Time is not a movement, a flowing, a wind then, but is, rather, but kind of climate in which things are, and when a thing happens it begins to live and keeps on living and stands solid in Time like the tree that you can walk around.
This is probably Warren’s most highly regarded work of short fiction. The narrative is the recollection of an adult looking back on an events that occurred when he was just a little boy. It is rather indicative the form that most of the author’s short stories take; he is less concerned with the mechanics of plot and action than with the effects and consequences of those events. The passage of time in one form another plays a significant role in most of these stories and it is worth attributing the conceptualization of time conveyed here to the rest of the collection as a kind of guiding light illuminating the thematic meaning of those stories.
They would not have believed him or his truth, for people always believe what truth they have to believe to go on being the way they are.
Warren is often lumped into that rather fluid category of writers known as a regionalists; in his particular case the region being the southern United States. One of the essential qualities of writers who trade in regionalism is a propensity for taking advantage of the opportunity to be more brutally honest about the character of the people who populate that area than an outsider would be given. It is kind of literary equivalent of “I can kick my dog, but nobody else better try.” This particular quote is directed toward the actual facts of a little-known skirmish of the Civil War in which the myth has overtaken the reality, but it is applicable to many of the author’s stories in which his insight into and knowledge of the character of his Dixie kinsman is sometimes impossible to ignore. The truth about a population is elusive in any region, but given enough time and distance and people in on the secret, it will eventually come out.
You have seen him a thousand times. You have seen him standing on the street corner on Saturday afternoon, in the little county-seat towns.
I had seen Jeff York a thousand times, or near, standing like that on the street corner in town, while the people flowed past him, under the distant and wary and dispassionate eyes in ambush.
Mrs. York was much cut up by her husband's death. People were sympathetic and helpful, and out of a mixture of sympathy and curiosity she got a good starting trade at the diner. And the trade kept right on.
These quotes do not occur in linear order one after the other, but rather are taken out of context. They are the opening sentences of three different paragraphs from this particular story. The attentive reader will likely already have noticed something strange, but what makes that something even stranger is that no explanation is given for the author’s decision. The story opens with a couple of paragraphs written in the rarely utilized second-person perspective. Then, suddenly and without explanation, it shifts to that first-person recollection by an unidentified narrator recalling how often he’d seen Jeff York standing in that particular fashion. This point of view only manages to last for that one—admittedly longish—paragraph after which the entire story is narrated in standard third-person. The unaccountable shifts in perspective turn out to be the most interesting aspect of the story, but what is most interesting is that this experiment in perspective does not become a convention motif for the author. It is just there.
I have noticed that people living way back in the country like that are apt to be different from ordinary people who see more varieties and kinds of people every day. That maybe accounts for the stories you read in papers about some farmer way back off the road getting up some morning and murdering his whole family before breakfast. They see the same faces every day till some little something gets to preying on their mind and they can't stand it.
This is the story about a baseball phenom found in the backwoods; a poor country hick who just happens to have been blessed with a talent that only pays off in the big city. He is not prepared for it for the adjustment. Here we have another example of the way that a writer steeped in the traditions and conventions of a particular regional culture can put a spin a story that can somehow manage to be both universal and idiosyncratically strange and alien. The above quote is actually rather chilling when one studies it, but there’s hardly enough time to do that very closely because by the time the paragraph ends, the story is over and the image left behind is absolutely horrific.
