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Duane pedaled on through town
 

      Duane pedaled on through town to the cemetery, keeping to the backstreets... ¶ Nobody was in the cemetery but the elderly caretaker, who was puttering around with a spade at the far end of the burying ground. Only three days earlier an old farmer had been killed when his tractor flipped over on him — the caretaker was leveling the pale clods above the fresh grave.

ex Larry McMurtry, Duane’s Depressed (1989) : 431
google books preview : link
 

The puttering appears on the very last page of what is my favorite McMurtry novel (I’ve read most of the early ones, fewer of the later ones). It’s my favorite not only because it contains a few passages about a hardware store : link

It was the preceding puttering (506), from Laura V. Hamner her fictionalized biography of Charles Goodnight, that brought Larry McMurtry to mind.

There’s another puttering in McMurtry’s fiction — in Texasville (1987) — but I haven’t read it, and probably won’t.
 

23 December 2024