Unit 4: Part 2 Vocabulary

He had lived a very long time with death and was a little detached. We were all a little detached, and there was nothing that held us together except that we met every afternoon at the hospital.

I had not learned my grammar, and he said I was a stupid impossible disgrace, and he was a fool to have bothered with me.

He stood there biting his lower lip. “It is very difficult,” he said. “I cannot resign myself.”

Shortly after midnight we moved into the ambush site outside My Khe.

He wore black clothing and rubber sandals and a gray ammunition belt.

He carried his weapon in one hand, muzzle down, moving without any hurry up the center of the trail.

But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps—an eyesore among eyesores.

So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had their fathers thirty years before about the smell.

So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldn’t have turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized.

(By that time it was a cabal, and we were all Miss Emily’s allies to help circumvent the cousins.)

Then we knew that this was to be expected too; as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman’s life so many times had been too virulent and too furious to die.

What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.

She always kept things secret in such a public way. She was always being tactful and kind.

He always had a funny story of some sort, usually about an Irishman who made his little mistakes and confessed them, and the point lay in some absurd thing he would blurt out in the confessional showing his struggles between native piety and original sin.

I meant to finish the altar cloth and send six bottles of wine to Sister Borgia for her dyspepsia.

This made a grave and persistent noise in the still air, that seemed meditative like the chirping of a solitary little bird.

This made a grave and persistent noise in the still air, that seemed meditative like the chirping of a solitary little bird.

Under her small black-freckled hand her cane, limber as a buggy whip, would switch at the brush as if to rouse up any hiding things.

“All right. The doctor said as long as you came to get it, you could have it,” said the nurse. “But it’s an obstinate case.”

“Awp,” he said, in the low, hopeless tone of a despondent beagle—he always half suspected that something would “get him” in the night.

Five or six cops sprang for the attic door before I could intervene or explain.

The cops were reluctant to leave without getting their hands on somebody besides grandfather; the night had been distinctly a defeat for them.

The cops followed him, the one grandfather shot holding his now-bandaged arm, cursing and blaspheming.

And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of
women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of
women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud
to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand,
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling.