Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock (1931).
Very Joycean, this passage: it could appear in Dubliners or, with pronoun changed, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . Also very Catherian.
Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)
Thursday, September 15, 2016
“Layers and layers of shelter”
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Those Winter Sundays
BY ROBERT HAYDEN
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
That’s a nice connection.
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