The Searcher: A Novel

The way the world’s after changing, it’s not made right for them, any more. When I was a young lad, we knew what we could want and how to get it, and we knew we’d have something to show for it at the end of the day. A crop, or a flock, or a house, or a family. There’s great strength in that. Now there’s too many things you’re told to want, there’s no way to get them all, and once you’re done trying, what have you got to show for it at the end? You’ve made a buncha phone calls selling electricity plans, maybe, or had a buncha meetings about nothing; you’ve got your hole offa some bitta fluff you met on the internet, got yourself some likes on the aul’ YouTube. Nothing you can put your hands on.

He feels like a fraud, because the other thing he took away from all those fights with Donna was that somehow, without ever intending to, he had let her and Alyssa down. All Cal ever wanted to be was a steady man who took care of his family and did right by the people around him. For more than twenty years, he went about his business believing he was that man. Only somewhere along the way, he fucked up. He lost hold of his code, and the worst part is that he can’t understand what he did. Everything he’s been since that moment has been worth nothing, and he doesn’t even know what the moment was

Cal goes inside and comes out with a peanut butter sandwich, an apple and a glass of milk. “Say thank you,” he says automatically.

It occurs to him that one reason he’s pissed off with Trey is because he would have liked at least one person around this damn place to be exactly what they seem

Twasn’t the laws that were the problem.” He looks out over the fields, at the pink sky. “It’s a hard aul’ place, this. The finest place in the world, and wild horses wouldn’t drag me out of it. But it’s not gentle. And if Theresa Reddy doesn’t know that by now, she’ll learn soon enough.”

“I oughta be that way about grits,” Cal says. “But I’m not. I’d eat grits any day and twice on Sundays, if I could get them.”
“What the feck is grits, anyhow?” Mart demands. “All the cowboys in the fillums do eat it, but they never have the courtesy to tell you what it is. Is it semolina, or what is it at all?”
“They’re made of cornmeal,” Cal says. “You boil ’em up and serve ’em with whatever you like best. I favor shrimp and grits, myself. If I could get my hands on some, I’d invite you over to try them.”

That doesn’t alter the fact that he didn’t say that to IA because he thought it was the right thing to do. He did it because he knew everyone around him believed it was, and he himself had no idea. He was so deafened by the locust buzz of all the anger and the wrongness and the complications surrounding him, he couldn’t hear the steady pulse of his code any more, so that he found himself having to turn to other people’s—a thing that in itself was a fundamental and unpardonable breach of his own

Cal thinks, That’s a good kid. He wouldn’t do that. But he knows that no one has ever made it clear to Trey what, exactly, good and bad mean, or the importance of finding the line between them and staying on the right side

“Morals,” he says in the end, “is the stuff that doesn’t change. The stuff you do no matter what other people do. Like, if someone’s an asshole to you, you might not be mannerly to him; you might tell him to go fuck himself, or even punch him in the face. But if you see him trapped in a burning car, you’re still gonna open the door and pull him out. However much of an asshole he is. That’s your morals.”

“Etiquette is the stuff you gotta do just ’cause that’s how everyone does it. Like holding your fork in your left hand, or saying ‘Bless you’ if someone sneezes. Manners is treating people with respect.”