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09/2007. 278 pages.
0896726150
978-0-89672-615-4

Sandhill County Lines: Stories

By Clay Reynolds

Sandhill County--Clay Reynolds’s Yoknapatawpha--is the setting for all nine stories in this collection. Reynolds sees his stories as reflective fragments, “the kind one notices when driving through a county in North Central Texas--old buildings and houses, each one concealing a story. I wonder about such places, who may have built them and what they looked like new. I think also about newer places, or places that have been converted from one thing to another, and I wonder about the people behind the windows and doors, what their stories truly are.

“Sometimes a sensation that wouldn't cause so much as a ripple in the city may roll like a tidal wave in a small town. But at the same time, individuals come and go, are born, grow up, live out their lives and die, sometimes with no one truly knowing who they are and where they came from--no one ever privy to their hopes, dreams, triumphs, and disappointments. Too often they blend too easily into the backgrounds.

“I hope that these stories illuminate them, make them more visible, and bring their lives to the fore by showing that within each is a personalized existence, one that may be funny or sad, poignant or nonsensical, but which always fits, somehow, into the greater chronicle of a single place. It takes all of them to make the place whole.”

Out on the porch twilight was passing. The silver sky in the west outlined the bare trees. It was early spring. Buds hadn’t yet appeared on the live oaks and cottonwoods, and the Johnson grass was still yellow and crackly. Walker P. walked to the edge of the warped, gray boards and peered out toward the highway. A pair of taillights blinked away into the night.

“One of them Surburbans,” he said. “From over to Punkin Center. Goddamn town people got no sense. Drive too goddamn fast. Don’t they know folks live here?” The man and boy stared off into the darkness. “Get my rifle,” he said, “and a lantern.”--from “Etta’s Pond”

And just so, these gathered short stories make whole and illuminate the place that informs Reynolds’s Sandhill novels, from The Vigil and Agatite to his most recent, Threading the Needle.

Writer and critic Clay Reynolds is the author of thirteen books. A native West Texan, he serves on the faculty of the University of Texas at Dallas and lives in Lowry Crossing, with his wife, Judy, and her dog and cat.

“Clay Reynolds’s stories are earthy, frank, sometimes disturbingly ironic, but his characters are always real, compelling, and unpredictable.”—Elmer Kelton, writer and critic