You might find it a restless, verdant, inconstant sight: the wind caresses, ruffles, disturbs the mass of leaves; each tree answers to the weather’s ministrations at a slightly different tempo from its neighbour, bending and shuddering and tossing its branches, as if trying to get away from the air, from the very soil that nourishes it. - P25
They had, all six of them, from time to time, received the blows and grips and slaps that resulted from the father’s temper, but with nothing like the regularity and brutality of this eldest son. He didn’t know why but something about him had always drawn his father’s anger and frustration to him, like a horseshoe to a magnet. He carried within him, always, the sensation of his father’s calloused hand enclosing the soft skin of his upper arm, the inescapable grip that kept him there so his father could rain down blows with his other, stronger, hand. The shock of a slap landing, sudden and sharp, from above; the flensing sting of a wooden instrument on the back of the legs. How hard were the bones in the hand of an adult, how tender and soft the flesh of a child, how easy to bend and strain those young, unfinished bones. The doused, drenched feeling of fury, of impotent humiliation, in the long minutes of a beating. - P28
He could push this man, this leviathan, this monster of his childhood, back against the wall with very little effort. He did so. - P29
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