On The Swamp For Joao Guimaraes Rosa

Our dad was an ordinary bloke who didn't ever talk a lot, even before he went out on the swamp. After he went, I tried to talk about it to some of his old mates at the shanty, but they mostly just shuffled about and looked at the floor and didn't say much either, though I almost think they were a bit proud of what our dad had done. I even wondered if some of them might have liked to go off, one by one, and do the same. For the moment, they just seemed to like the idea that one of them at least had done it, and they weren't going to let him down and head the whole thing back to a world where there had to be reasons for what people did.