Word: rufus
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...Death in the Family has the simple beauty and drama of a folk ballad. Set in the foothills of Tennessee's Great Smokeys, it sings of "quiet summer evenings" and a Knoxville family faced with the problems of love and human loneliness. It's a song about Rufus Follete, a boy of six years or so, who wants a cap like a man's and who finds the night frightening as he lies in his bed. It's about his father, Jay, who drives too fast and sometimes drinks too much, but who sings his son back to sleep with...
This is the world of Jay and Mary Follet, and of their two small children, Rufus and Catherine. A few streets away live uncles and cousins and grandparents. A few miles out in the country is another solid cluster of relatives, and up in the timeless hills survive even more ancient progenitors. Safe, warm, sweet almost to the point of cloying, this is a world nourished on love, protected by kindness, impervious to small failures or vaulting ambition. It is shattered by the sudden, meaningless death of Jay Follet in an auto accident...
...this symphonic reconstruction of time past, there is a soloist: young Rufus Follet, who plays a lighthearted, vagrant air in counterpoint to the heavier orchestration. Death, to Rufus, is scarcely more complex than the other riddles flung at him each waking day-the nagging puzzle of why he should not speak about the black color of a Negro maid's skin; or why the older boys on their way to school solemnly ask his name and then go into fits of inexplicable laughter; or why a woman will suddenly become so very...
Certain scenes-the Follets watching a Charlie Chaplin movie, young Rufus visiting his great-great grandmother, a colloquy between the child and darkness-are a near-marriage of prose and poetry...
...there seemed to be scarcely anything else in the room except the sunny light on the floor. It was very long and dark; smooth like a boat; with bright handles. Half the top was open. There was a strange, sweet smell, so faint that it could scarcely be realized. Rufus had never known such stillness. Their little sounds, as they approached, vanished upon it like the infinitesimal whisperings of snow, falling on open water. There was his head, his arms; suit; there he was ... He saw him much more clearly than he had ever seen him before; yet his face...