I started revising the section of the novella in progress that needs changing to come into line with my new theory of the story this morning, but I was interrupted by some business that required my attention so I didn’t get very far. I hope to get a lot done on it this weekend.
Since there was nothing new on TV last night, I finished and posted my review of The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party by Alexander McCall Smith last night. It’s the latest of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency novels.
I also got caught up on the most recent episode of Justified. Coover’s death seems to have taken all the wind out of Mags Bennett’s sails. She gave Dickie the weed business and otherwise disavowed him, paid off some old debts, and let it be known that she doesn’t want anyone going after Raylan for his part in Coover’s death. She’s not completely defeated—when one of the locals berates her for selling out the mountain she still has enough of that deadly steel left to stare him down.
Raylan’s in a bit of a pickle, though. He knows that Art suspects he was involved in the money fiasco that Winona created. (“You went crazy. I’d like to know if that’s temporary,” Raylan tells Winona.) When he tries to address the elephant in the room with his boss, Art lets him have it with both barrels. He calls Raylan a lousy marshal but a pretty good lawman. “It kind of makes me sad,” he says. “Believe it or not, I thought at one point that maybe someday you and I’d be able to look back on all this and laugh but, shit, I don’t think you’re gonna alive that long.” He seems to think he’s stuck cleaning up Raylan’s messes but that probably will solve itself sooner or later.
When Raylan was looking at the family picture of the old Givens clan, imagining himself with a mustache, could you help but think about the way he looked in Deadwood? Raylan’s thinking it’s time to move on, perhaps to Glynco (where the federal marshal training academy is located), if Winona is willing. She’s putting her affairs in order, trying to hammer out a divorce with Gary. I liked the scene where Raylan told the guys following them that he was a little out of sorts because he’d just shot and killed a man a few days earlier and that they should turn left when he turned right (“or I’m going to want some answers”) but I’m not convinced they were following him. Conventional wisdom might have it that they were sent by Dickie as payback, but they looked a little too professional to do business with him. I have a hunch that Gary sent them to speed along and lessen the cost of his divorce.
Winona accepts that Raylan loves her, that he helped her not simply because he has the outlaw gene from his father, and willingly says that she loves him, too. “But now what?” They were married once before, we have to remember, and that didn’t work out so well. “It’s not you, it’s me,” she tells him, but he’s heard that song before and knows what it means.
My favorite exchange in the episode though (of course) was the one involving Neil Young, just before the crash. The singer on the radio had a raspy voice, which makes Raylan think about Young, and how his voice grows on you. “A national treasure,” he says. “Uh uh,” Winona shoots back. “He’s Canadian.” Raylan grins. “Then I guess he sucks.”
I didn’t expect Dickie to walk out of that bar alive after he started poking the bear, but Boyd is patient and he knows how to turn just about anything to his advantage. He’s embracing his heritage and wants to reclaim Harlan County in the Crowder family name. How will this all turn out? Perhaps with a shootout even bigger and more exciting than the one that ended this week’s episode? But Boyd has a soft spot, returning to see Eva one more time, “even if it was from a distance.”
