St. Elizabeth's: the sincere and unsayable cliché
Gately wanted to tell Tiny Ewell that he could totally fucking I.D. with Ewell’s feelings, and that if he, Tiny, could just hang in and tote that bale and put one little well-shined shoe in front of the other everything would end up all right
Context
The anthology's most physically literal image of sincerity's difficulty. Gately longs to hand Ewell the banal AA consolation — hang in, one shoe in front of the other, the God of your Understanding will make a way — and he means every trite word of it completely, and he "couldn't connect the impulse to speak with actual speech." The cliché is sincere and unsayable at once: the gunshot wound has done to Gately's voice exactly what irony does to everyone else's, severed the earnest impulse from its expression. And the book gives the failure a heartbreaking coda — he "settled for trying to reach his left hand across and pat Ewell's hand," sincerity rerouted through the body when the mouth won't work, except "his own breadth was too far to reach across." The banal-but-true consolation is never more true, or more impossible, than when it cannot be delivered.