Excerpt from A Tinker's Damn

I was only ten years old in 1929, not old enough to understand the unsalved and visceral fear that was the Great Depression. I was, however, old enough to be in the swamp with my father, hip deep in mud and water moccasins when Spence's daddy was killed. Or murdered.

I see it, I assure you, vividly, in the mind behind my eyes. I see the Clyde skidders at work, some Yankee's invention from hell, a wood-fired, steam-powered winch mounted on a chassis so massive it had to be towed by rail. I see a sawmill large as a city erected in a Florida quagmire. And for what purpose? To turn cypress and pine grown before the birth of Christ into boards for houses and hotels.

I see, as well, the slight perspiration of oil on the quarter mile of steel cable that cut Spence's daddy in two. I remember the moss that morning, how it hung sparsely from the yellow-heart pine and massive cypress which late that night a black man from my father's camp would fashion into a coffin. Spence held a lamp for that labor, a kerosene lamp, the coffinmaker's hand-held saw following by that wavering illumination a line marked with the stub of a pencil.

I see the oil on that cable. I see Spence's daddy, one blue eye and one brown one in a black face, floundering awkwardly, arms extended as if in supplication. And I can see my own father reaching out to take the black man's arms, to pull Saint MacGrue from that waste of fetid muck.

It was not until Tink took hold and heaved on those arms and Saint jerked too easily from the mud that he knew his best man was cut in two. There is my father, Tink Buchanan, a hard man standing hip-deep and horrified in an awful embrace with the torso of Saint MacGrue's corpse, the severed body twitching in his arms like a snake with a broken back. He let his man go, Tink did. Just let him go.

The body slopped back into the sammy earth and so once more Washington Saint MacGrue was baptized in a muddy Jordan, those mismatched eyes rolling as if seeking his missing brogans. That's when Spence, my childhood friend, maybe my only true friend, came screaming from the skidder.

Calling for his papa.

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