There was a small hole I could peak through--to see what I was up to.
It was a matter of faith. For years I had practiced the life of a faith-based person, full of fear, wanting revenge on the flesh, craving in a tragically backwards fashion my own redemption. It had turned morbid long before my quitting the religion could make it stale.
Fishing around for compliments at a local pub, I heard the Mountain Journal people cavorting at a table near where I had sat before laying my arm on something sticky. Their topic: Vietnam vets residing too close to an old blown-out dynamite factory with no potential for repair.
Stories were shared, memories skewered by the resident critic of the Journal, the same who sketched what the artist later rendered full in color and dimension. The subject of homemade whiskey was dropped when the bitter local sap dripped from the interlocutor's palette.
They moved on to textual questions while nodding intonations toward my corner of the pub.
Not to suggest they knew of my proclivity with a pen....but it did seem I was a candidate, especially if their conversation were suddenly to lag. Do not imagine the old bookish hick, dear reader, unless somehow you've an historical understanding of the following:
That any manner of strength could go into felling and stripping trees into logs and directing them down the local creek system towards the Allegheny river; that this could be managed by strong poets and muscular husbands alike, each for himself interested in personal or familial well-being. I ask that you consider these diverse white heroes of a hilly new economy for the sake of a story that has no intention of developing. But to regroup: the lumber industry had its ramifications, they cannot be reduced to the necessities of the brute.
My thread was canceled, or should I say transferred, before Last Call.
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