Thursday, August 08, 2013
ven as a kid, I was an early riser, and more than once I had to pound on his door to wake him . . . he drank a little. One morning in particular is branded in my memory; the morning I banged on his door and he hollered, “It ain’t locked.”
He was sitting on a lard can rolling up the cuffs of his church-sale fishing pants. We stepped outside just as the sun broke through the trees along Amos Ridge.
Hawk let the screen door close behind him . . or not close; it didn’t matter one way or the other to him. He said if he really cared, he’d “let one of them do-gooders from the church come out and fix the spring.” Actually, there was no fixing to it. It rusted away a couple years after his wife quit the choir, sat down in her chair, and finally “drifted off to Glory,” as she’d been promising to do since Hawk quit the mill and made a full-time job of planning the murder of Coy W. “Doc” Clay MD.
