”His coat hung by the door with the badge pinned inside it, and now, for the first time in his career as a sheriff, he could feel the metal as an organ gone bad, liver mossy or kidneys hardened, heart flattened out and its rivers of blood damned off.” By the force of his will and sometimes by the vigilante justice of his gun he has kept Clark County peaceful.Īnd while he drinks he spends more time thinking about his past and some of his indiscretions weigh heavy on his mind. Sheriff Billy Waite is feeling every mile of his existence in 1897. “Means I’m fixing to go to the bottom of some things.” He took a cigar from his own shirt pocket and put it in his lips. “That’s a good little speech,” Bedsole said.
And so there’s two or three places I’ve let go too far. Now the habits of flies are unknown to me and men shit and women bleed unattended. But then it happened I got older, as men will, and had to let some slack in my grip. A fly couldn’t light on a stack of horse shit I didn’t know about it.
Was a time back yonder in my ambitious years, when you was still chasing girls in pigtails, where I knew just about everything went on in my county, no matter how delicate, from the bowel movement of men to the ministerial cycles of women. “Good sheriff has to know things, be they secret or not. It is a mesmerizing and unforgettable display of talent by a writer of immeasurable gifts. The hooded members of this gang wage a bloody year-long campaign of terror that culminates in a massacre, where the innocent suffer alongside the guilty.Ĭaught in the maelstrom of the Mitcham War are four people: the county's aging sheriff, sympathetic to both sides the widowed midwife who delivered nearly every member of Hell-at-the-Breech a ruthless detective who wages his own private war against the gang and a young store clerk harboring a terrible secret.īased on incidents that occurred a few miles from the author's childhood home, Hell at the Breech chronicles the dark events of dark days, events that lead the people involved to discover their capacity for good, for evil, or for both. Seeking retribution, his outraged friends - mostly poor cotton farmers - form a secret society, Hell-at-the-Breech, to punish the townspeople they believe are responsible. In 1897, in the rural southwestern area of Alabama known as Mitcham Beat, an aspiring politician is mysteriously murdered.
0 kommentar(er)
