ISBN: 9781931982665 trade paper

ISBN: 978-1931982658 LIBRARY BINDING

EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK:   

     There was a legend, told over old, dying fires in grates, or maybe swapped back and forth over sandwiches being consumed at noon, of the deer hunts that touched the edge of the swamp, the type of legend that a boy of twelve would never tire of listening to; and afterwards, after the sandwiches, during the long, dripping, slate-gray November afternoon on the stand, listening to the dogs, far off in the otherwise quiet woods, he would peer back into the gloom, into the tangle of vines gray and stiff with winter, as if straining to get a glimpse of the hermit, watching for any movement in the still gloom that might indicate his presence, the old Negro who had been walking along the river bank one spring day when the high wind came up and blew him against a white oak tree so that now his eye, one eye, looked off into space and his cheeks were scarred, and he had his seasons turned around so that he wore a heavy, black overcoat in the summer and went around half naked in the winter, back in the swamp so deep that only a few men had ever seen him since, and they came back saying that he had come up, loomed up, out of the swamp like a huge brown apparition, calling himself Joe Bynymo, and waving his arms around like a madman. That was the legend of the long fall and winter, the legend with which he, with which many in the town grew up.