Our mother sang Peace in the Valley with our father, who is pastoring his own church now.

But the good life wouldn't last long, indebted by a sawmill and threatened by new temptations that the devil would lure our father into.

Thrown into the world of logging and pulpwood, we'd meet a whole different breed of people, one whom I'd call my friend even with his vulgar poetry and ways of doing things, another whom I'd eventually threaten alongside my father at gunpoint.

Something had been haunting my brother to the point of madness, and I'd now be part of it, staring at the old man's Bolivia watch lying beside our bed.

Would the terrible deed fix anything or just make it worse as we struggle between right and wrong and life and death?