Even at his best, a man is a mess. He’s strong-willed and impatient, gets dirty at work and play, and often doesn’t smell good. However, if you’re one of those who suspects that life has some purpose other than filling one’s belly and stirring up the bed lint, you might have seen, on occasion, something else under all that male bluff and bluster. You might have discovered a warm, humane creature that has, at times, given serious thought to the more meaningful things of life. Such a man is the one I’m going to tell you about. His name is Heck Tennel. Heck was my best friend back when the Great Depression bore down on East Texas farms. Both of us were as poor as winter weeds and dumb as mud about some things, but that didn’t stop Heck from wanting to improve his life.
Heck’s main purpose back then was taking care of his sick little brother and his sisters, saving money to pay down on a piece of good land and finding a proper girl to marry. Fate didn’t give him enough time to make the money he needed, but he came real close to hitching himself to a proper girl. It was his love for that pretty girl that almost got him killed. $0.99 on Kindle.
