Word: hoes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When the Links arrived at the ruins, they found a man poking through the ashes with a hoe. Link knew him well. He was Clarence W. Calvin, 35, an odd-job man with a local police record for disturbing the peace-and until a few hours before, part-time caretaker at the Link cottage. Suspecting that Calvin had something to do with a recent rash of cottage burglaries, as well as with the fire, Link had reached Calvin by phone, had discharged him before leaving St. Louis...
Before a coroner's jury, convened after the killing, Link was a cooperative witness. He said that Calvin had rushed him, brandishing the three-pronged hoe, with "a terrible expression on his face." Link told how he had run to a tree against which he had leaned the shotgun, fired twice. Calvin kept coming. Link went for his .38 and slammed out three more shots...
...LONG Row TO HOE, by Billy C. Clark (233 pp.; Crowell; $4.50), at first seems to tug too unashamedly at the reader's sympathies. In fact, this autobiographical sketch of a Kentucky boyhood is flecked by neither self-pity nor stuffiness, and its markings of American life are so authentic that a latter-day Mark Twain could reshape it without much trouble into a new Huckleberry Finn...
...Long Row to Hoe makes no mawkish attempt to glorify poverty, but it is crammed with woods lore and river-rat doings that Billy might well have missed had his family been prosperous ; after all, few of the more sheltered boys got to know Mountain Mouse, the Hogarthian local whore. With a passionate hunger for education, Author Clark eventually made it to the University of Kentucky, is now a freelance writer. Far from trying to forget his boyhood miseries, he has dignified them through grit and awareness of the natural beauty around...
...course, I'm not really satirizing a place. My novels deal with a frame of mind and a certain social strata. A female satirist has a difficult row to hoe, because if you are too nasty, people think you are a five-letter word. Actually, I'm terribly torn as to where I fit in. There is an affirmative side to all my novels; I guess it's my Puritan tradition which makes my novels point a moral. Some people think I should do straight satire and are disappointed that the novels have this other aspect...