Tools of the Earth
By Jeff Taylor
My father had an unusual relationship with small motors and could persuade most of them to work, but this one had the cooperative spirit of a dead mule; though Mac wound and pulled for hours, nothing happend. His face lost all expression, and then tightened. At one point, he took a deep, ragged breath and spoke an amazing multi-adjectived phrase, the last compound word of which described a barnyard perversion that none of us ever imagined as a possibility.
Mac wound the cord around the flywheel one final time, and gave it a pull, without effect. Perhaps it was flooded, or it may have suffered internal injuries from the kick he gave it, right after the rope whipped off and the knot struck him on the cheek just below the eye. I looked at my brothers. We knew it was doomed before he fetched his tool of last resort, a ball-peen hammer, to make sure none would ever again mistake this inbred pockmarked chicken-violator--I am paraphrasing, for his language was much more robust--mistake it for a working piece of machinery, such as a garden tiller.
