The clock is still ticking

Seventy years earlier, Howard Crosby was a hustler, driving a wooden wagon through the backwoods of Maine. He sold soap, string and tobacco to housewives and woodsmen, and he tinkered for pennies on the side. “Tin pots, wrought iron, solder-melted and cupped in a clay dam,” his mastery of practical things jars with the epilepsy that diminishes his mental and physical control.

Tinkers is an elegiac prose poem in praise of these two men and the lives they touched.