When I was twelve years old, I watched my father rush into a burning building to rescue a paraplegic man in a wheelchair.
In the summers, we lived in a little house beside a creek in the village of Mt. Morris, in the heart of the Appalachians. About a half acre of field separated us from the next house along the creek. The paraplegic man and his wife lived there. He was, perhaps understandably, an embittered person. He had been injured in a coal-mining accident when he was a young man and only recently married, and he and his wife did not get along. My brothers and I often heard the couple loudly (and profanely) quarreling. Often, she would simply jump in her car and drive away. He would shout after her, sometimes threatening to kill her. Sometimes he would threaten to kill himself.
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