"Mamaw always said it takes a little bee's wax to mix oil and water," howls Loy Patrick to the five other inmates laying block for the tower on the first fifty degree day of February.
"What you going on about Hillbilly?" wonders the diminutive black man placing a cinder from each hand onto a growing stack as the others pause to spectate.
"Just that we all hear you all getting on that bus," Loy retorts as he plops a trowel of mud onto a block.
"Piss on you!" streams across from the wheelbarrow along with a cartwheeling hoe.
Oil had kept his anger at bay since the arrest, but his family had been feared for explosiveness from tribal times. They had survived for eons on the hostile borders between Scotland and England by laying low in the Galloway hills, only unleashing violence when provoked. It took the Crown's standing army a century of hangings and deportations to root out the Beattisons from those debatable lands, dispersing that familial potency to Ulster and beyond.
A psychiatrist might name it intermittent explosive disorder or oppositional defiance, a psychologist post-traumatic stress, but any self-respecting borderer would know that a short fuse was just one means of survival.
"You got anything else to say?" Oil scowls over the prostrate bricklayer squinting up into the midday sun as their guard turns his back.
"Not this minute," Loy groans, clutching his head and wobbling back to work while the mortar is still wet.
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