Judson Mitcham cuts through the moral ambiguities of life in the midcentury rural South to show us the heart and soul of a good but flawed man. Sharecropper's son, mill worker, and ex-convict - Ellis Burt surely knows adversity. For a brief and cherished time there was a woman, and then a child, too, who had been a kind of salvation to him. Then they were gone, leaving Ellis to carry on with the burden of what he had done to them, of the ruin he brought down upon them all. Like the hero of William Kennedy's masterpiece, Ironweed, Ellis Burt is a man of uncommon personal dignity and strength, always moving toward, but never expecting, redemption.