Summary:

This story takes us to the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky where the traditions of family, farming, and freedom blend in a durable wholeness and wholesomeness of place. It is to this place that Burley Coulter is returned by his kin to die. In what turned out to be a mistaken expression of compassion, Burley's family took him to the doctor when, after eighty-two years, he fell ill. But then seeing him lying in the "mechanical room" of a hospital, attached to a life support system, his family conspires quietly and heroically to kidnap him so that he can die in his beloved woods.

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