But where, meantime, was the soul? —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Premature Burial” THE SPARKLING SUMMER day was in sharp contrast to Duane Dupre’s mood as he trimmed back pine tree limbs in the backyard of his trim bungalow. 1 Dupre was forty years old with an eighteen-year-old daughter and a twelve-year-old son. Having a girl going off to college was stressful enough and so was managing three grocery stores. Doing yard work was usually a release. Today, it wasn’t. Texas-born and Texas-bred, Dupre was used to the heat, but this day he was feeling every ounce of the 240 pounds that he carried on his not quite six-foot frame. Sweat held his shirt to his chest and across his shoulders, and he could feel pangs of heartburn, or indigestion, shooting through his midsection. Once or twice he’d stopped to rest, but that just made the pain sharper. Oh well, he thought, better to work and distract myself.
