Ring Jaw -- sleepy Chipola River country town -- flashes back woods-toughened West Florida characters and their violent lives of the 1930s and 1940s. Chance Cahoon left at 15; thirty years later, seeking his ancestry, he returns to the haunted river shoal, Look and Tremble, scene of murder, ghosts -- violent episodes told by his grandfather, Sol Cahoon, Old Man of Ring Jaw. World War II hero Roscoe Ransum, Chance's father, haunts his boyhood with hard lessons of manhood. Chance's ironic journey coincides with a murder in Mobile, climaxing a long blood feud, and leads to another Look and Tremble death. Ageless Sol Cahoon relives violent tales of the "the heathen." Chance and his boyhood friends seek the "Ghost of Look and Tremble" -- a murdered man walking the dark woods, seeking his head that had been severed by a pocketknife. The Old Man of Ring Jaw warns the boys of real ghosts. But Ring Jaw bullies Rooster Reddoake and Hunky Hoggen turn a Look and Tremble peanut-boiling night into a hellish nightmare. A lyrical, poetic portrait of Smalltown West Florida, now vanished, flashbacks in seamless narrative unfold with Civil War ancestors, a brutal 1934 lynching, death of a snake-handling Georgia preacher, snakekillers, foxhunters, whiskeymakers; hard white men honestly befriending blacks sharing their trapped lives. Evoking verdant beauty of Chipola River Country, Jesse Earle Bowden resurrects a generation living by sweat and muscle when the measure of men was surviving bullet-and-blade meanness. Book jacket.