When I need some firewood, I start with a tree

When I need some firewood, I start with a tree is Charlie Croker’s folksy maxim about self-reliance, but its force shifts when Raymond Peepgass recalls it in anger. In the bank’s glass-walled room, the remembered line becomes a taunt: Croker’s performance of rural independence is set against the creditors’ power to take his property and leave him to begin again.

The Maxim in Croker’s Interview

Croker’s line comes from an interview in Atlanta magazine. Asked about his exercise regimen, he says that he is from southwest Georgia, below the gnat line, where people would not know what an exercise regimen was; if he needs firewood, he starts with a tree. In his spoken version, the word appears as “farwood,” part of the regional dialect through which he presents himself as grounded in the South Georgia countryside.

The maxim makes a practical point—begin with the raw material at hand—but also helps Croker fashion an image of directness and self-sufficiency. Peepgass remembers it not as an isolated homespun observation but as part of the interview that, in his view, showed Croker to be full of it and to have manipulated the bank.

Peepgass Turns the Line Against Croker

The phrase returns during a meeting with Harry Zale and the rest of Team Saddlebags. Peepgass has been smiling to himself before Zale’s rasping voice brings him back to the glass-walled room, where computer screens display the money moving through the financial world. When asked about his smile, Peepgass repeats Croker’s interview anecdote and proposes going after every piece of collateral on the list, beginning with the airplanes, the plantation Croker treats like Tara, and his Buckhead house.

Peepgass then twists the image of starting with a tree into a threat of dispossession: if Croker is truly the down-home hero he claims to be, Peepgass says, he can start over with his bare ass, an ax, and a tree. The homely maxim becomes a creditor’s challenge. Croker’s own language of self-reliance is turned against him at the moment Peepgass wants the bank to strip away the assets that have insulated him from having to start over.

The Phrase as a Reveal

The scene makes the recalled expression a trigger for Peepgass’s unexpected outburst. His colleagues stare: they have never heard him use such profanity, mimic Croker, or advocate pursuing a target with bared fangs. The change is not simply a shift in vocabulary; it exposes a more aggressive side that the people around him had not seen.

The narration gives that change an image of its own: Peepgass has let his red dog off the leash for its first romp. Against the interview’s pose of rustic competence, the image suggests that the maxim has released something less controlled in its new speaker. The expression thus connects Croker’s public self-fashioning to Peepgass’s emerging hostility, while the tree-and-ax image gives the financial threat a rough, literal edge.