Bill Arnold was standing at the side of his house, tending to the barbecue pit. His two dogs prowled around the pit, as if hoping for a handout. Several bicycles and a swing set testified to the presence of children, though the girls — 8-year-old Rose, 9-year-old Grace and 10-year-old Maggi — were out when I visited Friday morning.

A scene fit for Norman Rockwell, is what I first thought, but truth is, the country has gotten ever so complicated since Rockwell did his paintings for the Saturday Evening Post.

Arnold is 52. He lives in the small town of Perry in northeastern Missouri. He was born and raised in Jackson, Tenn. He went into the Army after high school, and when he got out of the Army in 1977 after a four-year hitch, he ended up in Chicago, working as a tool and die maker and going to college.

In a visit to Jackson in 1986, he ran into an old friend who was a plant manager at a tool and die company. The friend offered Arnold a job. So Arnold returned home. He opened a restaurant on the side — The Blues Hog Cafe.

"I have always loved barbecue," Arnold told me. "When I was little, I used to make squirrel stew. Well, one day friends and I were having a barbecue, and I was cooking, and there were guys playing bluegrass music, and we were passing around this bottle, and I was cooking the hog and there was the bluegrass music, and it all just became the blues hog."

He worked in the tool and die plant during the day, and he ran his restaurant at night. Then a friend started a cab company, and Arnold parked a cab at the restaurant and went out on an occasional fare. One night, his fare was a young woman from Paris. That's Paris, Missouri.

They were married on Easter Sunday in 1996. Shortly after the wedding, they visited Paris, which is close to Mark Twain Lake. He loved the idea of living close to a lake, so he sold his restaurant and moved to Perry.

Arnold ended up with an engineering job at a company that made electrical supplies in Columbia. Not long after they moved to Perry, a family got burnt out of their house. Friends put together a benefit. Arnold provided the barbecue.

"The next day, the phone started ringing," he said. "Even the local grocer called and said he ought to have my sauce in his store."

So Arnold got a business license and began producing Blues Hog Sauce in 1998. The next year, he went to the state fair in Sedalia. He won Best in Show. He entered the American Royal International Barbecue and Sauce Contest in Kansas City. That's for professionals. He won first place in the mild division.

He entered more contests and won more prizes. Still, it was pretty much a hobby.

Life was hectic. He was commuting 65 miles each way to work. He was making sauce at night. He and his wife and one, then two, and then three little girls. He was active in church.

Things went from hectic to awful in 2002. His marriage disintegrated, and Arnold received full custody of the three girls, who were 1, 2 and 3 when their mother left. Shortly thereafter, his employer outsourced his job.

"I didn't see it coming. I was so busy," Arnold said.

After losing his job, he threw himself into the sauce business. He won more championships. He made a deal with somebody to produce the sauce for him. That didn't work out.

When he lost his job in Columbia, he lost his health insurance. He looked into buying a policy, but it was too expensive. He thinks he might have been covered by the state, but lost whatever benefits he had when the state cut Medicaid.

"I wasn't making enough to buy insurance, but I was making too much to get it from the state," he said.

Not that it mattered. The girls did not lose their benefits. Besides, he probably would have been eligible for VA health care, but he was too busy — and seemingly too healthy — to look into it.

He noticed a little bit of a problem this past winter.

"I used to split wood like nothing, but all of a sudden, I couldn't hold the block of wood so well. And my left foot seemed to go dead." People at church told him they thought he was limping.

Four weeks ago, on the second weekend in June, he came to St. Louis, as he does most Saturdays, to sell sandwiches and sauce at the Clayton Farmer's Market. He didn't think he could make it home, so he got a motel room. His head was pounding. He went to lie down on the bed. Suddenly, it felt as if he were having a seizure. He grabbed for the phone but pulled it out of the wall.

"I thought I was having a massive heart attack," he said. He lost consciousness. He awoke, found his cell phone and reached a friend from church. An ambulance rushed Arnold to St. Luke's.

"They told me I had a tumor the size of a lemon in my brain," he said.

The doctors operated that week, but because the tumor was on an artery, they were unable to remove all of it. So now it's a waiting game. The prognosis is uncertain.

So are the financial details. His medication looks as if it will cost about $800 a month. He doesn't know how long he can afford it. The first of the bills from the surgery are starting to arrive. Arnold is not sure what he will do. He said the people at St. Luke's had been wonderful so far.

Meanwhile, the barbecue business is looking up. Starting in January, a company in Tennessee has been producing his sauces for him. He thinks this arrangement will work better. "These are Christian people," he told me.

In that vein, friends from his church — the Living Water Ministry Church — have been tending to his stall at the farmers' market while he has been away. When I visited Friday, he said he hoped to be back at the stall on Saturday.