Джонатан Крейг - Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 12, December, 1953

“It’s your doing!” Father exclaimed. “You’re making a lousy flower-sniffer out of him. What you want me to do, go chasing with him, with a butterfly net? Is that your idea how a boy should be brought up? You’ve kept that boy chocked tight to your apron and I’m damped glad I found out in time.”

“What’s the use?” Mama said. Her voice sounded tired. “You won’t understand anybody but yourself.”

“I’m not interested in your opinion of me. I’m telling you no son of mine is going out into the world afraid of a little blood, too good to do what killing’s got to be done or to make a sport of a thing like thinning out the coyotes. Go tell him to get his shotgun. I’ll be ready to leave in half an hour.”

“Thomas,” Mama pleaded. “Thomas, I’m begging you. I know the boy. He’s only eleven years old. Maybe when he’s older, if you don’t force things, maybe he’ll grow out of this.”

“He’s going with me,” Father said, like he hadn’t listened to anything after all. I was beginning to cry then and I was afraid they’d learn I’d been listening to everything they’d said, so I went to the outside door, stepping carefully so the floorboards wouldn’t squeak and I ran away where I could cry without Father ever knowing about it.

She put her hand softly on my back and leaned forward to press her cheek on my cheek. She smelled clean and sweet and she picked up a straw and put it in my ear to tickle me when I wouldn’t turn to look at her. If I hadn’t heard what I did I would have thought it was like it had always been, but now I knew she was play-acting me and I couldn’t look at her for wondering how long she had been play-acting me without my knowing it.

“Tommy,” Mama said, “I couldn’t imagine where you’d gone. Until I remembered this place.”

“Mama, please let me stay here awhile. I just want to think.”

“Of course.” Mama leaned down and kissed me. “I know how you like it here. I’ll wait for you in the house. But don’t be too long. Father’s waiting for you to go hunting with him.”

I stood up in the loft. “Mama, I don’t want to, I don’t!” Now I couldn’t keep from showing her I had been crying and I ran to her and she put her arms around me and pressed me very close to her. “I hate it, Mama, I hate it!”

She held me close to her and let her fingers touch my face and my hair and then she said, “Sit down, Tommy,” and we sat and she took my two hands in hers and looked right in my eyes and said, “Tommy, sometimes we have to do things we don’t like doing. You can understand, can’t you?”

“Yes, Mama,” I said, “but I don’t want to go hunting with Father.”

“But it will be fun, Tommy. Just the two of you, when the desert floor is cooling and the colors are so nice in the sky. There’ll be no one but you two. Think of the good time! I wish I were a boy so I could go along, too.”

“I don’t want to go,” I said.

She pressed my hands very tight. “Tommy,” she said, “even if we didn’t like it, for the sake of the ranch, we might have to destroy coyotes. They kill things, you know.”

“No, they don’t, Mama,” I said. “They’re too timid. They only eat what others leave behind and what we throw away. They don’t hurt anything.”

“A boy must shoot, Tommy.” Mama said it like she was a teacher telling me about fractions. “Even if you don’t like it for sport, then for the ranch. Can you see that? Coyotes are disorderly. Do you remember when the vet said we’d have to inoculate the puppy because the coyotes might give him rabies?”

“Father’s not doing it for that reason,” I said. “He’s doing it because he likes to kill things and he wants me to start to like killing things, too.”

“What a thing to say!” Mama said. She let go of my hands and turned her head from me and when she talked again she sounded the way she had before when the tears were bubbling in her throat but she hadn’t wanted to let on. “Father is only trying to bring you up so you can take your place next to him when you grow up.”

Mama took my head in her hands and pressed it to her shoulder. “I wish you didn’t have to go,” she said. “I wish I could help you. But you must go if only because it’ll be easier for you to go than not to go. It will please your father and you must do that. We must always do what Father wants us to do.” She stroked my hair and I couldn’t talk. I thought about everything and I tried to figure it all out.

We walked around the alfalfa, across the last irrigation ditch and over a little rise in the ground from which I could see the house. “Come along,” Father said, “I never saw a boy walk so slow in all my days.” Father was walking ahead of me, his shotgun slung easy across his two shoulders like a yoke. Father didn’t believe in going hunting with your gun broke in half. That’s the way I liked to carry my gun. It seemed better balanced that way. But Father said if you carried it like that and saw something suddenly you wouldn’t have time to fire, so the thing to do was to keep your gun loaded all the time.

We walked for a long time, not seeing anything, Father ahead of me turning around every now and then to hurry me up and me trying to do my best to keep up with him.

Suddenly, Father turned toward me and pointed off. “There!” he said. “Over there! Go on, boy. Shoot him!”

Just a few steps from him a big brown jack was bouncing up and down across the brush. He must have sensed something because he was going very fast.

“Let him have it!” Father cried. “Shoot him on the run!”

I looked at the rabbit and then at Father and then to where the rabbit had been, but he was gone.

Father came over and grabbed my arm right below the shoulder. He shook me hard. “You stupid little fool,” he said. “When you see something, think and act quickly. Shoot! Don’t go looking for any by-your-leave.” He shook me again. “Why didn’t you shoot?”

I couldn’t talk. I turned my head from him.

“Why didn’t you shoot? Why?”

“I forgot, I guess,” I said. I wasn’t telling the truth, but I knew what would happen if I told him the truth. It would have sounded wrong to him to say I knew I could have got that jack but he looked so pretty bounding there among the sage, so I said I forgot.

He let my arm go with a push. “Next time I won’t ask for explanations. I’m going to spank you, like a little boy. Understand? If you don’t shoot first and think after, I’ll thrash you.”

He went away from me and motioned for me to come after him. I walked quickly, the gun in my hand at the side. Father turned to see how I was going. He came up to me again, swiftly, and pushed the gun to the ground. “Not like that, you fool!” he exclaimed. “You want it to go off and kill me?”

I bent down to pick up the gun. He put his foot over the barrel. “I said, do you want it to go off and kill me?” I looked at him. I didn’t know what to say and I was afraid to say anything at all for he’d be able to tell I was trying to keep from crying. I bent down again, but Father seized my shirt and straightened me once more. “Do you?” he shouted. “Do you?”

I started to cry. “I want to go home, Father,” I said, but I was crying so hard I think he didn’t understand me.

“You stop that cry-baby stuff,” he said. “Stop it, I tell you!”

He waited till I did what I was told. I rubbed the back of my hand across my eyes and my face and I could taste the salt on my mouth.

“All right now, pick up that gun and watch it, you fool. You handle it carelessly, you’ll blast your leg off.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Father looked at me. “Very well. We’ll go on and forget the whole thing.”