Boys Life

Meadows can’t compete with those supermarket prices. We cut our rates for our regular customers last week, and then Big Paul’s Pantry undercut us two days later. I think it’s gonna get a whole lot worse before it gets any better.” I saw his hand squeeze Mom’s, and she squeezed back. They were in it together, for the long haul.
    “One other thing.” Dad paused. His jaw clenched and relaxed. He was obviously having a hard time spitting this out, whatever it was. “I talked to Jack Marchette this afternoon. He was at the Shell station when I stopped to fill up the truck. He said-” Again, this was a thorny obstruction in his throat. “He said J.T.’s only found one more volunteer deputy other than Jack himself. You know who that is?”
    Mom waited.
    “The Moon Man.” A tight smile flickered across Dad’s face. “Can you believe that? Out of all the able-bodied men in this town, only Jack and the Moon Man are gonna stand with J.T. against the Blaylocks. I doubt if the Moon Man can even hold a pistol, much less use one if he had to! Well, I suppose everybody else decided to stay home and be safe, don’t you?”
    Mom pulled her hand away, and she looked somewhere else. Dad stared across the table at me, his eyes so intense I had to shift in my chair because I felt their heat and power. “Some father you’ve got, huh, partner? You go to school today and tell your friends how I helped uphold the law?”
    “No sir,” I answered.
    “You should have. Should’ve told Ben, Johnny, and Davy Ray.”
    “I don’t see their fathers linin’ up to get themselves killed by the Blaylocks!” Mom said, her voice strained and unsteady. “Where are the people who know how to use guns? Where are the hunters? Where’re the big-talkin’ men who say they’ve been in so many fights and they know how to use their fists and guns to solve every problem in this whole wide world?”
    “I don’t know where they are.” Dad scraped his chair back and stood up. “I just know where I am.” He started walking toward the front door, and Mom said with a frightened gasp of breath, “Where’re you goin’?”
    Dad stopped. He stood there, between us and the door, and he lifted a hand to his forehead. “Out to the porch. Just out to the porch, Rebecca. I need to sit out there and think.”
    “It’s cold and rainin’ outside!”
    “I’ll live,” he told her, and he left the house.
    But he came back, in about thirty minutes. He sat before the fireplace and warmed himself. I got to stay up a little later, since it was a Friday night. When it was time for me to go to bed, between ten-thirty and eleven, Dad was still sitting in his chair before the hearth, his hands folded together and supporting his chin. A wind had kicked up outside, and it blew rain like handfuls of grit against the windows.
    “Good night, Mom!” I said. She said good night, from her Herculean labors in the kitchen. “Good night, Dad.”
    “Cory?” he said softly.
    “Yes sir?”
    “If I had to kill a man, would that make me any different from whoever did that murder at Saxon’s Lake?”
    I thought about this for a moment. “Yes sir,” I decided. “Because you’d only kill to protect yourself.”
    “How do we know whoever did that murder wasn’t protectin’ himself in some way, too?”
    “We don’t, I guess. But you wouldn’t get any pleasure from it, like he did.”
    “No,” he said. “I sure wouldn’t.”
    I had something else to say. I didn’t know if he wanted to hear it or not, but I had to say it. “Dad?”
    “Yes, son?”
    “I don’t think anybody gives you peace, Dad. I think you have to fight for it, whether you want to or not. Like what happened with Johnny and Gotha Branlin. Johnny wasn’t lookin’ for a fight. It was forced on him. But he won peace for all of us, Dad.” My father’s expression didn’t alter, and I wasn’t sure he understood what I was driving at. “Does that make any sense?”
    “Perfect sense,” he replied. He lifted his chin, and I saw the edge of a smile caught in the corner of his mouth. “Alabama game’s on the radio tomorrow. Ought to be a humdinger. You’d better get on to bed.”
    “Yes sir.” I started toward my room.
    “Thank you, son,” my father said.
    I awakened at seven o’clock to the clatter of the pickup truck’s cold engine starting. “Tom!” I heard my mother calling from the front porch. “Tom, don’t!” I peered out the window into the early sunlight to