“You just haven’t cared about trying to understand,” Mama said.
“Anything that isn’t to your liking you won’t hear about.”
“Have it your way,” Father said. “I will not waste my time arguing with a woman or a boy.”
“But this is like everything else in our life,” Mama said. “You won’t bend an inch for Tommy or for me. That’s the way you run the ranch, that’s the way you treat your family and your help. Why won’t you leave even a little bit of what was once our marriage, Tom?”
There weren’t any words for what seemed a long time. All I could hear was my breathing. Then there was a sound like a slap and Mama called out Father’s name, “Thomas!” And it was awfully quiet in there again, not even anyone moving on the floor. When Mama started to talk it sounded like her throat was drowned in tears. She said, “You’re doing this because you know there’s nothing I won’t take on Tommy’s account.”
“Look,” Father said, “we’ve been through all that before. If you get any fun grubbing around in dead ashes, keep yourself a diary. You know how I feel, I know how you feel. It’s an old story and it always comes out the same, that if it wasn’t for Tommy we wouldn’t stay together an hour. All we can do is hate each other and wish to God one of us falls into a threshing machine or gets hit by a truck so Tommy need never know how it was with us. But while you’re living here, on my ranch, mothering my son, we’ll have no trouble so long as you understand what you’re to do. I won’t have you bringing up that boy a lacey-pants. He’s my son and I’m not giving in to childish whims.”
I could hear Mama clear her nose. “Thomas,” she said in a voice that didn’t sound like Mama, “I told you the boy doesn’t want to go hunting with you. It’s a simple thing. He loves you very much but he doesn’t like to kill anything, even in sport.”
“Kill!” Father exclaimed. “I’ve heard of men shamed by the soft eyes of deer, but this is only coyotes.”
“It doesn’t matter. Tommy doesn’t like to kill anything.”
“What kind of damned boy is that?” Father shouted. “I’d be the laughing stock of every rancher in the valley if they thought I had a son too chintzy to kill a lousy coyote.”
“He’s a gentle boy, don’t you see? Take him camping with you, sleep out on the range, shoot skeet, he likes that very much, but don’t ask him to kill living things. Try to understand the boy, not for my sake, for his. He wants so to admire you.”
“What do you mean, wants?” Father said, very loud. “Have you been turning him against me?”
“Please,” Mama said, “don’t shout. He’s out with his pony and I’d die if he heard us. I haven’t, Tom. I swear I haven’t. I’m just trying to tell you he’s the kind of boy who never even killed caterpillars out of curiosity.”
“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.