move real slow until you're looking at it from the side. Then you fire, but you don't hit the squirrel, you hit the bark just under it. If you do that just right, a piece of the bark flies up and stuns the squirrel. And you got your meal."
By the time they got Junior home and made it on to their own small house in Clayville, it was growing dark. Clouds from the Gulf of Mexico gathered and closed gently over them, hastening the night. With a slight breeze whispering its approach, a warm soft rain began to fall.
4
AFTER SUPPER, RAPHAEL LAY in bed, worrying. He stared sightlessly at the screen of his twelve-inch color television set, last year's Christmas present from his Uncle Cyrus. Two rooms away Ainesley and Marcia were talking loudly. He could not make out the words, but he knew from the volume and tone that it was an argument. From past experience he was certain that this one was about himself.
During the meal of fried calf's liver, turnip greens, and biscuits, he had averted his gaze from the two adults and uttered not a word. It was not easy being an only child. After the dishes were washed and dried, his father departed for the Delchamps Supermarket in Clayville for groceries. As soon as Ainesley left, Marcia took Raff aside and gently worked out of him the main events of the day. As he described the firing of the shotgun and conquest of the guinea fowl, her narrow, pleasant face turned increasingly grim.
Now his parents were squared off, as they had been many times before, on the issue of how their son should be raised. They were coming at each other from different positions Raff could sense but not understand. It ran a lot deeper, he knew, than just a turkey hunt. The ten-year-old's loyalty was divided by the conflict. That was bad, because the fissure appeared to be insoluble, and he did not know to whom his loyalty was owed.
Raff worried that Ainesley and Marcia might separate, leaving him without a father or a mother, one or the other. Maybe he would have to live with a relative or some stranger. He knew kids at school in that fix. They seemed mostly okay, but in his case, he thought, it would strip away his own security and upset his life completely. He fell asleep trying to puzzle this dilemma.
Toward dawn, as Raphael slept, the rain slackened off. By the time he was roused for breakfast, the wind had picked up and a slight chill was in the humid air. The blond weatherwoman on Mobile Television Channel 5 said with a clipped midwestern accent that the Alabama and Mississippi coasts would be cloudy, but with no more rain. Still, Marcia made Raphael put on a slicker, which he hated, and a rain hat, which he hated even more. They made him look like a sissy, he thought. His father thought the same, an opinion he had let recklessly slip to Marcia more than once.
Raff rode his bicycle down Charleston Street to the first light and then left three blocks to the Martin Luther King, Jr., Grammar School. Once, many years ago, it had been the Robert E. Lee School. Through the day he couldn't think about anything much in class. Geometry, English, and American history churned on past him like the talk of strangers in a shopping mall. During lunch and recess he stayed away from his best friends. He kept thinking about Ainesley, worried about the wrath to come. He feared the angry spells, the way his father occasionally raised his hand as though to hit him, although he never really had. He felt ashamed that he had refused simply to hold the gun with his father's help and pull the trigger. He felt guilty that he told his mother about the incident.
He thought, Am I a sissy? Even though I get in fights with other boys and don't run away? He felt even worse for letting his father down, because he knew Ainesley thought of him as a special and very precious boy, and maybe a little man too, after everything was said and done. Once he had heard Ainesley refer to him in conversation with some neighborhood friends: "I wouldn't take a million dollars for this one or give you a dime for another."
When he arrived home from school that midafternoon, he was surprised to find his father waiting for him. Ainesley