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Show 64 delivering his prisoner to the pen. On the way he gave me a fatherly lecture on the evils of speeding, and of drinking while driving (I never drank), and how both of them led to worse things. He didn't say what worse things but I supposed he meant robbery and rape and murder. And then he delivers jm sentence: I could stay home on the farm for the next month. He would find plenty for me to do. So this way I got thirty days at hard labor. I could see the irony of it all right but I didn't once laugh. I felt sick. I suppose my father was remembering my mother's father, who'd been a drunk, and his own father, Wild Bill, and even more my own brother Henry, who'd moved to town and got a job and a room and from all reports was living it up with whiskey and wild wild women. Dad was concerned about me, and I hated him for it. But the worst sentence was knowing that Buck Sanders was a better man than I was. I felt as sick as if I'd been kicked in the balls. For him to show me how short I had fallen of any existence I had dreamed for myself; for jv[m_ to show me I had committed sin after all, against myself. |