Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (easy readers .TXT) 📕

murmured, helping him to his bed. When he lay down and turned his face to the wall, she covered him with a blanket and stood looking down at him.

She imagined that his father had lashed out at him, disowned him, torn at his heart, and she was right. But she also imagined that Joe had heard only what he’d feared, and in this she could not have been more wrong.

  Book

Two

My crown is in my heart, not on my head.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, from King Henry VI, Part 3

Chapter 16

        Joe let his hair grow all through the long, hot months of his first summer in Belle Haven. While most of the other men in town had theirs clipped down to let the air touch their sweating scalps, he let his go its own unruly way. He let his beard grow too, for a while, but it made him feel like a stranger, and since he’d had enough of that, he cut it off sometime before July.

He borrowed a shovel from Ian, turned over a few bits of ground around the Schooner, and carefully transplanted clusters of wild-flowers from the fields and woods.

He bagged groceries at the A&P, hauled ice in a worn-out truck, picked strawberries by the hundred-quart, and shelved books at the library. A few hours’ work here and there. He fed himself, mended his berry-stained trousers, went to bed as soon as it was dark.

“My son, Rusty, hates to read,” Angela said to Joe one day when he stopped in to buy a paper. “Which makes me sick at heart, Joe.” She wiped one glistening cheek with the back of her hand. “I can’t afford to pay you, but I’ll feed you supper every day of the week. Anything on or off the menu, long as the fixin’s are in the fridge. Ice cream if you’re good.” She smiled tiredly. “Read to him. At least once a day. You choose the books. Or let him. Whatever you want. Read to him. Talk to him. Tell him stories. I don’t care what you do, just get him in love with books. Would you do that for me, Joe?”

He would have done it for nothing. He did it for her. For her cooking. He didn’t really know the boy yet. Had he known him, he would have done it for the boy, and for no other reason.

He started with books gathered by the town’s eager librarians, books that made Rusty wince when he saw them coming and made Angela shake her head in doubt. Big, heavy books with somber leather bindings and pages that creaked like long-locked doors. The Last of the Mohicans, The Yearling, Treasure Island, Kidnapped.

“I like comic books,” Rusty said, looking a bit like he’d stepped out of one. He was small for his age, crowned with a cowlick, his jeans cuffed up, his face freckled. He sat across from Joe in the Kitchen’s only booth, the books scattered across the table between them.

“So do I,” Joe said. “I also like these.”

Rusty picked up The Yearling with both hands. Pasted on the front cover was a large illustration of a boy and a deer. He turned it over suspiciously.

“What’s this one about?”

“What do you think?”

Rusty looked at the picture again. “A boy and a deer.”

“And?”

“And what?” Rusty gave Joe a sour look. He glanced over toward his mother, who was polishing the chrome on an enormous blender, but she ignored them both. When Joe did not answer, Rusty sighed and said, “How am I supposed to know? You’re the one that read the book. You tell me.”

Joe picked up the book, weighed it in his hands. “I could tell you this story, in a hundred words or less, and you’d forget it by bedtime.” He leaned toward Rusty and lowered his voice, as if he had secrets to share. “Or you could read a couple hundred thousand words instead and never forget the story as long as you live.”

Rusty snorted, crossed his arms over his chest. “Hundred thousand? You gotta be kidding me.”

“Hey, look, kid. I couldn’t care less if you read comic books and cereal boxes the rest of your life. But I do care what I read, and I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to spend my summer reading trash.” He stopped. Rusty looked at him across the table as if it were a continent. “All right, let’s start again,” Joe said, running a hand through his willful hair. He thought for a minute or two while Rusty waited. He seemed to be good at waiting.

“All right,” Joe said again, taking the book up against his chest and closing his eyes. He held it there for a moment while Rusty wondered whether he was supposed to do something to get them both past this bad beginning.

Then Joe opened his eyes and smiled.

“What would you do,” he said, “if you were out in the woods, deer hunting with your father—”

“I don’t have a father,” Rusty said. He said it simply but as if he wanted to get that one thing straight right up front. “And I don’t like it when people try to act like they’re my father either.”

Joe had never had a conversation like this before. He couldn’t remember the last time he had spoken even a single word to a child, let alone discussed great literature and the unfortunate lack of fathers.

“I don’t blame you,” Joe said. “And if it matters, I don’t really have a father either. Not anymore.”

Rusty looked as if he wanted to ask a question, but he had enough sense to keep it to himself. “So I’m deer hunting with my father, and?”

“And you’ve wandered pretty far from home. There’s no one else out in these woods. No phone. No car. Just the two of you and your guns. And all of a sudden, your father gets bitten on the leg by a rattlesnake. He’s going to die if he doesn’t get help quick, but he knows that