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

the faster he moves, the more the poison will spread. And then, even though he’s dying of this snakebite, your father picks up his rifle and shoots a doe. Kills it. And starts limping toward its body.” Joe stopped short and waited. He, too, was learning how to give people room.

Rusty was not too proud to meet him in the middle. “Why would he shoot a deer when he’s dying of snakebite?”

Joe held the book out toward Rusty, who looked at it with a little less loathing than before. “How many thousands of words do I have to read before I find out?” the boy asked.

“They’ll fly by,” Joe said.

Within the month, Rusty had taken to waiting for Joe on the steps of the Kitchen, light pouring out of his eyes. He now carried his own library card with him everywhere he went and had begun, unbidden, to read. Books from the school library that smelled like french fries, with sticky, ragged pages. James and the Giant Peach, Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Call of the Wild.

As long as they stayed within the boundaries of stories, in the company of characters like King Arthur and Daniel Boone, Joe and Rusty got along like bread and jam. But on occasion, when Joe forgot the rules and was heavy-handed, acted too much like a father, or when Rusty asked Joe about his boyhood, forgetting for a moment that Joe would not answer … when either of them trespassed on such forbidden ground, a wall went up between them, leaving them stranded.

“Hey, Rusty, this book is a week overdue.” It was a blazing August day, and neither of them was in the mood for anything but Raccoon Creek and a rope swing. But as much as they could, they stuck to their habit of meeting at the Kitchen for an hour every other day, usually to read together in easy partnership, sometimes to talk about what they’d witnessed between the covers of their books.

“Big deal. A nickel a day. My mom’ll pay for it.”

Joe thought about Angela, hard at work long before dawn every day of the week.

“You ever take a good look at your mom’s hands?” he said. “I don’t think she should have to do even thirty-five cents’ worth of work just because you’re too goddamned lazy to return a book on time. You were my kid, I’d make you pay the fine yourself out of money you earned.”

Rusty picked up the library book. Got out of his chair. “My mother and me are none of your business,” he said. And walked out the door.

Joe sat in the Kitchen for another ten minutes, thinking about his own mother. And about his father. Then he got up and went looking for Rusty.

He found him coming out of the library. When Rusty walked past him, Joe took his place by the boy’s side and they walked up Maple Street without a word. When they got to the bridge over Raccoon Creek, Rusty shimmied down the steep bank and straight to the water’s edge. He took off his shirt and shoes, wedged them in the fork of a tree, and stepped into the cool creek water.

Joe stood on the bridge and watched Rusty from above. He was afraid to make matters worse between them, worried that what had started over a library book might end in a place they wouldn’t easily get beyond. Not unless he chose his words carefully.

“I’m sorry, Rusty,” he said, leaning on the rail of the bridge just over the boy’s head. “I like your mother a lot, but I’ll never love her one millionth as much as you do.” Rusty had found a stick and was stirring up the water along the bank of the creek, hoping to spook crayfish. He didn’t look up, give any sign he was listening. An old man, walking along Maple Street, glanced twice at Joe as he passed, wary of someone who made speeches from a bridge.

“I never earned a nickel in my life, until I came to Belle Haven,” Joe said. “Which makes me something of an idiot to be preaching at you.” He had seen Rusty working in the Kitchen and had never heard him complain about it, not once. When he thought about it, Joe realized that it was not only understandable but entirely reasonable, even desirable, for Rusty to misbehave now and then, especially with someone who could be counted upon to let him.

“I will mind my own business,” he said. “From now on. I promise.”

Rusty finally looked up.

“It’s okay,” he said after a moment. “I don’t much mind.”

“Good,” Joe said. “And while we’re at it, it’s ‘My mother and I are none of your business,’ not ‘My mother and me.’ ”

At which Rusty picked up a clod of creek mud and lobbed it at Joe, who ran down the bank hollering and into the creek, shoes and all.

In September Angela asked Joe to tutor Rusty in other subjects. “He’s a smart kid, and he does pretty well in school. But it’s not enough to be smart and I don’t give a good goddamn about grades. He loves to read now. I want him to love to learn.”

So Joe and Rusty continued to meet at the Kitchen, on the ball diamond, on the banks of Raccoon Creek. Joe made the town’s meadows into classrooms, teaching Rusty about the migration of hummingbirds, the stunning unlikelihood of metamorphosis, the indispensable gift of bees. He made baseball a matter of math and physics as well as of pure, immeasurable joy. Together they catalogued the clouds and the leaves of the trees, sought the burrows of earth dwellers, studied the kingfisher taking its plunge.

“I used to know a lot about frogs,” Joe said as they waded along the bank of the creek one day in late September. Rusty had caught a fat frog and held it cupped between his hands. Its legs dangled between his fingers, and its head popped through the collar Rusty