Juice (29 page)

Dave looked up. There was sweat on his face. “Worms,” he said.

Joe was mildly exasperated. “You know there aren't any fish.”

Dave grinned. “I don't care. Maybe they come along when you don't expect them. Anyway the paper said it was the season.”

“Right,” Joe said. “What kind?”

“Trout,” Dave said.

“Good luck.”

“Thank you.” Dave leaned on the shovel; the handle reached his armpit. “Dad,” he said.

“What?” The sun was hot and brilliant; Joe moved into the shade. From there he could barely see the valley—a patch of green, a swath of brown.

“What should I do tomorrow?” Dave asked.

“You mean in school.”

“Yes.”

Sally came to stand beside him. He sat down and put his back against a tree. “Sit down,” he said, and they did. Now he could see the house, the yard, and a few trees; a cupful of sky, and the sunlight on the leaves. The smell was good. His forearms were pale; he needed sun.

“I don't know what to tell you,” he said.

“I know you were right,” Dave said. “But I don't know what it was all about. You said I could beat the bejesus out of him if I wanted to.”

“No,” Joe said. He looked at his daughter; she was grave and attentive. “No. Fighting's no good.”

“Then what should I say? What did you do this morning?”

A boy, Joe thought. As wide as he is high, and digging for worms, and dirty all over, and unaware that someday the worms will dig for him, and what do I tell him?

“Well,” he said, “the accident was my fault.”

Dave nodded.

“I was careless,” Joe said. “And it was the kind of carelessness that you can't buy back.” Leaves fluttered above him; a breeze was rising. “So I couldn't very well blame it on somebody else. Not even on the …”

“The dead man,” Dave said.

“Yes. Most of all, not on him. It would have been the worst kind of cheating.” His voice sounded tired and unconvincing. “We all do a little cheating all the time. We don't tell other people everything we think, or we're nice to people we don't like, or we pretend to be a little better than we are. That's all right. But I can't do the other kind.”

“Listen,” Dave said. “A woodpecker.”

“Yes. Do you understand so far?”

“Yes.”

“I do too,” Sally said. “I understood yesterday.”

Joe took her ankle and squeezed. “Good girl. Now it would have been easier to cheat. But I couldn't go against myself. I knew it would make trouble for everybody, and I tried to fix as much of that trouble as I could. But the most important thing must have been to behave—to do—” he paused, and groped—“to do what I would still think right twenty years from now. Not to do what was best for now, unless it was also best for then. All right? Because I don't want to stop being me. I don't want to become somebody else.”

“All right,” Dave said.

“So I had to tell them it was my fault,” he said gently, “and when they sing those songs in school, they're partly right.”

Dave looked up compassionately. “Then what do I do?”

“You take it,” Joe said, still gently. “You can't do anything else.”

“It isn't fair,” Dave said.

“No. It isn't fair because I should have to take it and not you.”

“I didn't mean that,” Dave said.

“No, but it's true. You'll have to go through a hard time because of what I did. Only for a little while; they'll forget about it. But you won't like it. I want you to do it well,” he said. “For me. I'll feel bad about it too, you know. But maybe then if other hard times come, when you're bigger, you'll remember how to get through them.”

“Did you go through them for your father?” Sally asked, and Dave looked up again.

“In other ways, yes,” Joe said. “Probably he could have done a lot of things that would have made my life easier, but he didn't think they were right, so I had to take the kind of life he gave me. And then when I was older I saw that it only seemed as though I were doing it for him; I was really doing it for myself.”

Dave wiped dirt off the blade of the shovel. “Then I'll be doing it for myself.”

“Yes,” Joe said. “It's one of the things that will make you whatever you become when you grow up. Nothing we say or do is ever wholly lost.”

“And if I have sons, they'll have to do it too.” Dave smiled.

Joe returned the smile. “Yes. And daughters.” Sally nodded.

“So I can't hit him.”

“You shouldn't. You shouldn't want to; I don't think it's right. Sometimes you have to; nobody can be good all the time. But you have to decide that for yourself.”

“The way you did.”

“Yes. It's hard to know what's right. And even if your father knows—or thinks he knows; my father did—that doesn't mean that you'll know. It isn't passed on automatically, like red hair or brown eyes. You have to do it yourself. You can't take anybody else's word for it.” What terrible nonsense, Joe thought; and I believe it, and always, in every generation, somebody's believed it, and told his children about it.

“Not even yours?”

“No,” Joe said. “If you think I'm wrong—or anybody is—and it feels important, you have to say so.” He paused. “There's no halfway.” Dangerous, he thought; too late now. “You have to decide what you think is right. Nobody can decide for you; no one man, and no group of men. And if you take it upon yourself to decide that, if you accept that responsibility, the most terrible of all responsibilities, then you have to
do
what's right, and if it turns out badly you can't blame it on anyone else. That isn't so hard when it makes trouble for you alone; but even when it makes trouble for other people, people you love, you have to do it.” It sounds wrong, he thought, frightened. How can I tell him that? Can he live by that? Should he? “If they love you,” he said, “they won't mind the trouble so much.”

Dave smiled, and Sally with him. “That makes it easier,” Dave said. “I won't hit him.”

About the Author

Stephen Becker (1927–1999) was an American author, translator, and teacher whose published works include eleven novels and the English translations of Elie Wiesel's
The Town Behind the Wall
and André Malraux's
The Conquerors
. He was born in Mount Vernon, New York, and after serving in World War II, he graduated from Harvard University and studied in Peking and Paris, where he was friends with the novelist Richard Wright and learned French in part by reading detective novels. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Becker taught at numerous schools throughout the United States, including the University of Iowa, Bennington College, and the University of Central Florida in Orlando. His best-known works include
A Covenant with Death
(1965), which was adapted into a Warner Brothers film starring Gene Hackman and George Maharis;
When the War Is Over
(1969), a Civil War novel based on the true story of a teenage Confederate soldier executed more than a month after Lee's surrender; and the Far East trilogy of literary adventure novels:
The Chinese Bandit
(1975),
The Last Mandarin
(1979), and
The Blue-Eyed Shan
(1982).

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1958 by Stephen Becker

Cover design by Kat JK Lee

ISBN: 978-1-5040-2688-8

This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com

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