Read Shiloh Season for Free Online

starts in November. . . . But dogs? Not a thing on the charts about dog season. With Judd drinking every evening like he does, I tell myself, and now suspecting me of scratching his truck, he'll make his own rules. There could be a Shiloh season, and it could be any time at all.
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    Six
    I
    don't sleep so good that night and neither does David Howard. When David comes over to spend the night,
    Ma opens up our couch to make a double bed, but it's got this bar down the middle inside the mattress, and every so often you hit it with your knee.
    Shiloh, though, he sure likes to sleep down at the bottom of that bed. When you wake up in the night but your foot's still sleeping, you know you got a dog on it, that's why.
    Both David and me wake early, and lie there talking while the house is still.
    "You think we should tell?" David asks me.
    "About the squirrel?" I say. He thinks that's bad, he should know what I know about Judd Travers.
    He nods.
    "You could, but it wouldn't do one bit of good. You ever hear of somebody getting fined for shooting a squirrel out of
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    season, when you can walk from here to Friendly and find half a dozen dead on the road?"
    It's a whole different thing, killing a squirrel or killing a deer. You can shoot only a few deer a year in West Virginia. During squirrel season, you can shoot six a day! Don't make it any more right to shoot a squirrel out of season. Just that the game warden isn't going to drive all the way up here because of a squirrel.
    I guess it wasn't the fact that Judd killed a squirrel so much as the way he killed it. That's what made us sick. His plain delight in watching it flop about his yard while it's dyin'. What kind of kid was Judd Travers when he was growing up? I wonder. What kind of boy was he when he was fifteen? I'm puzzling over what his ma and dad were like, bringing up a son who could sit there and smile over a small creature's misery.
    We must look pretty tired at breakfast, 'cause Ma says, "Were you boys up half the night playing games? You don't look very hungry to me. I don't see that bacon going anywhere."
    David and I both reach for a piece of bacon just to show her we're awake and hungry, but we're not. Ma's biscuits are good, though. I show David how to mix a spoonful of honey with a spoonful of margarine-stir it up till it turns creamy, and then spread that on a hot biscuit.
    We play on the bag swing till David's dad comes to pick him up. Dara Lynn gets up finally and watches us out the window, but our yelling don't wake Becky. She could sleep with a full brass band by her bed.
    The Howards go to the Methodist church, and David's got to go home and change clothes first.
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    "See you at school Monday," David says as he gets in the car beside his dad.
    "How you doing, Marty? You guys have fun?" Mr. Howard calls.
    "Yeah," we both tell him. We did, too, but watching a squirrel die before our eyes wasn't part of it.
    We like Sundays at our house 'cause they're slow. Dad's home all day, and he'll sit out on the porch swing reading the comics aloud to Dara Lynn and Becky. Takes all the different voices and makes us laugh.
    Ma usually listens to Brother Jonas preach on TV, but now she's out in the kitchen making bread. She says that next to her children, she loves baking bread on Sundays about as much as anything she can think of.
    She don't say so, but she loves Dad more'n she loves baking bread, too. And this morning after I listen to Dad read the comics, I go back in the kitchen where she's shaping the loaves and she's singing one of the country songs she likes so much:
    "If I could have three wishes, I'd spend 'em all on you.
    To love me when I'm lonely, To cheer me when I'm blue. To laugh with when I'm happy, Because I know you're true.
    If I could have three wishes, love, I'd spend 'em all on you."
    I know it's not me she's singing about. I just smile and Ma smiles back.
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    I spread out my homework on the table across from her and do my arithmetic problems,