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blacked both her eyes and broke her jaw, but she was afraid of him. I was so mad I drove out to the Scragg ranch and walked in the house. They was all sitting around the dinner table. I grabbed Lister, jerked him out of his chair and threw him up against the wall. Put the cuffs on him in front, because I knew what I was gonna do. Old Batim was shouting, ‘You got a warrant, you got a warrant? What’s the charge?’ I told him to shut up, that he didn’t know anything about the law just because he’d been in prison a couple of times. I pushed Lister out the door and into my pickup. He’s yelling and hollering about his rights, and I says, ‘I’m driving you into the next county. You ain’t got no rights over there.’ I drove him up the West Branch Road way out in the woods till we come to that old horse-packing camp out there. The meat pole for hanging deer carcasses is about eight feet high, and I hauled Lister out of the truck, tied a rope to the handcuffs and tossed it up over the top of the meat pole. Then I pulled the pickup around to the other side and tied the rope to the pickup’s winch. I winched Lister up till he was standing on his tippy toes.
    â€œIt’s dark by now so I have the lights turned on him. He’s yelling and bellowing and waking up all the coyotes in the entire canyon and they’re all howling. A big October moon was just coming up, probably about like last night, and it’s beautiful, but it’s all kinds of eerie, too. I walked over to the river bank and cut me an eight-foot willow a little thicker than my thumb. Then I sat downon the bumper of the truck and started to shave the bark off that willow with my knife, Lister straining around and watching every stroke. ‘What you aimin’ to do with that willow?’ Lister croaked out. I said, ‘You ever heard of caning, Lister?’ He said no he hadn’t, which is about what I expected, because Lister ain’t never heard of nothing. Lem is pretty intelligent but Lister is dumb as stone. So I explained it to him. I says I ain’t never experienced it personally myself but I read an account about a fella who did, over in one of them Asian countries, and he said the pain of the first whack exploded like a bomb in his head, and then it got a whole lot worse from then on. Well, you never heard such carrying on as come from Lister when I told him that. By then I had all the bark whittled off the willow and I got up and went around and undid Lister’s belt and let his pants drop around his ankles. He was wearing long johns with that flap in the back that buttons up. I undid the buttons so that his skinny old rear end was sticking out there in the moonlight pale as a peeled egg. By now he’s dancing around on his tippy toes and really whooping it up. So I stepped over to one side with my willow cane held up in both hands and . . .”
    â€œI don’t want to hear this!” Tully said.
    â€œYou’re gonna hear it, so shut up and listen!”
    Pap took a final drag on his cigarette and crushed it out in the ashtray.
    â€œIt will do you some good, Bo,” he said. “So I told Lister, ‘I figure you got at least fifteen licks coming for each time you put that wife of yours in the hospital. But right now I’m putting them all on hold. If I ever hear tellof you laying a finger on her again, I’m gonna bring you out here and collect all of them plus another fifteen. You hear?’ Lister kinda nodded that he’d heard. All the way driving back to the Scragg ranch he sat slumped in the seat like a big pile of mush. He never said a word but every once in a while he let out this little moan, like I had beat him half to death. I pulled up in the Scragg yard, took off the cuffs and shoved him out. He just laid there on the ground, like he was so tuckered out he couldn’t move.”
    â€œI’m about that tuckered out myself,” Tully