The Silence of a Boy

Crawford crept past his father's door, no crack of light, put his own empty bed and stretched on his back. This time he never tried to pray. What he tried was a thorough backward search of his recent life. His mind was clear and a thousand details marched past his eyes. But no fault showed, nothing worth more than a god-dammit-fought from his tired patient father. So the boy kept coming round to the fact that as lately as two or three Sundays ago he and his father had walked an hour out into the fields. Arrowheads shot or lost by the Tuscarora ages past, no Tuscarora left in the state for two hundred years