Chapter 9
Father and Son

None of us saw Zack for five days.

Pa went up to Jack Lame Pony’s, but neither he nor Little Wolf knew where Zack had gone. Little Wolf couldn’t tell him much more than Almeda had, that a fellow they had met had offered the boys jobs with the new mail delivery service and that they had talked about taking him up on his offer. Then Zack had gone home to tell Almeda about it, and that was the last anyone had seen of him.

Then as we were talking, Zack came walking through the door. We hadn’t even heard the sound of a horse riding up.

I don’t know where he’d been, but he looked dirty and unshaven. He gave me a little nod of greeting, but he didn’t smile, and he tried to pretend Pa wasn’t there. He probably knew what was coming.

“Where you been, son?” said Pa.

“Out riding,” muttered Zack.

“Where?”

“Just around,” said Zack, shuffling toward the kitchen area to see if there was anything to eat.

“I was a mite surprised to come home and find you gone,” said Pa. “When I’m away I expect you to look after the family.”

Zack said nothing. He picked up a piece of bread and bit into it.

“You don’t figure you owe no responsibility to the family, is that it?”

Zack mumbled something, but I couldn’t make it out.

“What’s that you say?”

“I said it ain’t my family no more.”

“What do you mean by that?” Pa’s tone was stern. It was easy to tell that he was getting riled.

“What should you care what I do? You all got your own plans. Corrie’s got her writing, and you all think she’s pretty great at everything she does. And you’re busy being the town’s important man. There ain’t nothing Almeda can’t do for herself. What do any of you need me for?”

“When I’m not here, I want you keeping a watch over things, that’s what,” said Pa, his voice icy. Zack hadn’t looked at any of us straight in the face since walking in. If he was embarrassed about running off, he didn’t show it. He just looked mad. I could feel the tension between him and Pa hanging in the air.

“Zack, please,” said Almeda in a pleading tone, “I don’t want—”

“You don’t need me, Almeda. Don’t try to pretend.”

“Zack, that’s not true,” she said, turning to him with tender eyes full of anguish. “You know that I do need you—”

“Almeda,” Zack said, cutting her off again, “you don’t have to try to make me feel good anymore like you did when I was a boy.”

“That’s no way to talk to your mother, boy!” said Pa. By now he was storming mad.

“She ain’t my mother!”

“She’s my wife and a woman, and that means you better learn to talk to her with respect in your voice, unless you want my belt around that hind end of yours!”

“So you still think I’m a little kid too?”

“You’re my son, and I’ll whip you if I need to.”

Becky and Tad stared at the two of them; it was all I could do to keep from bursting out crying. To suddenly have two of the people you love most in all the world arguing and yelling at each other was too horrible even to describe.

Zack turned away and laughed—a bitter, awful laugh.

“You find something funny in that?” asked Pa.

“Yeah,” retorted Zack, spinning around and leveling that bitter-looking grin on Pa. “I’m twenty-one years old. I’m taller than you. I can ride a horse better than anyone for miles. But you still think of me as a little kid. You don’t even know what it’s like for me. I got a life of my own to live, and you don’t even know the kinds of things I’m thinking about. Everything’s about Corrie and Almeda or your being mayor or the Mine and Freight. You got no time for me—you never had. What do you care what I do? You just expect me to be around to take care of things so you can leave whenever you want.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You figure out what it means.”

“None of that matters. You’re not going to the Pony Express without my say-so. Whatever you may think, I’m still your pa. And I still got a right to tell you what you can and can’t do.”

Zack stared straight into his face, and the next words out of his mouth were so biting I could almost feel them slicing straight into Pa’s heart.

“You never knew what it was like for me,” said Zack. “You never knew the times I cried myself to sleep when I was a kid, hoping you’d come home. I was frightened without a father. I got teased and made fun of something awful ’cause I was little, and sometimes I came home with bruises and a black eye from trying to defend myself. I used to dream how good it would be to come home to feel the arms of a pa to hold me. I’d beg God to help us find you. But we never did, and I had to grow up alone like that. You’ll never know how much you hurt Ma, and how she’d cry sometimes when she didn’t know I was watching. She kept loving you and kept praying for you—always asking God to protect you and watch over you. But I finally quit praying, because I was sick of being disappointed.”

Zack stopped for a second, trembling with emotion. Then he added, “So I don’t reckon you got a right to call yourself my father no more. You may be my pa. But I figure I’m old enough to decide for myself what I want!”

Zack’s words came so fast and were so unexpected that Pa didn’t know what to do. I know Pa was hurt by what Zack had said, but his response came out as anger.

“However mixed up a job I done of it, I’m your pa whether you like it or not!”

“I’m stuck here with nothing but women and babies and little kids,” Zack shot back. “You can go off and do whatever you want, and you figure I got nothing of my own that matters?”

“You got no right to talk about your mother and sisters that way. You apologize to them, or you’re gonna feel that belt like I told you!”

“Ha! Your belt ain’t gonna come anywhere near my rump! And I ain’t apologizing to nobody! It’s true, everything I said. I said to myself a long time ago I was getting out of here first chance I got. God knows I spent my muscles and blistered my hands working that mine for you all these years. You don’t know how many days I sweated all day long, aching inside just for you to smile at me once and say I’d done a good day’s work. But I might as well not even been there, for all you ever noticed! I don’t reckon you’ll figure you owe me anything for it. Well, that’s fine with me. But all that’s over with. I met a guy, and he’s got a place arranged for me in the Pony Express. And I don’t care if Little Wolf’s changed his mind, I’m gonna take it. It’s the chance I been waiting for to get out of this place!”

He turned and strode toward the door, still without looking at any of the rest of us. But Pa was closer, and took two giant steps and cut him off. He laid a strong hand on Zack’s shoulder.

“No you’re not, son,” he said. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere without my leave. Now you get back in here, and we’ll sit down and talk about it.”

“I’m not talking about nothing,” retorted Zack. “I’ve listened to all the rest of you long enough. Nobody ever seemed much interested in talking to me before. Now I’m going, whether you like it or not.”

“And I’m telling you you’re not.”

“It’s too late. I signed the papers. I start my first run next week.”

“Then I’ll go talk to this fella and unsign them.”

Zack laughed again.

“You’re not leaving home, Zack! You hear me, son? You got duties to this family.”

Zack’s eyes squinted ever so slightly, and his next words weren’t loud but they cut deep.

“Is that how it was when you left Ma?” he said icily. “Duties to the family!” He laughed again. “You talk to me about duty to the family? Where were you all those years when I needed a pa? Even after we’d come all the way across the country to find you, you didn’t want us. You denied you even knew us!”

Zack’s back was to me as he spoke, and I could see Pa’s grip on my brother’s shoulder loosen. Pa unconsciously took half a step backward, as if Zack’s words had been a physical blow across Pa’s face. The rest of us stood in stunned silence to hear Zack accuse Pa like that.

“Well,” he went on, “you talk about duty all you want, but I figure I’ve already about done as much as you ever did. You ran out on us, and even now you’re always gone somewhere or another, but still you figure I’ll do for you what you never did for me. Well, I tell you, I ain’t gonna do it no more! If I go ride for the Pony Express, at least I ain’t leaving a wife and five kids like you done!”

He wrested free of Pa’s hand. As he did, Almeda approached, her eyes full of tears, and stretched out a hand and gently placed it on his shoulder.

“Oh, Zack,” she pleaded, “if only I could make you see how much we all—”

But Zack, still backing his way free of Pa, either didn’t hear her tender words of love or misunderstood her gesture. For whatever reason, as her hand touched him, thinking she intended to restrain him further, he reached up and in a swift motion threw her hand off him and took a step toward the door.

Seeing him rebuke Almeda so rudely was all Pa needed to jolt him awake from his stunned silence. Zack’s reaction could not have been more ill-chosen.

Pa’s eye’s inflamed with rage. He leaped forward and struck Zack across the jaw. Yet even as Zack fell, Pa realized what he’d done and pulled back.

His cheek red from the blow and his body trembling, Zack slowly rose. “It’s no secret where your loyalties lie,” he said. “Everything for the women, but you won’t lift a finger unless it’s against your own son!”

He turned, opened the door, and stalked off, slamming it behind him. Pa half stumbled back into a chair, mortified at what he’d done. His face was white as a sheet.

The house was silent. The next sound we heard was Zack’s horse galloping away.