Chasing the Bear

Chapter 4

"How come he didn't arrest you?" I said to my father when we got home.

"Known Cecil most of my life," my father said.

"But wasn't it against the law?" I said. "What you did?"

"There's legal," my father said, "and there's right. Cecil knows the difference."

"And what you did was right," I said.

"Yep. Cecil would have done it too."

"How you supposed to know that what you're doing is right?" I said.

"Ain't all that hard," my uncle Patrick said. "Most people know what's right. Sometimes they can't do it."

"Or don't want to," Cash said.

"But how do you know?" I said.

My father sat back and thought a minute.

"You can't know," he said. "But you think about it before you do it, if you got time, and then you trust yourself."

"How 'bout if you don't have time to think and you done it and it was wrong?" I said.

"Did it," my father corrected me.

He was a bear for me saying things right. Even when he didn't always say it right himself. When he wasn't around, I talked like all the other kids talked, and I think my father knew that. As long as I knew how to talk right, then I could choose.

"Sometimes you make a mistake," he said. "Everybody does."

"It sounds too hard," I said. "How do I know I can trust myself?"

"It'll be pretty much instinct," my father said. "If you been raised right."

"How do I know I'm being raised right?" I said.

My father looked at my uncles. All three of them smiled.

"None of us knows that," my father said.

I nodded. It was a lot to think about.

"How 'bout, what's right is what feels good afterwards," my father said. "It's in a book, by a famous writer."

My father wasn't educated. Neither were my uncles. And they didn't know what they were supposed to read. So they read everything. Not long after I was born, my father bought a secondhand set of great books, bound in red leather, and he and Patrick and Cash used to take turns reading to me every night before bed. None of them had any idea what was considered appropriate for a little kid. They just took turns plowing on through the classics of Western literature in half-hour chunks every night. I didn't understand most of it, and I was bored with a lot of it. But I loved my father and my uncles, and I liked getting their full attention.