Free For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down by David Adams Richards

lately it had become prevalent.
    Last week Constable Petrie had come to tell him and Vera that Gary Percy Rils had escaped from prison. Ralphie had not thought of him in years, even though Gary had made death threats personally toward him.
    And Ralphie’s feeling now was – in the most secret part of his being – that he did not want this man in his life and hoped Jerry would help him – even if Jerry had to go to prison or die. It would make him and Vera safe from someone who had plagued their family for twenty-odd years. He tried not to let on he felt this, just as a man tries to let on he does not feel pleasure at an accident on the road.
    But how could he ask for help? He worried about this constantly. Of course Constable Petrie told him that Gary Percy Rils would never get here to bother him. But still and all there was this edge on things, and Ralphie would think, “If only my father had not been the judge who heard the case.”
    The case was in 1960. Gary Percy Rils had beat up ayoung man and left him for dead. The man had three small children. He was an average man who had opened up a small store in Millerton. A good, kind-hearted man. The fight had started over cigarettes.
    After he was beaten up he suffered from a punctured kidney, a damaged hand, and was blind in one eye. He was tormented by painful fluid and was frightened, and yelled at the children if they made noise.
    He refused to stay in the store unless his wife was there, and could no longer play the pipe organ in the church. Gary Percy was given three years in prison.
    “So it is me who is going to suffer,” Ralphie thought after Petrie told him about Rils, and he disliked himself for thinking this, yet he also suddenly disliked the idea that the man had played the pipe organ.
    “Everyone must suffer – one for the other,” came the answer.
    And this idea that everyone must suffer one for the other – which had been extracted from Ralphie’s thoughts on calculus more than from his study of St. Paul – made no difference once you yourself began to suffer. Once you yourself began to suffer you wanted the suffering to stop, and you would allow someone else to take it and bear it for you. (That this was the parable of Christ made no serious imprint on Ralphie, who disliked religion.)
    He wanted to ask Jerry for help in this matter. But how do you do this? Straightforwardly or stumbling? And what were you doing if you did ask for help?
    Ralphie had a map in his office upstairs. Besides doing tests on water samples taken from the river for his independent study on effluents from the mill, and a more serious study on groundwater that he was engaged in, he was also engaged in a kind of detective work.
    He was plotting Gary Percy Rils’ imaginary course back home, from various police reports, and wondering if he would ever make his way, and then the feeling came over him that he was quite willing to have someone else suffer instead of himself.
    To Jerry it would be nothing. And he had heard rumours that Jerry didn’t like Rils anyway. (Ralphie in his innocence never bothered to wonder why this might be.) But this feeling, this other feeling that he would be willing to have someone else suffer instead of himself, plagued him.
    One night he got up late and went into his office. The naked tree branches were tapping the window. He was standing in bare feet and long underwear looking at the map. There was a tiny bit of snow on the ground and everyone was sleeping. He believed Rils to be somewhere in Quebec – it was only an intuition, a feeling.
    “No, I can’t ask Jerry – I’m his friend,” Ralphie thought. “I’m his friend.”
    And at that moment a feeling of peace descended upon him.
    The peace lingered a long time in the cool night air. And yet he shivered as he went back to bed.
    He only knew that if something terrible happened tohis life, it would be because he had been born. In this he was only the same as everyone else, like the poor man