Free Thief of Dreams by John Yount

rescue because a part of him wouldn’t believe it and had withdrawn beyond the reach of pain or the need for rescue.
    The moment the rifle went off, it was that way. Some essential part of him simply went away, and it wouldn’t come back, not even when they began to labor through the iron-hard roots of laurel and rhododendron to get a hole deep enough to bury the body. He was shocked and weak in his limbs, but another side of him had gone away somewhere and wouldn’t acknowledge what they had done.
    When they got down off the mountain and into the nearly grassless hard-packed earth of Lester’s backyard, Effie was on the dogtrot washing clothes, but she didn’t speak to them. She merely gave Lester a brief, discreet glance when he passed her to take the rifle back inside to put it away. Listlessly, James propped the spade against the fence and wandered over to the apple tree by the springhouse to get a treat for the crow.
    â€œYou boys want a little something to eat?” he heard Effie ask gently when Lester came out again.
    â€œI reckon,” Lester told her and went on to fetch the spade and put it away in the tool shed.
    The crow didn’t seem to want the apple. When James held it out, the crow merely glared at it as though it had no idea what an apple was, and then it hopped to his shoulder and rapped him solidly in the head, pulling out a tuft of hair. “Ouch, you bastard!” James said, brushed the bird off, and inspected the side of his head tenderly with his fingertips. He wasn’t surprised to find a little blood.
    â€œMust think you’re a tree and he’s a woodpecker,” Lester said, sounding almost like himself. “Hold him for me.”
    Carefully, so as not to injure the crow’s leg, which was already scarred by the hog staple bent around it, Lester pulled open the metal band, took the crow out of James’s hands, and gave it a pitch in the air. “So long, Blackjack,” he said, but the crow hovered uncertainly for a moment and then lit again on the rail.
    â€œWhat are you up to, chile?” Effie called from the dogtrot. “Blackjack don’t do no harm.”
    â€œHe don’t do no good neither,” Lester told her. “Scat,” he said and gave the bird a push, but it simply flopped its wings for balance and moved a few inches down the rail until Lester picked it up and pitched it high overhead. This time, after it had fluffed in the air a moment like a swimmer treading water, it banked over to the roof of the springhouse where it made a clumsy landing. When it had righted itself, it wiped one side and then the other of its beak against the comb of the roof, getting rid of some of James’s hair, and stared at its new surroundings with what looked like pure hatred.
    Lester rushed at it, waving his arms. “Shoo, get outta here!” he shouted, but a single beat of its wings lifted it into the apple tree. “Well,” Lester said, looking up at it, “I reckon you ain’t had much slack.”
    â€œAwwwh honey …” Effie said, shading her eyes with her hand and looking at Lester sadly.
    â€œI’ve just growed out of it, Momma,” Lester told her.
    â€œCome on,” he said to James, “less us take this next’n off a ways.”
    â€œAwwwh honey,” Effie said as James followed Lester around the house, “you got no call … Poppa didn’t mean …” she stammered from the front end of the dogtrot.
    â€œI know it,” Lester told her, opened his pocketknife, cut the cotton rope with a single stroke, and began to pull the fox from beneath the house.
    James could hear its small, keening growls before it came into view, all four feet braced against being dragged and its bushy tail thrashing side to side like the tail of a cat.
    â€œHa,” Lester said. “Ain’t you in for a surprise though.”
    With Effie looking after them, they went off down