If you went to the trampoline place and thumped as hard as you could on "old number 3," the "tramp" with the strongest springs, from the highest point you could get to, you could see nearly the entire valley. If you got up so high your eyes hurt, you'd see the church down in Wilemburg. I did it twice.
          We lived three miles from the trampoline place in Skyline, the top of the world--at least that's the way it felt to me. My family had a farm there. It had passed from generation to generation, like skin warts. I felt like I lived on a tightrope most of the time.
          There were folks in Skyline who had never been to any other place than there. Mrs. Phillips, the widow in the red house had been to lots of other places, but she didn't talk about it much.
          Skyline never really took to Mrs. Phillips. She didn't have kids and she wasn't a member of the Sunshine Club. Every woman in Skyline, at one time or another, was a Sunshine Lady; just as every man, sooner or later, wore the windbreaker of the Skyline Volunteer Fireman Department. It was like circumcision. It was nearly automatic and you didn't quite know how it had happened. It just had.
          I heard Skyline almost burned to the ground once. Mrs. Magnus, the librarian, said the earth had been so scorched from the fire that Skyline roses, to this day, have a gray tint to them. I think I believe her.
          Jimmy Johns had done it to himself. That's the truth of it. We didn't dare him to do anything. He dared HIMSELF off that creek wall. He'd slammed his own knee through his own chin, his own tooth through the roof of his own mouth on the landing. It wasn't us at all. Jimmy Johns just blamed us because he was an idiot, and he knew his mother couldn't bear the news of her son's idiocy, so he did what everybody did in Skyline in those days when they wanted to skirt trouble; he threw the ball into my court. He knew the old man would just take it out on me, and then it would all die. He knew his idiocy would remain a secret.
          Everything, it seemed, always ended up between my old man and me. Everyone knew the old man had simple justice--"the boy must be guilty" kind of justice. All the town's people knew they held three aces and a king when it came to the old man. I never blamed Jimmy Johns. I never blamed any of them.
          "All right boy," I remember the old man saying after he got the call from John's mother. The rest was vintage, by the script.
          "Someday, it's gonna be just me an' you kid!"
          Perfect, and with such feeling, as well as the obligatory shot to the arm and the equally beautiful, "You just mark my words!"
          Outstanding! But, it was the old man's closing line that I always loved the best, the line that ended every episode of "Life With Old Chester."
          "I'll make a man out of you, yet!"
          Encore, old man!
          None of it was his fault, really. The old man just never had a tolerance for boys. He was a man's man. He ate boys for breakfast, and he got more than a little sympathy from his buddies at the Volunteer Fire Department. What did they care? They all had good boys. Sympathy always comes quickest from the lucky.
          Me? I didn't care to be a man anyway. I saw what men did. Anyway, Jimmy Johns played "the old man card," and the old man and I ended up face-to-face again, but that didn't matter either, really. When the truth doesn't matter, you don't either.
          I'd bet it was Stan Kemp, our Little League coach who first suggested to the old man that I be excluded from the village's first "doing" of the year that Saturday. Stan was Skyline's "Guru of Modern Child Psychology." Stan was the first to introduce Skyline to the modern theory of reasoning first and throwing dukes second. That was cutting edge. The men always conferred with Stan first before they started swinging.
          "If you prohibit the boy from going to the first doing of the year," I could hear Stan telling the old man, "then he'll see how terrible it is not belonging to something."
          Stan the Man.
          I would guess Woody York was the one who came up with the idea of having me paint shelves in the barn all day, the day of "the doing". They'd just put up the new shelves and they were as many and as long as January nights.
          Woody belonged to the "Workonian" cult. Work was Woody's religion. His big saying was, "Work'll make a man out of a boy faster than a lightening bolt trapped in an electric store."
          For some reason everybody in Skyline was just bound and determined to rid themselves of boys. Even my mother, I knew, would get into the act. She was the queen of innuendo.
          "Well, I guess now you'll have to miss Aunt Pat's potato salad, and you know what that means."
          Actually, I didn't, but I appreciated Mother. Mother always turned her back when the beatings started. She had compassion.
          I remember lying in bed, the night before I was to serve my sentence, wondering if this might be the day I finally became a man. I didn't know if I had any fight left in me not to. After all, I knew there was a windbreaker with my name on it somewhere down at the firehouse.
          In the morning my father walked me out to the barn, pointed to the paint cans, shook his head and walked away--The Book of Stan Kemp, Paragraph 1.
          I didn't think much of it. Hell, it was just another brand. I had their brands all over me anyway. I'd been branded at their ball games, branded at their supermarkets, even branded in their churches on Christmas Eve. Brands don't ever come off, like the smell of Skyline or the way people pronounce certain words. You think it's gone and then one day they come back to you in a dream, screaming. Some things don't leave; they just hide.
          I was happy to be painting their shelves anyway, happy enough just to be alone in the barn. I crouched down and mixed the first can of paint. The paint, I remember, was baby blue. Slowly, I laid the first few strokes to the bare pinewood. I worked with the patience of a monk making bread. I loved the fresh kiss of cool air, still trapped in the barn from the night before. I knew nobody would be coming in. My mother would never visit me in Solitary. The old man didn't know it, but he'd put his boy into Heaven. I loved it in the barn.
          I noticed a new piece of equipment, still in the crate, sitting near the old man's workbench, sitting there like Buddha. It was a pulley system, excellent for raising engines or maybe gutting deer. On Skyline, hunters were like fireflies. Sometimes in the middle of winter, when the air was at its thinnest, you could hear gunshots that sounded like hard slaps on wet skin. Some men got to be damn good shots, as did their boys. Sometimes fathers and sons worked together to bring down game. Sometimes they'd feed the entire village.
          Only a football field separated the barn from the Green. I could hear "the doing" being set up, ants hard at work--Legion men pounding stakes, volunteer firemen scraping old meat off barbecue pits, Sunshine women putting down table cloths. Nobody ate off bare wood when the Sunshine women were around.
          I put my brush down and looked around. I think I might have been staring at the pulley when I heard the loud, muffled "boom" echo from above me. It sounded like a softball being smacked by a wooden bat on a dry summer's day.
          I got up and walked to the ladder, the ladder that led to the barn loft. I remember climbing with great trepidation, afraid to see what was up there. Once in the loft, I stood among the hay and looked around. Yesterday's heat had found a home. I stuck my head through the large, uncovered opening that led to outside, the opening where we tossed hay bales from into the beds of trucks on great days. I could see over to the Green, see all the ants, moving. I could hear all the "mornin's" and "hey there's."
          I turned to go back down the stairs and that's when I saw it, laying almost at my feet, a shuddering, speckled hump of feathers. It was a hawk, a broken hawk--a hawk who had probably misjudged the side of the barn, slammed into the frame of the opening and then had fallen into the loft.
          One of the wings was tucked beneath its body and the other wing was bent in the wrong direction. The hawk's eyes were open but glazed, and blood from a twisted foot smeared an exclamation point on the board beneath it. The bird didn't even try to move. It was broken too badly.
          I found a milk crate lying in the corner and brought it near, then I snatched some hay from a nearby bale and made a bed of hay on the bottom of the crate. Using a pitchfork I found against the wall, along with a rolled up girly magazine, I slid the hawk onto the rungs of the fork and lifted it slowly, then gently laid the bird on the hay. I thought that the bird might fight, but it had left all its fight on the side of the barn.
          Through the opening I felt the best breeze I'd ever known stroking my arm. Summer is never a harsh mistress. The sounds from the Green swirled around my head as I looked into the crate. I could hear Mitsy Reuben. Mitsy lived for her "doings." I could hear the old man. He was wearing his "kind" voice, the kind that fools. If you go to enough masquerade balls, it all becomes a masquerade, I think sometimes.
          I wanted to touch the hawk, but I was afraid. The hawk's breathing was labored, and its body shuddered like a small engine trying to catch a spark. I wished the barn wasn't getting so hot, but day waits for no one.
          Reluctantly, I left the hawk and returned downstairs to my work. Again, I took the paintbrush in hand and tried to get my head right, but the more I painted, the worse my thoughts were. I stopped and read the sticker on the outside of the pulley, all the great things it could do.
          "My God," I thought, "men will love this machine."
          Nothing quite lights up men like fresh equipment. I could see Stan running his hands along the side of the pulley and making his humming noise. The first engine raised will really test its fortitude.
          From the Green I heard Mrs. Simpson over the loudspeaker. Mrs. Simpson always smelled like funeral flowers. I applied a long line of blue to the shelving. This'll be where the old man puts his drill bits, I thought. The old man had the biggest drill bit collection around; he even had an article written about him in the paper once.
          I spread blue for nearly half an hour but then couldn't help but return to the loft. I found the hawk shrunken even further down into the crate, like dough after it has lost its air. The hawk's breathing had slowed too. I knelt beside the crate. The bird tried to raise its head a bit but then gave up and rested it back onto its broken body.
          "They think they're punishing me," I told the hawk, "…but nobody does anything to anyone that don't let it happen. That's the truth of it."
          I stopped and thought.
          "I'd give anything to fly away."
          I thought again.
          "Just like you."
          I smiled and put my hand on the crate as if touching the shoulder of a down-and-out friend.
          "It's awful hot in this barn," I said, "but I can't do nothing about it. It's hot for me too."
          I fanned the air above the hawk's head.
          "God, " I whispered, "you are a sight."
          I smiled and then thought of something nice I could do for the bird. I sprang to my feet, walked over to the wall and began tapping out a rhythm with my hands. A couple of hooks on the barn side clanged with me.
          "I came up with this in my room the other night," I whispered. "It's just a little thing, but it kind of makes you feel good, don't it? I think I'll call it, Bird of the Barn Yard Blues."
          I don't know why but suddenly I stopped tapping. A cloud had formed over me and, suddenly, I had become sad. I never found out why, but I just felt sad and I stopped tapping. I turned around and walked back to the ladder and then without even looking at the hawk, I left the loft.
          The morning was almost gone and I hadn't done much work. The hot breath of noon was everywhere. By the time I finished the first can of paint my wrist was pretty sore. I hadn't even finished one shelf. The fresh wood sucked up the paint as fast as I could put it on.
          On the Green the ball games were beginning. They loved their ball games. They loved teaching the kids the finer points of the game. My head was throbbing, and I felt woozy from the heat. I wondered what they would do to me next. What would be next in Stan's book? When would the beatings start? I sat against the wall and stared at the inside of the barn. I stared for a long, long time.
          In the afternoon, I brought a fresh carton of milk that I had stolen from the refrigerator near the old man's desk along with a plastic spoon the old man used to stir his eggnog and whiskey with, up to the loft. I poured a spoonful of milk and held it over the hawk, then let some nectar fall onto its beak. Eventually, a little milk found its way into the hawk's mouth. What happened next, I think, may have opened my eyes for good.
          The hawk slowly raised its head and spread its beak apart as wide as it possibly could. As it did, it looked directly into my eyes. I stood mesmerized. The predator had a gentle soul after all. They were wrong. They were all wrong, every one of them.
          Drop-by-drop, I let mercy fall into the hawk, into the jaws that had been made for ripping, that now trembled before me. On the Green I could hear Mr. Mahaney yelling for his boy to stretch a single into a double, and for the first time in my life I felt sad that it wasn't me running the bases for the old man. If only I had been more pigeon and less hawk.
          I sat down and looked at the opening, the opening where the hawk had broken itself. I leaned out the opening and looked up. The sky was a deep blue. I saw a formation of birds flying so high they appeared like sand specks on rippled water. I knew that I would never finish the shelves. Brands don't wear off anyway. You can cover the wood with paint, but eventually the grain comes through. I longed for people who could bring out the grain.
          I went back downstairs, happy about the hawk. I knew the ball game would be ending soon and so would the "doing." I knew all the kids would have done a good job playing the game and listening to the men who had played the game before them. I put my head down and spread paint, spread it frantically as if painting shelves was my life-long passion. Sometimes my brush against the wood sounded like the ocean. Soon, I was drenched in sweat, but I had finally finished a shelf.
          I jumped out and let out a howl, then went and grabbed a fresh carton of the old man's milk and returned to the loft. This time, though, when I looked in the crate, the hawk was broken no more. It lay as still as a first-time lover asleep. Some milk that had missed its mouth before lay in beads on the wing, but the feathered breast had been quieted. What had been the smell of afternoon was now the smell of death, like the way the barn smelled after they hung a deer. I remember crying like I'd never cried before, crying for the price of freedom that always seems to be exacted hardest on the soul of the renegade.
          I knew that soon they'd be coming for me. I carefully carried the crate down the ladder, and set it down so I could wash out my paintbrush. It seemed no matter how hard I tried, though, I could never get all the paint off.
          I carried the crate, with the dead bird in it, outside. The afternoon sun had lead feet. I carried the crate through the tall grass, then loped with it over uneven Earth. The hawk was heavy.
          When I reached an open field halfway between the barn and the first row of cow corn, I put the crate down and crushed some tall grass, with my foot, into a tiny square. I then reached into the crate, lifted the hawk and set it down on the green grass. The hawk felt like a bag of peanuts. It had been broken so badly. Later, I knew, it would be ripped apart. All of us, at one time or another, get ripped apart, I think. It's just those tiny moments of dignity between the ripping that make it all worthwhile.
          Before I left the bird, I took my pocketknife from my shorts and cut off one of the hawk's feet. I stuffed it deep into my pocket. I then took the empty crate and ran like the wind back to the barn. Once in the barn, I climbed the ladder to the loft two steps at a time, and I tossed the empty crate in the corner next to the rolled up girly magazine. My leg was warm from where the hawk's blood had gone through my jeans.
          I stuck my head out of the opening one more time. The Green was deserted and worse yet, I couldn't fly. I would have given anything to be on the "old number 3 trampoline" again trying to get high enough to see the old church in Wilemburg, but the ground beneath me did not have springs. I knew that for sure, just as sure as I knew about the gentleness laying deep in the soul of the predator. I'd probably known it all along.
          I turned and looked down at the front of the barn. There was no one there. The worst is not knowing where they are.
          I put my hand in my pocket and touched the hawk's foot; then I carefully went back down the ladder. At the bottom I turned. That's when I saw the old man's shadow, coming for me.