The most annoying game to ever play with a bunch of young’uns who didn’t put much effort into spelling was Hangman. It was torture with two five-year-olds and one mentally delayed twenty-year-old, but we soldiered through when it rained because there wasn’t much else to do since Pa refused to put a TV in the house. We’d all but begged, but he said that was inviting Satan into the home. Well, I was fairly certain that sucker was already roaming the hallways, so there really was no reason to deprive us of a TV.

I certainly could have used the distraction of a TV show during that bleak spring and the humdrum life on the farm. There were always needs for me to meet and always the exhausting task of keeping up with Pa. He’d begun drifting off the farm for a day or two before drifting home like an indecisive ghost, never sure where he wanted to haunt. The fear of him drifting away permanently robbed me of rest at night, and so like most nights I had wandered up to the loft of the packhouse to ponder and worry about matters that were out of my hands.

As I studied the yellowing maps on the far wall of the loft, the incident at lunch last week came to mind. I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples, wishing to block it out but it was no good.

Pa had been all over the kitchen, plundering through the doorless cabinets. “Where the heck are the knives?”

I knew where the knives were and took them down when I needed them. Pa never ventured into the kitchen for much of anything, so it had been easy to keep them out of sight. Until now, I suppose.

“I . . . uh . . .” Before I could finish stumbling over an answer, his big paw met the side of the roasting pan on top of the fridge, the contents jangling from his force. “I put them inside the pan to keep them out of reach of the younger twins.”

Nash and Knox sat at the table munching on a tin pan of Jiffy Pop I had just finished making for them. The space held the aroma of butter and a slight burnt smell from me almost taking too long to remove it from the burner, but it didn’t stop their hands from dipping inside the foil dome for more.

Pa craned his neck around and actually looked at the boys —something he rarely did —while moving the coffee cups out of the way of the roasting pan. “You boys got enough sense not to mess with knives, right?”

“Yes, sir,” they both muttered, eyeing Pa with a measured amount of fear.