Kenneth loved his parents and his sister and because he could not tell them why he went to the woods. He was thirteen and he could not say that he was going to sit on a hill and wait for the silence and trees and sky to close in on him, he could only say that he was going for a walk. He could not say that on the hill he became great, or that he had ridden into town, his clothes dusty, his black hat pulled low over his sunburned face, and an hour later had ridden away with four fresh notches on the butt of his six-gun, or that with the count three-and-two and the bases loaded, he had driven the ball so far and high that the outfielders did not even move, or that he had waded through surf and sprinted over sand, firing his gun and shouting to his soldiers behind him. Now he was capturing a farmhouse. In the late movie the night before, the farmhouse had been very important, though no one ever said why, and sitting there in the summer dusk, he watched the backs of his soldiers as they advanced through the woods below him and crossed the clear, …show more content…
For a moment, he did not breathe. Then, slowly, stopping at each sound of the bedsprings, he rolled out of bed and crouched on the floor beneath the window. He did not move. He listened to his breathing, for there was no other sound, not even crickets, and he began to tremble, thinking the prowler might be standing above him, looking through his window at the empty bed. He held his breath. Then he heard the footsteps again, in front of the house, closer now. He crawled away from the window, thinking of a large bearded man standing in the pine trees thirty yards from his room, studying the house and deciding which window to use, then he stood up and walked on tiptoes to the chest of drawers and moved his hand over the top of it until he touched the handful of bullets, and he picked up the rifle. He picked it up and eased forward