“No,” I said. “I told Dewey Dell not to. Not ma, anyway.”
“No. Not ma.”
After that I thought it was right comical: he acting so bewildered and willing and dead for sleep and gaunt as a bean-pole, and thinking he was so smart with it. And I wondered who the girl was. I thought of all I knew that it might be, but I couldn’t say for sure.
“ ’Taint any girl,” Cash said. “It’s a married woman somewhere. Ain’t any young girl got that much daring and staying power. That’s what I don’t like about it.”
“Why?” I said. “She’ll be safer for him than a girl would. More judgment.”
He looked at me, his eyes fumbling, the words fumbling at what he was trying to say. “It ain’t always the safe things in this world that a fellow …”
“You mean, the safe things are not always the best things?”
“Ay; best,” he said, fumbling again. “It ain’t the best things, the things that are good for him. … A young boy. A fellow kind of hates to see … wallowing in somebody else’s mire …” That’s what he was trying to say. When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there’s nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again.
So we didn’t tell, not even when after a while he’d appear suddenly in the field beside us and go to work, without having had time to get home and make out he had been in bed all night. He would tell ma that he hadn’t been hungry at breakfast or that he had eaten a piece of bread while he was hitching up the team. But Cash and I knew that he hadn’t been