Power in the Blood by Greg Matthews

Drowned. You’d have to be a fool, ending up that way. Learning,” he said, and shook his head. Several minutes later he added, “They ought to learned him to swim, I reckon!”
    For Clay, the work was balm, the lunch torture. Chaffey was a stupid person, in Clay’s estimation, and a lazy one to boot, allowing Clay to do more than his share of the work.
    “My brother, now, he never went to school, same as me. He does just fine. Works over Jeff City way.”
    “What does he do?”
    “Turns his hand to this and that. Could do ’bout anything, purty much. Never went to school, not one day. Proves my point.”
    Clay always stood up to resume work before Chaffey, who liked to linger while his stomach digested the food prepared for them both by Mrs. Delaney. The boy just wouldn’t sit still for a minute like a normal person would have, just had to be up and raring for more sweat. Chaffey made it a habit to delay a minute or two longer each day, following their lunch, to let Clay know he had no intention of imitating his example. It infuriated him even more that the boy seemed not to mind in the least. Chaffey almost bit his pipestem in two, watching Clay set about hitching the mules to yet another obdurate stump. Clay’s enthusiasm for work was an aberration, against human nature. Somebody ought to teach him to slow down and not be showing off that way.
    “Clayton, Mr. Delaney has such plans for you.”
    “He told me, kind of.”
    These plans were of the vaguest, hinting at the possibility of political office in the state for a young man who wanted such a thing. Clay wanted no such stature in the community, but hadn’t said so outright.
    “Then you are aware of the high regard Mr. Delaney holds you in.”
    Clay nodded awkwardly. He could never bring himself to call Edwin’s wife anything but ma’am, just as Delaney himself was always sir. They accepted this; each addressed the other, in company or in private, as Mr. and Mrs. Delaney even after nineteen years of marriage. They were his legal parents, and Clay liked them well enough, but they were not of his blood, nor could they ever be.
    “Would it not be better to do as he wishes and return to school? Nothing is accomplished in this world without knowledge.”
    “I know.”
    They were good people both, and it hurt him to go against their wishes. Only his respect for the Delaneys had kept Clay on the farm for so long, but the duration of his stay was the worst kind of thorn, pricking him every day. He had promised Zoe and Drew to return for them, and so far hadn’t taken a single step eastward to fulfill that promise. He was ashamed, didn’t understand why it was that he shied away from leaving the Delaneys. Was it nothing more than a need to remain as far west as he’d already come? Was that reason enough for betrayal?
    He could, if he wanted, go east only for as long as it took to locate and sweep up his brother and sister, then all could go even further west together, to places Clay truly yearned for. The one lesson he had studied assiduously in school was the location of Missouri in relation to the continent; it wasn’t even halfway across.
    The life he led was tolerable enough to hold him in stasis, divided by westward hankering and eastward obligation. Clay inhabited the narrow margin between indulgence and responsibility, and found it an uncomfortable place. The dichotomy was persistent, insoluble, forgotten only when Clay worked his gangling body to exhaustion. He wished the stand of trees slowly succumbing to his efforts were an endless forest, a magical wood wherein he could lose himself forever, beholden to no one. The illusion might have been possible, on a daily basis, if not for the grating presence of Chaffey, with his inane conversations and casual approach to the work Clay wished could be more Herculean a task.
    “Then why, Clayton, do you resist?”
    Mrs. Delaney’s round, sweet face could be irritating in its warmth, its quality of eternal