The Tiger Rising by Kate DiCamillo

the tiger again.
    “Where’d this meat come from?” his father asked, pointing at the bloody brown bag.
    Without thinking, Rob said, “Beauchamp.”
    “Beauchamp,” his father repeated, low and dark. “Beauchamp. He don’t hardly pay me enough to get by, and now he’s giving us his rotten meat. He thinks I ain’t man enough to put meat on my own table.”
    Rob wanted to say something, but then he thought of Beauchamp and held his tongue.
    “I ought to teach him a lesson,” his father said. The cords in his neck stood out like twigs. He kicked the bag of meat. “I ought to,” he said. “Making me work for less than nothing, giving us rotten meat.”
    He went and stood in front of the gun case. He didn’t unlock it. He just stood and stared and cracked his knuckles.
    “Daddy,” said Rob. But he couldn’t think of anything to say after that. His mother had known how to calm his father. She would put her hand on his arm or say his name in a soft and reproachful voice, and that would be enough. But Rob didn’t know how to do those things. He stood for a minute more, and then he walked over to his bed and grabbed a piece of wood and his knife. As he left the room, his father was still standing at the locked gun case, staring through the glass at the deer-hunting rifle, as if he was trying to will the gun into his hands.
    Rob walked to the Kentucky Star sign. He sat down underneath it and leaned up against one of the cold, damp poles and started to work on the wood.
    But his head was too full of his father’s anger and Sistine’s tears. He couldn’t concentrate. He looked up at the dark underside of the sign and recalled lying on a blanket, staring up at a big oak tree. His mother had been on one side of him, and his father, asleep and snoring, had been on the other. He remembered that his mother had taken hold of his hand and pointed up at the sun shining through the leaves of the tree and said, “Look, Rob, I have never in my life seen a prettier color of green. Ain’t it perfect?”
    “Yes, ma’am,” he said, staring at the leaves. “It looks like the original green. The first one God ever thought up.”
    His mother squeezed his hand hard. “That’s right,” she said. “The first one God ever thought up. The first-ever green. You and me, we see the world the same.”
    He concentrated on that green. He let it seep through a crack in his suitcase of not-thoughts and fill up his head with color. He wondered if Willie May’s Cricket had been the same bright and original green. That’s what he thought about as he carved. And so he wasn’t surprised, when he stopped and held the wood away from himself, to see a wing and a beak and a tiny eye. It was Cricket, Willie May’s Cricket, coming to life under his knife.
    He worked on the bird for a long time, until it looked so real that he half expected it to break into song. When he finally went back to the room, he found his father asleep in the recliner. The gun case was still locked, and the bag of meat was gone. He wouldn’t be able to feed the tiger in the morning. He would have to wait until Beauchamp brought him another package.
    Rob went and stood over his father and stared down at him. He looked at his heavy hands and the bald spot on his nodding head. He was memorizing him and trying, at the same time, to understand him, to make some sense out of him, out of his anger and his quiet, comparing it to the way he used to sing and smile, when his father jerked awake.
    “Hey,” he said.
    “Hey,” Rob said back.
    “What time is it?”
    “I ain’t sure,” said Rob. “Late, I guess.”
    His father sighed. “Go on and get me that leg medicine.”
    Rob brought him the tube of medicine.
    Outside the motel room, the world creaked and sighed. The rain started in again, and his father’s hands were gentle as he applied the ointment to Rob’s legs.

The next morning, Rob put the keys to the tiger cage in one pocket and the wooden bird in the other,