The Ben is a fiery man, smelling perpetually of tobacco and moonshine, always drunk, eyes rimmed with red. He is as irresponsible and free of conscience as a child; whereas his son, The Young Ben, is so solemn in appearance the teacher has trouble determining if he’s a child or not – though it doesn’t help that the Young Ben spends two years passing each grade. As his father recounts, the Young Ben jumped straight into chores the day he was born, separating the cream and chopping firewood for his mother. Until he was forced to attend school the Young Ben had never been to town but ran wild on the prairie, startling at the approach of anyone but his parents. School didn’t seem to have much on The Young Ben’s sociability, learning, or discipline – he was so indifferent to the teacher’s whippings that the teacher began feeling guilty for the constant pointless punishment. The teacher took to smoking in the janitor’s retreat to learn some of the legends surrounding the boy’s father.

The Ben worked only sparingly to fund his drinking habits. He dug graves on occasion but was so superstitious that when a group of practical jokers dressed as ghosts and ambushed him, he never dug another one. He took to stealing eggs from his wife to sell but was forced to take a job as church janitor when this income supply was shut off too. This is where his trouble began – the Ben decided to move his still from the brush behind house to the church coal room, where nobody visited and where the manure from a nearby barn absorbed its fumes. The still detonated during service, and Ben frantically hid its remains inside the coal pile and beat it as the yeasty fumes of brew coiled into the church above.

In one of the five years it took for Ben to be sufficiently associated with his moonshining crime, the teacher visited their residence to inquire about the Young Ben’s spotty attendance record. Predictably neither parent was interested, but the teacher came away disturbed by the owl that the Ben had caged in the yard. The sheriff paid a visit not long after, and in front of his eyes one of their horses kicked up a rotten board and brought forth the smell of the still under the manure. It was during the Ben’s ninety-day jail term that the Young Ben was released from school by the hopeless teacher and instructed by his father on a visit to the cell to ‘Let that there goddam owl go.’