Lem didn't hear her, he was stroking the stock of the shotgun absently. "I could do it easy," he muttered. "I could shoot me a Martin easy. I sure could Maw. I'd show Hank and Zeke, I would."
"You forget about the Martins, son," Maw Coy said softly. "Yore my simple son—there's at least one in every family, mostly more—and it ain't fittin' that you get into fights. You got a strong back, strongest in the hills, but yore too simple, Lem."
"I ain't as simple as Jim Martin, Maw," Lem protested.
"Son, they don't come no more simple than you," his mother told him gently. "And mind that gun. You know how you bent the barrel of Zeke's Winchester back double that time, absent-minded like."
He stroked the gun stock, patted it, half in anger, half in protest. His lower lip hung down in a pout. "You stop talkin' thataway, Maw," he growled, "or I'll larrup you one."
Maw Coy didn't answer. She reckoned she'd better set off into the woods and see if she could locate the rest of the men folks, so they could eat.
Lem said under his breath, "I could shoot me a Martin real easy, I could."
To the Most High, the Glorious, the Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and Omniscient, the Lord of the Seven, the Leader of the Chosen, Neo Geek XXXVIII:
In regard to: Testing of special weapons designed to eliminate present population of the third planet with the eventual view of colonizing.