The Preacher's Kid

Without a word, we all veered to the left to get as far from the fenced beasts as possible. When we walked under the big oak tree that stood next to the fence of the second house on the north side, we heard a blood-curdling scream that brought to mind the war cry of the Apache Indians in the Louis L’Amour novels my dad loved to read. The scream erupted from directly above us, somewhere in the branches of the big oak tree. We all froze in our tracks and craned our necks to looked up. Out of my peripheral vision I caught a blur. Something was hurled directly at Gib...