The Beginning Place by Ursula K. Le Guin

have somebody to depend on. She can depend on you. It means a lot to me, knowing that.” Hugh could not kiss the large, gold-haired hand; the only way men were allowed to touch each other was by hitting. He could not even touch the frayed cuff of the jeans jacket. He sat silent in the sudden blissful sunlight of praise. Next day when he got home from school their neighbor Joanna was there, thin-lipped, in the kitchen; Hugh’s mother was lying down, under sedation; his father had gone off in the Ford truck leaving a note saying he had a job in Canada and thought this was a good time to make the break.
    Hugh never saw the note, though Joanna had repeated a couple of phrases from it, such as “a good time to make the break,” and he knew his mother kept it among her papers and photographs in a file box.
    He had got lousy grades the rest of that term, because his mother had kept him out of school by any means she had, usually by having a crying jag at breakfast. “I’ll come back, I’m just going to school. I’ll be back at three-thirty,” he would promise. She would cry and beg him to stay with her. When he did stay he did not know what to do with himself but read old comic books; he was afraid to go out and afraid to answer the telephone in case it was the school attendance officer calling; his mother never seemed to be glad to have
him there. That summer they had moved for the first time, and she had got a job. Things were always better for a while at first in the new places.
    Once she had started working she could cope with daytime all right, and he finished school without any problem. It was the night, the darkness, that she still couldn’t handle, being alone in the dark. So long as she knew he was there she was all right. Who else did she have to depend on?
    And what else did he have but his dependability? Anything else he might have thought he was or was worth his father had pretty well devalued by leaving. People don’t leave necessary things, or valuable things. But though he understood well enough what Cheryl had felt like, like shit, that ought to be got rid of, he wasn’t going to do anything about it, as Cheryl had tried to do, because in one respect he was valuable, useful, even necessary: he could be there when his mother needed somebody to be there. He could take his father’s place. Sort of.
    When he had to go out for track in spring in tenth grade, he broke his ankle pole vaulting the first day. He was never any good at sports. He got big and tall, but heavy, with soft muscles, soft skin.
     
     
    “Hey, I’m going to get one of those cute red suits and start running up and down the street too,” Donna said. “Where’s
your spare tire gone to, Buck?” He looked down at his belly self-consciously but saw that maybe it did look better than it used to. No wonder, since every morning before work he got in a long fast walk plus something like ten or twelve hours of hiking and swimming and not eating very much. Getting enough food into the evening land was a problem which he solved mainly by going hungry there.
    His first explorations farther upstream had been tentative and short. He was afraid of getting lost. He bought a compass and then discovered he did not know how to use it. The needle flittered and veered at every step, and though it seemed most of the time to indicate that north was across the creek (if north was the blue end of the needle) he would need a bit more than that to get back to the gateway clearing if he got deep into the hills upstream. There were no stars or sun to take directions from. What did north mean, here? The trees grew close enough that walking could never be straight for very long, and he found no open viewpoint, no way to get an idea of the lay of the land. So he explored the paths and thickets, hollows, glades, side valleys, hillside springs, windings and turnings of the forest on both sides of the creek upstream from the willow place. He learned that piece of