To begin, I’m not a sadist or a child abuser. I love my kids and I hate to see them cry. It makes my heart ache and my head buzz when their tears start and the wailing picks up,  and I’d do anything to stop them from crying. Usually.

But this time was different.

My oldest child is a deeply empathetic ten-year-old who loves to read.

I was also a reader as a child and still am. I spent the summer months perched in a tree in my back yard with a book rather than playing kickball in the street, just as he now often sneaks away from crowds to hide in his room and read his latest novel.

Our taste in books may be different but the love of books is the same and every now and then I can slip him a story from my youth – A Wrinkle in Time, The Hobbit  -- that will capture his attention for a few days and give us something new to share.

This was one of those times.

For Christmas I bought him a copy of Where the Red Ferns Grow by Wilson Rawls. For anyone who has not yet read this book, get it immediately. It is a captivating story about a boy in the 1920s who saves all his money to buy two coonhounds and how together they battle bullies, and mountain lions, and a ‘ghost coon,’ and become the best of friends.

I read it thirty years ago and I still get trembly when I think about the impact it had on my young life.

My son was not initially impressed with the cover blurb, and rather than start it immediately, as I had hoped, he stuffed it into his pile of books to read at a future date if he ran out of better choices.

There it sat for months.

I managed not to push him to read it for fear my pressure would backfire. Instead I let it go, wondering if he would ever  discover the adventures of Billy, Old Dan and Little Anne, or if it would go the way of The Great Brain, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and other random books gathering dust in that pile.

Then on a recent evening, he finished his latest Time Thief edition and had nothing to get him through until our next trip to the book store. I casually slipped Where the Red Fern Grows out of the pile and said, “what about this?”

He reexamined the cover, glanced back at the dusty pile and said, “sure, okay.” And climbed into his top bunk oblivious to the fact that he was about to embark on one of the greatest stories any ten-year-old could every read.

He  stayed up late that night, and carried the book with him to school every day that week, reading in the car and grabbing spare moments in class to find out what happened next. Every afternoon he’d come home to discuss the story with me, asking if I remembered Billy sleeping in the cave with his pups, or Little Anne winning the coonhound beauty contest, or how they all got caught up in the bet to kill the ‘ghost coon.’

(Spoiler alert: If you don’t want to know how it ends stop now.)

I loved having these talks with him, both because of his own enthusiasm and for the way it jostled my memory of a book that had such an impact on me when I was his age.

But I also knew he was nearing the end, and I almost regretted buying it for him.

This book is a classic story of a boy and his dogs. It devotes chapters to making its readers love those dogs, and cheer for what they and Billy are able to accomplish in the face of poverty and diversity, and people with better dogs and more expensive lives.

It’s written in a way that makes readers feel like those dogs belong to us, and the love they feel for each other and their boy is palpable.

But in the end, of course, that love becomes deadly. When Billy is attacked by a mountain lion, the dogs try to save him and end up getting badly injured. Old Dan dies, and Little Anne is so heartbroken that she lays down in the spot where he is buried and dies herself of a broken heart.

Never in my ten years had I been so devastated and so moved by a story. In the last scene, Billy returns one last time to say goodbye to his dogs before his family moves away, and there, growing in the spot where the dogs are buried is a red fern. According to Indian legend, red ferns can only be planted by an angel.

I still get chills thinking about it.

My son finished the book one evening, several days after he started it. When I called him to dinner he emerged from the back room, face red and puffy, eyes welling with tears, clutching the book to his stomach.

“You finished it didn’t you?”

He smiled and nodded and burst into tears, falling into my arms in grief. I comforted his sobbing head, and shhhed him, and we talked about the story over dinner like we were talking about our own friends.

I know that everyone who reads Where the Red Ferns Grow has to be moved by it (unless they have hearts made of stone), but it was with pride and my own grief that I witnessed his profound and visceral reaction to a story that had the identical effect on me thirty years before. He loved those dogs as much as Billy did, as much as I did, and their death, even on the page, broke his heart.

I am constantly reminded in joy and in pain that he and I are both cut from the same cloth. It’s a tearful, emotional cloth that may never take life’s blows easily, but it allows us to experience everything with our  hearts.

And that’s why his tears made me proud.