Pick your own time

“Pick your own time” is Willard Russell’s rule for fighting back: resistance should be deliberate, not impulsive. The advice begins as a father’s response to Arvin Russell’s vulnerability, becomes visible in Willard’s own intervention against two hunters, and later shapes the way Arvin chooses his confrontations and defends Lenora Laferty.

The Lesson and Its First Context

Willard gives the lesson after Arvin comes home from school with another black eye. He does not endorse fighting simply for its own sake, but tells his son that if a larger boy starts trouble, Arvin should finish it. The instruction emerges from a specific imbalance: Arvin is being bullied, and Willard wants him to stop being too easygoing when someone targets him. His own work at a slaughterhouse, where sixteen hundred hogs were butchered that day, provides a stark background to this talk about force, though Arvin already knows he does not want to follow his father into that work.

The phrase’s emphasis is not simply on fighting, but on choosing the moment. When Willard later explains, “You just got to pick the right time,” he turns the earlier instruction into a rule of judgment: wait until action can be effective rather than answering every provocation at once.

Willard Demonstrates the Rule

That principle becomes tangible during the family’s morning prayer in the woods. Two hunters interrupt the clearing; later, with the truck still moving, Willard jumps out after one of them. The other escapes in a car with a gun, while Willard overpowers the man who remains. He then unloads the hunters’ shotgun and smashes it against a tree, preventing it from being used again. The sequence shows the lesson as more than a command to retaliate: Willard acts when the hunters’ intrusion becomes an immediate threat, and his response includes disarming them as well as confronting them.

Back in the pickup, Willard wipes his hands and connects what Arvin has witnessed to the advice about the school bullies. The explanation gives the childhood lesson its practical example: choosing the right time means recognizing when to act, then following through. For Arvin, the connection is reinforced by seeing his father put the rule into practice rather than merely repeating it.

Arvin’s Later Use of the Expression

By the time Arvin is fourteen, he has been expelled from school several times for fighting. He remembers the lesson as “Pick your own time” and applies it tactically, catching an opponent alone and unaware in places such as a restroom, stairwell, or the gym bleachers. His method reflects the rule’s transformation from general encouragement into a strategy for choosing the conditions of a fight.

Arvin is nevertheless described as easygoing for the most part. Many of the fights that get him into trouble begin when he is defending Lenora from students who mock her pious manner and appearance. The expression therefore carries a protective dimension in his life: it is not only a way to answer those who have harmed him, but also a lesson he uses on behalf of someone close to him. Passed from father to son through instruction and example, “Pick your own time” joins restraint to violence, making timing the distinction between an impulsive quarrel and a considered act of defense.