The beginning of guilt

I watched an episode of Wagon Train this morning about a mother with a past history as a saloon hussy.  They never called her a hussy on the show.  They never called her anything.  They just danced around the truth.  I think because she was a mother they were trying to be nice about it.

They never said, but the viewer was given the impression that she had to do 'whateve it took' as a "saloon hussy" to make enough money to feed her son and handicapped husband.  When she got tired of taking care of her husband, she stopped helping him live.  That's what she called it.

In trying to teach her son, Matthew, to be a strong man, she tried to teach him that love was bad.  That a "real man" would take but never give, would never cry, would never grieve.  When their horses were attacked by a wounded mountain lion, the boy shot at the lion but hit his beloved dog, Happy.  The mother tried to make Matthew shoot the dog to put it out of its misery, and when he wouldn't do it, she killed the dog herself.  This stirred up a turmoil in the boy's mind as well as his heart.

There was a philosopher on the train who was intrigued by the mother and son.  He felt the pain that they both harbored without knowing the cause of it.  In one scene he discussed the wounding and killing of the dog with the boy.  Whose fault was it that the dog died?  The mother killed the dog, but the boy wounded it, he wouldn't have wounded it if the dog hadn't tried to protect the horses from the mountain lion, the lion wouldn't have attacked the horses if someone or something hadn't wounded it first. 

Only God knows where the guilt begins.