The Names Carved Inside Dad’s Rifles
What my father built in that cabinet
My father, Roy Pruitt, was seventy nine years old when his heart finally gave out on him, and he had been collecting those rifles the way some men collect watches or stamps, except every single one of his had a reason behind it that was never about the gun itself.
He started the habit the year I was born. Bought a used bolt action rifle off a farm sale outside Harmon for eleven dollars, cleaned it up over a winter, and the week I came home from the hospital he sat at his workbench with a woodburning pen and carved my name and my birth year into the underside of the stock, hidden up under where the recoil pad meets the wood, a spot you would never find unless somebody showed you or you took that pad clean off. He did it again when my brother Wade was born two years later. Then again for every grandchild after that, one rifle at a time, bought secondhand and cleaned up and carved and set back in the cabinet to wait, until by the time he died there were eleven rifles standing in that cabinet, one for every grandchild he had, from my son Casey, thirty five now and living in Columbia, down to baby Nora who wasn’t walking yet and already had a little single shot .22 waiting for her with her name burned into the stock in Dad’s careful, slow hand.
He never put a word of it in his will. I asked him once why not, sitting on his porch three summers ago shelling peas, and he said a will was a cold thing, a paper a lawyer wrote, and he did not want his grandchildren’s inheritance to be a line item some stranger in an office typed up. He wanted them to find their own name carved into their own gun, in his own hand, the way he’d done every piece of woodwork in that house for sixty years. He said that was worth more than any paper, and maybe he was right, except a paper would have stopped what happened two days ago, and his own hand carved into hidden wood could not.
Elmer’s shotgun was different. Dad never carved a name into that one. He told me once, the same summer on the porch, that the Model 12 was going to Mallory, my daughter, because she was the only one of his eleven grandchildren who still walked out with him on opening morning every single year without being asked twice, rain, sleet, or the year she was seven months pregnant and still sat in that deer stand with him until ten in the morning. He said a daughter who showed up earned her grandfather’s gun same as any grandson, and he meant to tell her himself when the time was right. He never got the chance. His heart went out on a Tuesday in his recliner, fast and quiet, and none of us got to finish the conversations we thought we had years left to finish.