The Names Carved Inside Dad’s Rifles

What I found when we got back to the house

The fellowship hall crowd thinned out by two in the afternoon, and Dale and I drove back to Dad’s place to start sorting what needed sorting before the house sat empty. That is when I found the cabinet open and bare, and that is when Patsy told me, drying her hands on that dish towel like it was nothing, that Wade had sold it. All of it. That morning. To Hank Dutton, who has run the sporting goods counter in Harmon for better than thirty years and bought and sold used guns there even longer than that.

I found Wade out back by the burn barrel, smoking a cigarette he’d quit four years ago and clearly picked back up sometime in the last forty eight hours.

“Where are Dad’s guns,” I said. I kept my voice level. I want you to understand that about me, because I know how this kind of story is supposed to go, the sister screaming across the yard at the brother, and that is not what happened, and I am not going to pretend it was to make this a better story.

“Sold them to Hank,” Wade said. He didn’t even turn around all the way. “This morning, before the service. Got three thousand for the whole lot, cabinet included if he wants to come get it later.”

“Three thousand dollars. For eleven rifles and Grandpa’s Model 12.”

“It’s done, Janet. Don’t start.”

“You could have asked me. You could have asked anybody. We buried him four hours ago, Wade.”

He finally turned around, and I will say this for my brother, he did not look like a man who felt good about what he’d done. He looked like a man who had talked himself into something in the dark hours before dawn and was already a little sick from it, the way you feel after you’ve said something true and cruel and cannot unsay it. “I needed the cash,” he said. “Baler went down in August and I never got it fixed, and the bank’s been calling about the truck note, and I figured better I handle it clean than let eleven guns sit in an empty house for lawyers to fight over for a year. Daughters don’t hunt anyway. What was Mallory going to do with Grandpa’s shotgun, hang it over a fireplace?”

“She hunts with him every November, Wade. She has for fifteen years.”

He didn’t have an answer for that. He just dropped the cigarette in the dirt and ground it out with his boot heel, and I understood then that he truly had not known, that he had not looked past the sheen of old walnut and bluing to see what any of those guns actually were. He saw a lot. Hank Dutton saw a lot too, I was about to find out, until somebody showed him different.