The Names Carved Inside Dad’s Rifles
Dale
My husband has worked heavy equipment on county road crews for thirty one years, and there are not many things that get past him when it comes to what a piece of machinery or a used gun is actually worth. He did the math out loud before we’d even cleared Dad’s driveway.
“Three thousand for twelve guns,” he said. “That’s two fifty a piece average, and half of those rifles alone are worth four, five hundred cleaned up. That’s not a fair price, Janet. That’s not even a lowball price. That’s a man who wanted cash in his pocket before lunch and didn’t care what he left on the table.”
“Wade’s been struggling since the baler broke.”
“Struggling’s one thing. This is something else.” Dale kept both hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road, and I could see his jaw working the way it does when he is holding something back out of respect for a day that had already asked enough of everybody. “I’m not going to stand in that store and start a fight over your daddy’s guns on the day we buried him. But I’m not going to sit in this truck either. You go in there and say what you need to say, and I’ll be standing right beside you the whole time.”
That is the only kind of man my husband has ever been. Not loud. Not a fighter looking for a fight. But he has never once in thirty seven years of marriage let me walk into a hard room by myself.
Hank Dutton’s store
Hank’s shop sits on the square in Harmon, same brick building it’s been in since his father ran it, shelves of ammunition and hunting boots and orange vests lined up under a ceiling fan that’s been turning slow since before I was born. Hank is sixty eight now, a heavyset man with a gray mustache and reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, and he has known our family since he and my father hunted the same creek bottoms as young men, long before either of them had gray in their hair.
He came around the counter when he saw me, and the first thing he said, before I’d gotten a word out, was, “Janet. I am so sorry about your daddy. I hunted with that man forty years.” He meant it. I could hear that he meant it, and that made what I had to say next harder, not easier.
“Hank, I need to see the rifles Wade sold you this morning.”
His face changed, just slightly, the careful look of a man who senses a family matter walking through his door and would rather not be standing in the middle of it. “Janet, I paid your brother fair money for that lot. I haven’t even logged half of it into my book yet, they’re still back in the totes he brought them in.”
“I’m not here to fight you on the price, Hank. I’m asking you to look at something before you log a single one of them. Take off the recoil pad on any rifle in that lot and look underneath it.”
He studied me a long moment, the kind of look a man gives you when he is deciding whether you are asking something reasonable or whether grief has gotten the better of you on a hard day. Then he set his reading glasses down on his nose and walked to the back room, and Dale and I followed him past the rack of orange vests into the storage area where twelve guns still sat in two plastic totes exactly the way Wade had loaded them that morning.