The Yards My Boy Raked for Nothing

The Rifle in the Blanket

It was Alma Pruett who finished the story, and I did not see it coming.

The first Saturday of November, the youth gun weekend coming the next week, she called the house. Would I send Cole down, she had something for him, and would I come too.

I thought she had baked something. I brought a loaf of my banana bread to trade.

She had us sit in her front room, the kind old women keep for company. Plastic still on the lampshade, Harold’s recliner left exactly where it had been.

On the coffee table was a long thing wrapped in a wool blanket. She had Cole sit right in front of it.

“Cole,” she said, “do you know what my Harold loved more than anything but me.”

“No, ma’am,” Cole said.

“These woods out back, in November.” She unfolded the blanket.

It was a rifle. A lever-action, old, the bluing worn silver on the edges from fifty years of a man’s hands, the stock oiled and glowing.

“This is Harold’s deer rifle. A Marlin, forty-four. He hunted with it from the year we married. It’s a straight-wall, so it’s legal here for deer. I called the game fella and asked him special, so I’d have it right.”

I had to put my hand on the arm of the chair.

“I’ve got no son,” Alma said. “No grandson. Harold’s been gone two years and this rifle’s been standing in the closet grieving, same as me.”

“A rifle’s not meant to stand in a closet. It’s meant to be carried in the woods by somebody who’ll do it right.”

She looked at Cole, and her little voice did not shake. “You rake like a man who does things right. I watched you all month do my leaves for nothing and take nothing.”

“I want you to have Harold’s rifle. Cleaned and oiled. It’s yours to keep.”

Cole did not reach for it. He looked at me, asking. I could not speak, so I nodded.

He put his two hands on it the way he had held that empty coffee can. Both hands, careful, like it might weigh nothing and be gone.

But this one had weight. This one had the weight of a man’s whole life of Novembers in it.

“I’ll take care of it, Mrs. Pruett,” he said. His voice climbed and caught. “I’ll do it right.”

“I know you will,” Alma said. “That’s the only reason it’s leaving my closet.”

I thought of what she had said at the mailboxes a month back. There’s more than one way to get a thing back.

I understood that this little bird of a woman had known the whole time. She had been holding this in her closet the whole month, watching to be sure.

I put my face in my hands in her plastic-covered chair and cried in front of everybody, which I had sworn I would not do.