The Rifle Grandpa Left For My Boy

Mason took it. He held it the way he had held the candy wrapper, close to his face, looking at the scuffs on the walnut. Then he ran his thumb over the safety lever, the one on the right side, where it belonged.

“I had a doe and a spike walk right under me at eight,” Bud said, to me now, quieter. “I didn’t even pick it up. My mom told me last night whose gun it was and what his grandpa said. I couldn’t.” He swallowed. “I told Jared at nine I was done. We were just sitting in the truck when your dad’s picture came.”

I looked at Jared. He was standing a little apart from the rest of us, beside the dead buck, in front of my father and my son and his own stepson, and for once in his life he did not have a speech ready.

“I was wrong, Beth,” he said. His voice was rough. “I was wrong in the driveway, and I was wrong a long time before the driveway.”

I did not say it was all right. It was not all right, not yet. But I did not say anything unkind either. My son was standing right there holding his grandfather’s rifle, and that was more important than anything I could have said to his father.

“Tell Mason,” I said. “Not me.”

Jared looked at his son for a long moment. Then he walked over to the old oak stump that sits below the stand, the one Ervin used to sit on to lace his boots, and he lowered himself onto it like a man much older than forty one.

“Mason,” he said. “Would you tell me about it? The whole thing. From the start.”

Mason looked at him the way he looks at a new road. Then he climbed back up the ladder with Ervin’s rifle, and sat on the bench in Ervin’s spot, and laid the rifle across his knees.

And he told him.

He told him all of it, from fourteen feet up. The long underwear. The fourteen minutes of walking. The red squirrel. The butterscotch wrapper, which he unbuttoned from his pocket and held up for his father to see. Quartering, then broadside. The crease behind the leg. Breathe out halfway. The split maple. Thirty minutes, counted.

It took him twenty five minutes and Jared did not interrupt him once. Around the part about the wrapper, Jared put his face in his gloves for a while. Bud stood beside him with a hand on his shoulder. My dad turned and looked at the cornfield.

At twelve thirty, Mason said, “It’s past noon,” and climbed down for good.

The rifle came home with us that afternoon. Nobody argued. Jared carried the case to my truck himself and set it on the seat beside Mason, and then he stood at the window and asked, very carefully, if maybe next year he could come out to the corner too. Not to hunt. Just to sit.

Mason said he would think about it. Mason always thinks about it.

He thought about it all year. Opener is two weeks off now, and Jared has already called twice to ask whether the stump is still his. Mason told him yes, as long as he sits still until noon.

Mason keeps his grandpa’s rifle in my gun cabinet now, and Jared asks every November if he can sit with him.