The Rifle Grandpa Left For My Boy

“I heard him, honey,” I said. “I heard him too.”

“Grandpa said till noon.”

“I know he did.”

“I can’t sit till noon without the rifle. That’s the rule. You sit with your rifle.”

“I know. Let me think.”

I should tell you about Jared, because I do not want you to think I married a monster. I did not. I married a farm kid from the next road over who could back a hay wagon into a barn with two inches to spare and who cried at our wedding harder than I did.

We were married fourteen years. Mason came in year two. He did not talk until he was four, and when he started, it was all at once, whole paragraphs about tractors and weather and the order of the hymns at church.

Jared loved him. I believe that. But Jared did not know what to do with him, and every year it got worse. Mason would come apart at the fair because the loudspeaker was too loud. He would come apart in the cereal aisle because the boxes had been moved. People stared, and Jared felt every single one of those stares on the back of his neck.

He would take Mason out to the truck and sit there with him, red in the face, not saying anything. Then later at home he would say, “Why can’t he just,” and never finish the sentence.

We split four years ago. Nobody cheated. Nobody threw anything. He was tired, and I was tired of watching him be tired of our son. He married again last fall, a nice enough woman from Stratford with a nice enough boy who plays football and hunts and does not come apart in the cereal aisle.

I think that is the truth of what happened in that driveway. For one weekend Jared wanted a boy who hunts the way he did. A boy he would not have to apologize for.

That is a reason. It was never a right.

The person who knew what to do with Mason was Ervin.

Ervin Kraus was a big, slow, quiet man who ran a small beef herd and drove the same pickup for twenty two years. He never once told Mason to calm down. He just waited. When Mason came apart, Ervin would sit down on whatever was close, a bucket, a hay bale, the porch step, and wait until it passed, the way you wait out a thunderstorm.

When it was over he would say, “Well. That was a big one.” And then he would go right back to whatever they had been doing, like nothing had happened, because to Ervin nothing had.

He started taking Mason out to the stand when Mason was eight. No rifle. Just sitting. Ervin said hunting was ninety nine parts sitting still and one part everything else, and that most grown men never learned the ninety nine.

Mason learned it. Sitting still is the one thing in the world that does not hurt him. Nobody talks. Nothing moves except what is supposed to. The light comes up in the same order every time.

The stand is a wooden ladder stand Ervin built in 1987 on the line between his farm and my dad’s, at the corner where the hardwoods meet the cornfield. It has a wide bench seat because he built it for two, back when he used to take Jared.