The Rifle Grandpa Left For My Boy

Ervin had rules, and Mason loves rules more than almost anything. Safety on until you mean it. Never shoot at a deer that is running. Wait for broadside, so you can see the crease behind the front leg. Breathe out halfway and squeeze. After the shot, sit and count thirty minutes, because a deer you push will run a mile and a deer you leave alone will lie down.

And sit till noon. That was the big one. Ervin said the young ones always quit at nine and went for pancakes, and the old bucks knew it, and walked at ten.

“Where are we going?” Mason asked. We had passed the turn to our house.

“Grandpa Duane’s.”

He nodded. My dad’s farm is the second safest place in the world for Mason, after the stand.

My father is Duane Ott. He is sixty seven and he still milks sixty cows twice a day with one hired man, and he will tell you the hired man is the one who does the real work, which is not true. He has a bad hip he says he will fix after first cutting, every spring.

He was coming out of the milk house when we pulled in, wiping his hands on a rag. He looked at my face and then at Mason’s face and he did not ask a single question in the yard. He just said, “Coffee’s on,” and held the porch door.

That is my dad. He saves his questions for kitchens.

We sat at his table, the oilcloth table I did my homework on, and I told him all of it in a low voice while Mason lined up the salt and pepper shakers and the sugar bowl in a row by height. When I got to the part about a kid who can handle it, his jaw went tight, and he set the mug down very carefully.

“He said that in front of the boy?”

“Window was open.”

Dad was quiet for a long time. Then he did not say one word about Jared. Not one. He got up, and his hip made him wince, and he walked into the front room where the gun cabinet is.

He came back with a rifle I had not seen out of that cabinet in years.

It was a bolt action with a plain stock, darker than Ervin’s, worn pale on the forearm where his hand had held it for half a century. Dad bought it in 1974, when he was sixteen, with money from baling hay all summer. He shot his last buck with it six years ago and hung it up, because he said the deer had earned a rest from him.

It was a .243 too. That was luck, or it was something else, and I am not going to argue with either one.

He set it on the oilcloth in front of Mason, bolt open, empty. Mason looked at it and then looked away fast, at the sugar bowl.

“It’s not Grandpa’s,” Mason said.

“No,” Dad said. “But the stand is.”

“Grandpa said you sit with your rifle. That’s the rule.”

Dad lowered himself back into his chair. He took a long time doing it. Then he folded his hands on the table and looked at Mason the way Ervin used to look at him, patient, like there was all the time in the world.