The Rifle Grandpa Left For My Boy

“Ervin said you sit his stand,” Dad said. “That stand is right where he left it. Nobody can give that away. It’s nailed to a tree.”

Mason’s hands stopped moving on the table.

“And Ervin and I hunted that line together for forty years,” Dad said. “He borrowed this rifle more times than I can count when his scope was fogged. He’d want you up there. He wouldn’t care two cents whose gun was on your knees, as long as you were the one sitting.”

Mason did not answer for almost a minute. I have learned not to fill those minutes. Then he reached out with one finger and touched the stock, just once, like you would touch a stove to see if it was hot.

“The safety is on the wrong side,” he said.

“It’s the tang safety,” Dad said. “Slides forward and back. Ervin’s was a lever by your thumb. Different, not wrong.”

“I don’t like different.”

“I know you don’t, son. Nobody does. You’re just honest about it.”

What happened next took an hour and ten minutes, and I watched every second of it from the stove, where I made grilled cheese nobody ate.

Mason worked that bolt. Open, close, open, close. Safety forward, safety back. Dad sat across from him and did not touch the rifle once. He just said the words, quiet, over and over. Safety on. Bolt up. Back. Forward. Down. Safety off only when you mean it.

Twice Mason pushed the rifle away and put his forehead on the table. Twice Dad said, “That’s all right,” and waited, and twice Mason picked it back up.

Around five thirty, Mason looked up and said, “It’s heavier.”

“Half a pound,” Dad said. “You’ll feel it in your shoulder. It’ll still go where you point it.”

“We didn’t sight it in.”

“I sighted it in for you in September,” Dad said, “in case.”

I turned around from the stove and stared at my father. He picked at a callus on his thumb.

“In case what, Dad?”

“In case,” he said, and that was all I ever got out of him about it.

We slept at the farm. Mason took my old room at the top of the stairs, and I took the couch. I lay there thinking about what I would say if it went wrong in the morning. If he came apart in the dark. If he could not get the different safety straight in his head and said we had to go home.

I decided I would say, “That’s all right.” The way Ervin did. The way my dad did.

Dad’s alarm went off at four. He and the hired man milked the way they always do, opener or no opener, because the cows do not know what day it is. I got up and made oatmeal and set Mason’s orange things on the chair by the mudroom door in the order he puts them on.

Mason came down at five fifteen and it started.

His long underwear was the wrong long underwear. The pair he had practiced in all fall was at my house, in the dryer, and I had forgotten it. These were a pair of my dad’s old ones, too big, and the seams were in the wrong places on his legs.

He went down onto the mudroom floor and started rocking and saying, “Wrong, wrong, wrong,” and pulling at the fabric at his knees. I sat down on the boot bench. I did not touch him. I said, “That’s a big one,” and I waited.