The Rifle Grandpa Left For My Boy

Dad stopped at the foot of the ladder. He loaded the rifle there, three shells in the magazine, none in the chamber, and checked the safety twice, and handed it up after Mason had climbed. Mason took it with both hands and laid it across his knees on the bench, muzzle pointed out over the empty field, exactly the way he had been taught.

Then I started up the ladder after him.

I was four rungs from the top when I stopped and reached up and put my hand on the toe of his boot. I do not know why. It was just there, and he was my boy, and he was fourteen feet up a tree with a loaded rifle on the morning his father said he could not handle it.

He did not pull his foot away. He does not usually like to be touched without warning. He let my hand stay.

Below us, Dad stood in the frost with his orange coat and his hands in his pockets, looking up at the two of us in that gold light. He did not say anything for a while. Then he cleared his throat.

“Till noon,” he said, quiet.

“Till noon,” Mason said.

Dad went on down the line to his old spot by the rock pile, about a hundred and twenty yards, close enough to hear us call and far enough to leave us be. I climbed the rest of the way and sat on the bench beside my son. A hunter Mason’s age has to have a parent close by, and I was not going to be anywhere else anyway.

And then Mason Kraus sat.

I have been his mother for thirteen years. I have seen him unable to sit through the first hymn at church. I have carried him out of a school assembly kicking.

He sat on that bench for three hours without making a single sound.

Not when the sun climbed and the gold went white. Not when a red squirrel came down the oak right beside us chattering like it wanted a fight. Not when his toes went numb inside his boots, which I know they did, because mine did. Not when a volley of shots went off so close on the next farm that I jumped.

He did not move except his eyes. His eyes went over that field in a pattern, left to right and back, slow, like Ervin taught him. Woods line, fence corner, cornfield edge, woods line.

Around half past eight he shifted his left hand on the bench seat to brace himself, and he stopped.

He was feeling something with his fingers. There was a crack in the bench, between two boards, where the wood had pulled apart over thirty years of weather. He worked at it with his glove a minute, very carefully, and then he pulled something out and held it up in front of his face.

It was a candy wrapper. Yellow cellophane, faded almost clear, twisted at both ends.

A butterscotch.

Ervin always had butterscotch candies in his coat pocket. Always. He bought them in the big bag and he handed them out at funerals and at the fair and in the church parking lot, to kids and to grown men alike. He told Mason they were good for sitting because you could not hurry a butterscotch. You had to let it go at its own speed.

He used to unwrap one in the stand, real slow, so the cellophane did not crackle and spook the deer. Then he would twist the wrapper and stuff it in a crack so he would not litter the woods. Mason knew that. Mason knew every single thing Ervin ever did in that stand.