The Rifle Grandpa Left For My Boy

He looked at the wrapper for a long time. He did not cry. Mason does not cry when he is sad. He gets very still and very precise.

“Grandpa’s,” he whispered. It was the first word he had said since the ladder.

“Yes, honey,” I whispered back. “That’s Grandpa’s.”

He turned it over in his fingers. Then he did something I will see for the rest of my life. He untwisted it, very gently, flattened it on his knee so it would not crackle, folded it into a small square, and put it in the chest pocket of his orange coat. He buttoned the pocket.

Then he put his hand back on the rifle and went back to looking at the field. Woods line, fence corner, cornfield edge, woods line.

I had to look the other way for a while. I looked at the oak bark beside my face and I thought about a big slow man who stuffed candy wrappers into cracks for thirty years, and I hoped wherever he was, he had a good seat.

At four minutes after ten, a deer stepped out of the hardwoods.

I did not see it first. Mason did. I only knew because his breathing changed. I followed his eyes and there it was, sixty yards out at the corner where the fence runs into the woods, standing in the frost with its head up.

A forkhorn. A young buck, two points on each side, his coat gone gray for winter. He was not running. He was just walking the edge of the corn the way Ervin always said they would at ten, after the pancake hunters went home.

Mason did not move for a long time. The buck was quartering toward us, head on, and Ervin’s rule is broadside. You wait until you can see the crease behind the front leg. I watched my son wait. I watched his thumb rest on the wrong side of the rifle, on Dad’s tang safety, and not move.

The buck took six more steps and turned to nose at something in the stubble, and stood broadside to us, perfectly still.

Mason raised the rifle slowly to his shoulder. He slid the safety forward with his thumb. I heard him breathe out, halfway, the way he had practiced seventeen Saturdays at the gravel pit.

Then the shot.

It was louder than anything I had ever heard, fourteen feet up a tree with my face a foot from the muzzle. My ears rang. Mason worked the bolt, smooth, without looking, and put the safety back on, and laid the rifle across his knees again.

The buck had jumped and run hard into the woods, low, the way they do when they are hit well. Mason had watched exactly where he went. He pointed at a split maple at the woods line.

“There,” he said. “Past the split tree. Thirty minutes.”

“Thirty minutes,” I said. My voice shook. His did not.

We sat and counted. Dad came walking up the line at a quarter past, slow, careful not to push anything. He stopped at the foot of the ladder and looked up and said, “Well?”

“Forkhorn,” Mason said. “Broadside. I saw the crease. He went past the split tree.”