The Rifle Grandpa Left For My Boy

Dad did not say anything. He took his cap off and put it back on again. He does that when he cannot trust himself to talk.

At ten thirty five we climbed down. Mason unloaded the rifle at the bottom and handed it to Dad, bolt open, the way Ervin taught him. Then we walked out to the split maple, and Mason found the blood trail himself on the frosted leaves, bright as paint, and followed it forty yards into the hardwoods.

The buck was lying under a basswood. He had not gone far. It was a clean shot, right behind the shoulder, and Mason knelt down beside him in the leaves and put his bare hand on the gray coat.

“Thank you,” he said to the deer.

Ervin used to say that. Every deer, every time. I had forgotten, and Mason had not.

Dad helped him field dress it, and Mason did most of it himself, slow and careful and exactly in the order he had watched on Ervin’s porch for five autumns. Dad registered the buck on his phone right there in the woods, grumbling about the tiny buttons, because that is how it is done now.

Then my father did something I did not know about until later. He took a picture of Mason kneeling beside his buck in the leaves, in his orange coat and cap. And he sent it to Jared, with four words.

“Thought you should know.”

We dragged the buck out to the field edge by the foot of the stand. Dad said he would bring the tractor and the loader after dinner. Then he looked at his watch and looked at Mason.

“It’s eleven,” he said. “Your call.”

Mason looked up at the stand. He did not even think about it.

“Grandpa sat till noon,” he said.

So we climbed back up. And we sat.

At ten minutes to twelve, I heard boots on the frozen corn stubble.

Mason heard it before I did, of course. He sat up very straight and gripped the bench, and his head turned toward the barn end of the farm line.

“Mom,” he whispered. “Look.” Two blaze orange coats were coming toward us across the field, one tall and one taller, walking slow.

The taller one was Bud. He was carrying a rifle in his two hands with the bolt open, held out a little in front of him, the way you carry something that is not yours.

It was Ervin’s rifle. I would know that walnut stock anywhere.

And the one walking a step behind him, with his hands in his coat pockets and his eyes on the ground, was Jared.

They stopped at the foot of the ladder, next to Mason’s buck. Dad had seen them from the rock pile, and he came walking up the line too and stood off to one side with his arms folded. He did not say a word to Jared. He did not have to.

Bud looked up at Mason. His ears were red from the cold, or from something else.

“Can you come down a second?” he said.

Mason looked at me. I nodded. He handed me Dad’s rifle, empty, and climbed down the ladder, and stood at the bottom in the frost, a head shorter than Bud, not quite looking at him.

Bud held out Ervin’s rifle with both hands.

“This is yours,” he said. “It was always yours. I’m sorry.”