The Rifle (6 page)

On the right of their house there was a small frame dwelling painted a spotless white and occupied by an elderly couple. The boy heard that the man had been a fighter pilot in the Second World War but didn't talk to him until he was of an age to make models, and the man came into his backyard and saw Richard holding a plastic model of a P-51 fighter near the low fence.

“I flew one of those,” the man told him, looking over the fence. “You had to be careful in a dive because if the airspeed exceeded the limits the aluminum would start peeling off the upper wing. That's what happened to Johnnie . . .”

And the man told Richard stories of flying in the war, talking to Richard not as if he was a boy but a man, telling him things because he seemed to need to tell these parts of his life to somebody. Richard was fascinated and listened raptly, and from that time on always said hello to the man when he saw him.

On the other side of Richard's house lived Harv Kline. Harv was as nice to Richard as he was to everybody and Richard liked him as much as everybody liked him. He had two children, a boy and a girl, but the boy was three years younger than Richard—the girl still younger—and when Richard was eight the other boy was only five, too young for good playing. The fence between their two yards was only a foot high, a wooden rail, and anytime she couldn't be with Richard, Sissy—who after the years with Richard had decided she was supposed to watch
all
young people—could be found in the Kline's yard playing with and watching Harv's two children.

There were other children on the block and Richard met them and came to know them and one of them became his best friend, a boy named Dennis, and another of them became his first girlfriend when he was nine years old. Her name was Peggy, and it wasn't the same as when he became older, twelve and then thirteen when she became his real girlfriend but even so, even so this first girlfriend business was very serious and he spent hours talking to Dennis about it, telling Dennis how much he loved Peggy though he hadn't told Peggy and indeed would not tell her of his love.

It was all very complicated and Richard thought twice that it would lead to breaking his heart because Peggy didn't seem to notice him and he could not, for the life of him, bring himself to talk to her. He had found that until they moved to Missouri, his life without girls to play with, his life with Sissy the collie had left him almost debilitatingly shy when it came to talking to girls.

It is impossible to guess how long it would have taken him to tell Peggy how he felt but Dennis was a good friend and teasingly told Peggy that Richard loved her and she broke the ice by talking to Richard. She was thin and had a spray of freckles across her nose and straight brown hair that hung down alongside her face, and Richard's tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth whenever she was near.

“Hi,” she said. “Dennis said you want to be my boyfriend.”

Richard stared at her. “Is that right?”

He nodded. “I guess so. I mean . . .”

“OK,” she said, shrugging, and it was done.

Richard had waited for some change but as far as he was concerned there was no difference between when he was not Peggy's boyfriend and when he became her boyfriend, except a little teasing at school and the fact that he tried to make his shoulders straighter when she was nearby.

And so he grew that way, from nine to ten and then eleven and twelve and the changes came that come with growing. Soon he did not play with small trucks or tractors and instead worked at models until his room was full of planes and cars and boats, hanging from the ceiling and on shelves, and that led to posters, and he fell in love with baseball and football and basketball all at about the same time. By the time he was fourteen his mind was full of stats about players and injuries and planes and cars and motors and yards gained and Peggy's eyes and lips and hair and school—where he turned out to be a slightly above average student—and performance statistics of cars and a dream to own a Harley and how to throw a clean dropping curve and which team would draft which player the next season and how special effects work in movies and who was really, really cool and who was not, and his voice had broken and changed and he looked at Peggy differently yet again, wondered at night about her, dreamed about her, and was starting to think that he liked science and would maybe be a doctor or a teacher if he didn't become a major-league pitcher when he was ready for it, and had come to understand and know in his heart that there are no, absolutely no goals that he could not achieve if he put his mind to it and worked hard at it, and he knew that though the time had gone so slow it seemed to stop, he was just getting started, that new things would come as the old ones went and he would grow more and know more, and sometimes it made him smile quietly, just knowing that it was all coming to him and at him the next day and the next day.

It is strange that in all the time of the rifle after John Byam's death and through all the people who looked at it and touched it and handled it, and actually held it to their shoulder as Byam had done, down through the years and years, and even with Tim Harrow, who thought he knew and was an expert at guns and rifles though he did not understand their true place, that nobody, not once in the life of the rifle, did anybody ever think to check to see if it was loaded.

To be sure, it was hard to check. There is not a breech to the rifle, nothing to open to see if there is a cartridge, and in fact there is no cartridge. Powder is poured down the bore and the ball set firmly on top of it. There is no way to simply look and see if the rifle is loaded, and the only way to make certain is to take the ramrod from its bracket beneath the barrel, slide it down the bore until it stops, mark the ramrod where it stops with a pencil, then pull it out and hold it alongside the barrel and see if it all the way to the end. If there is a load in the rifle the rod will have stopped well short—up to two inches—of the true bottom of the bore. The method is not widely known to people who have no experience with muzzle-loading weapons and so often it is not known if they are loaded or not.

The rifle was loaded.

When muzzle-loading rifles were in wide use, safety was largely a secondary consideration and there were many accidents. As late as the middle of the nineteenth century, during the Oregon Trail period, gun accidents along the trail were a leading cause of death and injury. It was, scornfully, thought that an empty rifle was worse than useless if it was needed—because it took so long to load compared to modern weapons—wouldn't even make a good club, and so guns were kept loaded.

Black powder is a strange material. It is easily made in large quantities but is extremely explosive when exposed to sparks or flame or heat. So dangerous is it to store and handle that in the sailing ships of the Revolutionary War, which used black powder for their cannon, the powder magazine was a small room tightly built deep in the center of the ship and no lanterns were allowed in the room though it was always pitch dark. Instead there were sealed windows leading to a second room where the lanterns were kept and the windows allowed the light to come through so the “powder monkeys,” small boys who ran from the cannon down to the magazine for powder bags, could come in and work. Even then there were wet blankets hung over the powder room door and the boys had to run beneath the wet blanket—kept wet with constant buckets of seawater—each time they entered or left the magazine. Anything and everything was done to keep a spark or heat from the powder.

Its one saving grace from a standpoint of time is that if black powder is exposed to the air it tends to absorb moisture and water neutralizes and ruins it. Since it is made largely of charcoal, when it absorbs moisture it cakes and becomes inert.

Many things enter into loading a rifle and when John Byam last loaded this rifle he could have done any number of things and they would have insured the powder would cake over the intervening 217 years and turn into a solid lump inside the bore. Had he used a loose patch around the ball, which would allow air to come around the sides, or left the rifle wiped dry of grease so air would work through the tiny hole from the pan—in either case it would have ruined the powder over the long time since he had loaded it.

But John was an expert, and very, very careful. He had used greased mattress ticking for the patch and the grease in the cloth swaged out and made an almost perfect gasket of the cloth. The last British officer he had killed before leaving the front lines had died just as it started to rain, and after loading the rifle John had dabbed just the tiniest amount of grease in the hole from the pan to the charge lest a drop of rain get in the hole. He carried a small sewing needle in his rifle pouch and when he next shot he would first use the needle to clean out the hole so the jet of flame would get through to the charge.

But he never fired again and the grease hardened and solidified in the hole, effectively making an airtight plug.

And so the powder lay for over two hundred years, dry, still in granular form, still ready.

And more bends and twists, turns in time to make it clear when it was done but not before; easy, so easy to see backward but as soon as the vision is moved to the present and then just slightly to the future it fogs and blurs and becomes impossible.

The Christmas season came and with it decorations, and Harv had gotten a box of Christmas things for the station from his distributor as a promotional gift and he put some in the windows at the station but he brought some home. He was always thoughtful and his wife liked candles and in the box there were two elegantly tall candles, red and made of soft wax, set in festive holiday holders, and he brought them home for her as a gift.

“They're perfect for the mantle,” she said and put them up over the fireplace in front of the rifle, wishing she had found a way to hide the Elvis painting, which Harv had also hung up over the mantle on the space between the rifle and the ceiling.

“There,” she said, “don't they make the house have a Christmas feeling?”

“Along with the tree and presents and two screaming kids—they sure do.” And Harv smiled because he meant it and loved this time of the year more than any other.

“I'll light them Christmas Eve,” she said, “when we light the fireplace.”

CHRISTMAS EVE
came two days later and the whole block seemed to light up. Many of the houses had been decorated and some weren't turned on until Christmas Eve, and Richard and his parents walked around the block looking at all the lights.

“It's cold,” Richard said, his breath out ahead of him.

“Not as cold as Colorado was,” his father said, smiling, and he ruffled Richard's hair and put his arm around his shoulders. “We'll never be that cold again.”

They finished their walk and returned to the house where his parents sat in the kitchen to drink a cup of coffee. For a moment Richard stood with them but he thought of the tree that was in the small room next to the kitchen and he went in there to see if any packages had been added to the pile since he last looked at the tree.

“
LET'S LIGHT
the fire.” Harv moved to the fireplace, took a box of matches from the mantle, and scratched one, putting it to the paper and pressed wood logs in the fireplace.

“The candles,” his wife said. “Light them, too.”

He nodded and brought the match up and put it to the candlewick. It sputtered and almost went out, then flared into life. It was placed directly in front of the pan on the rifle, which was hanging over the mantle, and as the flame sputtered a small breeze moved it to the side and closer to the pan. It did not get close enough for the flame to reach the metal but a sliver of heat, almost open flame, came near the touchhole that led to the powder. There was the tiniest bit of old, over two hundred years old, almost mummified grease there blocking the hole and the slight brush of heat was enough to dissolve it and open the way to the powder, but the flame moved away before it could ignite the charge. The flame settled, the flickering stopped, and it rose in a clean brightness toward the ceiling, adding its warmth to the Christmas cheer in the room.

RICHARD MOVED
one foot closer to the tree, turned slightly to the right, and raised his right hand to rehook a Christmas tree bulb that seemed to be coming loose.

THE FIRE IN
Harv's fireplace was not doing well. The paper and logs lit all right but they were too far forward into the room and the fireplace wasn't drawing well. Smoke drifted out and Harv took a poker from the stand to the side to push the logs back farther into the fireplace, but as he started to do it he stumbled on the corner of the carpet and had to move forward suddenly to keep from falling. The move threw his coordination off and the poker hooked in back of the logs and jerked the top one out onto the floor.

A shower of sparks went up in the air. Most of them moved up and away from the wall, bounced off the ceiling, and fell to the floor. A half-dozen of them caught a heat eddy and swung inward over the mantle. Of the six sparks, four of them merely bounced off the wall and fell on the mantle to die there.

Two of them got further caught in the heat eddies from the candle flame, and of those two a single one swung in and skipped harmlessly off the barrel of the rifle.

The last spark, almost completely out, cooling fast and no bigger than half the head of a pin, slid off the pan and speared directly into the touchhole of the rifle, where it ran into the sharp edge of a granule of black powder. It nearly died there. For a millionth of a second nothing happened because the powder, so close to the touchhole, had lost some of its explosive properties. Then the spark moved the tiniest part of a distance, no more than a micron, to the left, and found a cleaner, sharper edge of powder. It ignited, if only slightly, but it was enough to double the original spark and that led to other grains of powder and then still more, traveling at a speed so fast it could not be seen, traveling spark to spark at better than twenty-five thousand feet per second, in effect setting the entire charge in the rifle into an instantaneous explosion.