The Rifle

by Gary Paulsen

  “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.

  The Joining

  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 n
ext 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.

  The effect was immediate and stunning. There was an enormously loud crack of sound and the entire living room filled with smoke. Harv looked up, thinking the ceiling had collapsed or that the fireplace had exploded, his wife paused by the door to the kitchen, her eyes wide, both children were frozen on the couch.

  “What—,” Harv had time to say.

  In the meantime the charge, exploding in the confined space of the loaded bore, brought its full force to bear on the only movable object.

  The ball had been sitting for over two hundred years, waiting for just this event. The patch had dried, of course, and so didn’t provide the lubrication required for a proper shot, but it didn’t matter. With so much pressure—suddenly coming close to eleven thousand pounds per square inch—something had to give and it was the ball.

  It left the bore, traveling at a speed of just over twelve hundred feet per second. The front of the ball was pitted by age but that only slowed it slightly and on a longer shot would have made it inaccurate. That did not matter because after traveling only seven feet the ball hit the edge of the window frame in back of the tree, clipping so close to the window itself that it broke the glass in a jagged spider-web pattern as it left the house.

  Striking the glass and frame deformed the ball. Had it run true it would have streaked across the space between Harv’s house and the next one—where Richard lived—and buried itself in the wall, coming to rest in a two-by-four stud holding the window frame in back of Richard’s tree in place.

  But being misshaped caused the ball to curve to the side as it flew, hitting almost four inches to the right of the two-by-four, in the glass of the window itself.

  The glass moved it a quarter of an inch still more to the right. It clipped through the Christmas tree, cutting four small limbs, grazed the back of Richard’s hand as he reached up into the tree to straighten the ornament and struck him in the forehead one inch over his right eye.

  The ball had lost some velocity coming through the windows and across the space between the houses but it was still moving at over a thousand feet per second when it hit Richard—faster than bullets leave the barrel of almost all pistols—and it passed through the skull easily, carrying bits of bone with it, destroying the brain almost completely before it passed out the back of his head and finally stopped in the wall next to the door.

  All voluntary and involuntary action for Richard ceased instantly. His breathing stopped, his heart stopped after two beats, his brain waves stopped and all his thoughts went blank—he was effectively dead and his world ended by the time his body dropped to the floor next to the tree.

  The entire time lapsed from the spark entering the touchhole of the rifle to Richard dropping dead to the floor was 1.43 seconds, so that Harv still stood, his wife’s mouth was still open, his children’s eyes were still wide, Richard’s parents still sat at the kitchen table, bits of glass were still falling from the broken windows, and Richard was dead, all in less than one and one-half seconds.

  And these are the things Richard missed that were in his timeline before it intersected the timeline of the rifle: twenty-one thousand nine hundred sunrises and sunsets, three thousand one hundred twenty-seven movies, nine hundred forty-three baseball games, one hundred fourteen walks with girls on moonlit nights, nine thousand days with warm sun beating down on his back, and swimming, hiking, seeing art in museums, watching puppies play, winning a bike race in spite of an injury, graduating from high school at the top of his class, being in the army, graduating from college, getting married in final and true love, graduating from medical school as a specialist in research on cardiac-related diseases wherein he would have found a genetic cure for heart disease, having children and watching them grow to have children so he could watch them grow, and at last, finally, at seventy-four, becoming ill and dying quietly in his sleep—and all of this, every moment of every day of this, was gone forever with the rifle ball entering his head.

  Ended.

  The Rifle

  It was not done. Not yet.

  Richard’s parents were torn, destroyed by their grief. His father got counseling and managed to pull himself together enough to continue working as a carpenter but his mother sank further and further into depression, refused all help, and after several thwarted attempts at suicide allowed herself to be committed to the state mental hospital, where she stayed and is now.

  Within minutes of the accident Harv found what the rifle had done, blamed himself, and continued to blame himself until he died four years later in an alcohol-induced vehicular accident when his car hit a bridge abutment. But before that, within weeks of Richard’s death, he had driven out of town and stopped at the bridge over Muddy Creek and thrown the rifle in the water and mud to disappear forever—or so he thought.

  But a man named Tilson was fishing from the shore beneath the bridge and he saw the rifle fall. He did not recognize it at first as anything but a gun and since he had several guns and was interested, he
put a large snag hook on his line and after eleven casts managed to snag the trigger guard and pull the rifle ashore.

  He had seen the story in the paper about Richard’s death and knew of the accident, of the kind of rifle and that it was antique, and he correctly deduced that this was the rifle. But he thought and believed, as Tim Harrow believed, as millions believe, that guns didn’t kill people, people killed people, and he took the rifle home and disassembled it and cleaned it and oiled it until it was almost like new and put it in his walnut-veneer gun case to keep, suspecting it was valuable and a collector’s item.

  And there it rests now, and would stay that way, except that Tilson read an article in a gun magazine, entitled “Don’t Shun That Old Smoke-pole,” about shooting with black powder, and he has been thinking seriously about getting some black powder and balls and maybe loading the rifle.

  Just to see how it shoots.

  And in the meantime the rifle sits in the gun cabinet.

  Waiting.

  Reader Chat Page

  How do you feel about the notion that “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”? Has this story influenced your opinion?

  What do you suppose happens after Tilson finds the rifle? Who is it passed on to next? Formulate some possible scenarios.

  When the rifle is first created, it is an item that is vital to survival. By the time it ends up in Harv’s possession, it is considered little more than a decorative item. Why do you think so little consideration was given to the possible dangers of this firearm?

  The rifle remains in the attic of the house in Connecticut for generations before it is discovered. If you were to make a time capsule for people to find generations from now, what would you include that is representative of the way we live today?