‘Run, you son of a bitch!’ He rolled back with laughter, the dust blowing off him like a cloud. I saw that his coat was made out of a blanket and sewn with wide stitches like sharks’ teeth.
My father pulled me away and out the door with that laugh at our backs.
We did not run. We left briskly. Everyone else on the street was just slow.
That night we stayed in a room on Front street above a potter’s called Bastian. This was two dollars for a brass bed but no meal. I figured my father was of the opinion that the man named Thomas Heywood would not spend two dollars for a room so would not likely be one of our neighbors. We had moved our belongings from the hotel along with the sack of guns. I carried the three boxed models like books under my chin. I did not complain about the weight.
In the room my father moved the kerosene lamp from the window and put it on the floor and drew the curtain. We ate salt-beef sandwiches and sauerkraut from a newspaper on the bed with the lamp throwing grotesque shadows of us on the ceiling like a Chinese silhouette show. We did not talk.
I had wanted my father to come into the room, lock the door, and laugh and slap his thigh about how lucky we had been and how foolish the whole scene was to civilized folks like us, but he did not. He had hid the lamp and chewed quietly in case the mice heard him. I could hear his watch tick.
In bed that night a piano along the street tickled me awake and I found myself alone under the blankets.
The lamp was down and flickering, the whole room dancing around the walls.
I was just about to lift up when there was a rattle like someone at our door lock and I froze. Then I was fully awake and knew the sound of the knob on our door turning was inside the room. The stranger twisting the lock was the clockwork and snaps of a gun.
I sat up but my father did not notice as he had the chair faced to the wall and his head down. I saw the box of one of the belt models open on the floor. On the green baize lid was a waxed paper image of the factory with smoke billowing from the chimneys. The inserts where the pistol and its accoutrements lay were skeletal empty. Mister Colt had provided us with caps and balls to demonstrate. Powder too. The boxes held cartridge paper, dowel, and block, and these were on the side table. When they were in their box, in their proper neat holes, they looked like a carpenter’s or an artist’s tools. They fooled you that they could create.
I went to speak but the hammer’s double click shushed me. That sound cuts you down to be quiet. It silences giants, and only dumb animals roar at it.
It has committal.
My father whispered from his corner.
‘Forgive me, Jane. My sweetest friend. What I … Oh, Jane, it was … Preserve me. My sweetest friend.’ He took a breath and the piano down the street stopped and people clapped and laughed. He quoted to the wall with that breath.
‘“Long is the way, and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.”’
I threw back the bedclothes and he turned to me.
‘Thomas?’ he said. ‘I thought you were asleep.’ He uncocked the gun. Pistols do this reluctantly.
I ran from the bed and around the chair. The gun was in his lap and his arms wrapped around me. I felt the pistol’s coldness against my belly through my shirt. He patted me closer and my cheek touched his, which was damp.
‘Oh, my boy … my boy.’ He chuckled and it was the nicest music.
You may have had a father or you may have had a man who lived in your house. If he beat you or left you I will suffer you that and if you carry it with you then you can have some pity. But I saw my father’s shame and he passed it on to me. If he had hit me I could abide, I could overcome. The Lord does these things so we do not do it ourselves. This is how man changes his generations, the way birds move on from barren lands, and we abide.
I told you when I started that my life began when I was twelve. It was there in that room. I did not exist before that night and I am still that boy.
He held me away. ‘I was only loading the gun so I could learn. So I could show Mister Baker in the morning.’ Then, as if to avow to himself rather than settle me, ‘I am sure that man will not be there then. We will do our business and be gone with Jude Brown.’
‘We could go home,’ I said.
‘We could. But there is no need, Tom. We will be on the road tomorrow. Everything will be well. Here, let me show you how fast I can load this thing. It is a marvel, I swear.’
I wiped my eyes and he rubbed his, lamenting his tiredness and concentration. I noticed he had only loaded one chamber.
I watched him play the gun like that piano outside. The gun in its simplicity and pleasing mechanics coaxed confidence from his hands; it forgave the amateur. And there was the V cut into the hammer as a back sight, the blade at the end of the octagonal barrel, and if you lined them up, aimed your eye down that V, down that steel-barreled extension of your arm, you would shoot the thing in front of you. But the gun does not know how to pull the trigger.
I did not ask him why he could not have practiced with the wooden gun. It separated and loaded just the same and even had wooden caps and balls. I never thought of it, or why the loaded gun did not go back to its green baize bed.
We packed and fetched the Brewster and Jude Brown first thing. Jude Brown was reluctant to leave either the food or the company of horses although as a gelding they should have smelled like dogs to him. We rode to Baker’s in silence. My father did not tip his head to anyone, which was not his custom and a bad habit for a salesman. His little gold glasses kept slipping down his nose with his sweat and he was forever confusing Jude Brown by lifting the reins to set them glasses right.
Baker’s reached, my father jumped down. I had no will to follow but still he said, ‘Wait here.’
He took two naked belt guns, whose barrels were about five inches, made for as they sounded, and he intimated such by tucking one in his belt.
‘I will not be long.’ He slapped the reins into my hand.
I watched the door close and looked at the back of Jude Brown’s head so as not to meet the eye of anyone on the street. There was a black boy in cotton-duck overalls on the porch sweeping but with no intention on cleaning. He was moving the dust around with the strength of a marionette and studied me and Jude Brown. I played the reins through my fingers and looked up at the mountains covered in cloud, the endless trees on them in the early morning still blue-green like the sea. It was not yet ten. I would not think that a man like Thomas Heywood had got out of his filthy bed by now.
I could not help but look at the door once or twice and each time the black boy grinned a gapped mouth. I chiseled my face like a man with fury in him. I did not truck with boys. I had a wagon and a horse. I had a sack full of guns. I dipped my hat to a milkmaid who instead of smiling or blushing looked at me scornfully. I pulled the brim down as if this was originally my intention.
I do not know how long I sat but it seemed as if the whole world passed by, their clothes getting smarter with every minute as the work they traveled to shifted from strong back to desk and pen, for the earlier you have to get up the harder you have to work. My father was taking his time. I thought on the two guns he had taken in and then I could think of nothing else except Thomas Heywood’s white, wide eyes.
The door and its bell exploded like a gunshot and I jumped, which made Jude Brown toss his head and curse me with a snort when nothing happened. My father was there and shaking mister Baker’s hand. He climbed up onto the seat and took the reins, adjusting them tighter where I had been running them through my hands.