His father. The kid thought of him with the whore in the sad little room in the house that leaned toward the water. It was a ragged life. To die in it seemed more sorrowful than he could imagine. If he simply left him to die he could go back to the farm and work it and hope for the best. Nothing would be different. There was nothing else for him. Truth was, he wanted nothing else because that life was all he’d known and there was a comfort in the idea of farming. He knew the rhythms of it, could feel the arrival of the next thing long before it arrived, and he knew the feel of time around those eighty acres like he knew hunger, thirst, and the feel of coming weather on his skin. Memory for the kid kicked in with the smell of the barn and the old man teaching him to milk and plow and seed and pluck a chicken. His father had drifted in and out of that life randomly and the kid recalled the first sense of him as the thin prick of the sawn door frame in the kitchen on his shoulder, leaning there, watching him smoke and drink and talk with the old man, trading furtive glances with him and then staring down shyly at his boot tops. The voice of him gruff and garbled with drink. When he disappeared again he always left money in a jam jar behind the sink. “Your pap,” the old man said whenever he doled out money from it, and for the longest time the kid had thought he meant the jar.
He learned his name was Starlight when he was seven. Even then the connection between them remained loose and untied and the kid remembered saying their names over and over to the darkness in the attic room where he slept. Eldon Starlight. Franklin Starlight. Four blunt syllables conjuring nothing. When he appeared the kid would watch him and whisper his name under his breath, waiting for a hook to emerge, a nail he could hang context on, but he remained a stranger on the fringes of his life. The old man was gruff about it, sometimes even seeming bitter to the kid, and he never spoke at length of it. He was content to provide as well as he could and he had. It was the old man who had taught him to set snares, lay a nightline for fish, and read game sign. The old man had given him the land from the time he could remember and showed him how to approach it, honour it, he said, and the kid had sensed the import of those teachings and learned to listen and mimic well. When he was nine he’d gone out alone for the first time. Four days. He’d come back with smoked fish and a small deer and the old man had clapped him on the back and showed him how to dress venison and tan the hide. When he thought of the word father he could only ever imagine the old man.
He sat on the fence rail and rolled another smoke, looking at the spot where the coyotes had disappeared. The spirit of them still clung to the gap in the trees. But the kid could feel them in the splayed moonlight and for a time he wondered about journeys, about endings, about things left behind, questions that lurk forever in the dark of attic rooms, un spoken, unanswered, and when the smoke was done he crushed it out on the rail and cupped it in his palm while he walked back to the barn in the first pale, weak light of dawn.
THE FIRST THING HE REMEMBERED was the gun. He must have been three or four. It hung above the mantel of the stone fireplace and to him then, it seemed like it owned a silent form of magic. It seemed to hang suspended above everything, silent, calm, drawing all the light to it. It felt as though it rang with stories and adventures. He could sit for hours and just stare at it, waiting for the tales to fall.
Now and then the old man took it down and set it in the middle of the hard plank table and he and the kid would just look at it together.
“Can I?” he’d ask.
“Go on then,” the old man would say, and the kid would reach both hands out and slide it slowly across the table so it lay lengthwise in front of him. He’d run his hands along the length of it. He’d come to love the feel of it on his palms. The slick, oiled blue-black of the barrel. The polished girth of the mount and the stock. The checkered and deliberate feel of the pistol grip. He’d poke the trigger guard with one finger, letting it swirl slowly around the bend and back before slipping it in and feeling the glassine curl of the trigger itself against the inside bend of his first knuckle.
He’d always look at the old man then, thrilled at all the magic he could feel alive in that curl of metal.
“What is she?” the old man would ask.
“She’s a Lee-Enfield carbine,” the kid would say.
“And what does she shoot?”
“She shoots 18-grain 30.30 bullets in a brass casing.”
“Shoot at what?” the old man would press though he was always grinning.
“Bear, moose, elk, wolves. Anything bigger than a bobcat.” It was the kid’s stock answer.
“Why?” The old man would always lean his elbows on the table and cock one eyebrow at him.
The kid would purse his lips together, feigning deep concentration even though the both of them knew the old routine by heart.
“Because you can’t tan a hide in pieces,” he would say, and the old man would cackle like he always did when he laughed and slap a hand on the table. Then he let the kid hold the gun.
He knew the names of all the parts by the time he was four. He could break it down and reassemble it by the time he turned five and he became the gun cleaner and caretaker from that moment on. He knew how to oil the rifling in the barrel and how to bring the outside metal to a dull blue sheen. He took care to ensure that the trigger held just enough slickness to make it cool and reassuring to the touch. He rubbed the stock and grip with wood oil and used a light file on the checkering of the grip. He could handle it with his eyes closed.
“Man shoots he’s gotta know what he’s shootin’ with,” the old man said. “No good to hunt with a stranger. Ever.”
“She’s a tool,” the kid said.
“Damn straight,” the old man would say and tousle his hair. “And what do you know about tools, Frank?”
“They’re only as good as the care you give them,” he’d say proudly.
“Won’t ever learn no better truth than that, Frank. See ya keep it.”
He did. The old man got to trust the condition of the gun every time he took it down. But he always made sure the kid watched him check it out. When he was satisfied he would load the clip and shove it in the pocket of his orange hunting jacket and give it a firm pat. He never said a word. He didn’t need to. The kid’s eyes drank in every move.
When he was seven the old man taught him to shoot. At first he plinked away at cans with an old .22. He got so he could hit them from a kneeling position, flat on his belly, and standing with the gun braced against his hip.
“Sometimes you got no proper time to raise it,” the old man said. “Gotta know how to fire on the rise. Save your life someday. You watch.”
The kid shot targets for a year. The old man gradually increased the distance until he could hit a bleach bottle hung from a branch from two hundred yards out every time. He learned to shoot with the wind, how to calculate drift, to know how much a bullet would drop over a long stretch of ground and how the impact decreased at the same time.
“Gotta hit what you shoot at and you gotta drop it.” The old man made him repeat that to himself over and over until it lived in his head like a nursery rhyme. “Ain’t right to let nothing suffer.”
“Gotta drop it.” It became the mantra he spoke to himself at his school desk.
He never did take to school. In the beginning it terrified him. The beat-up old bus would pick him up and he’d be surrounded by yelling, screaming, frantic kids whose noise hurt his ears. Then they’d be made to sit in silent rows with their feet tucked together under the desk and their