“Your targets,” the man replied. “You go and mark each of ’em in the same way. With your initials. Or your mark, if you prefer: a scratch, a line, or carve your hull name if’n you want. But we must all be able to tell just whose target it is in the case of a dispute.”
“They’re all like this,” said the sharp-nosed farmer assisting the shooting judge. He held up a square of rough-hewn hardwood, less than a foot on each side and no more than two inches thick. At the center of the block a small circle had been blackened by smudging a candle’s flame against the flat surface.
“The range judges check every target after all the shooters is finished at a certain distance. Them what qualifies, anyway. If there’s a hole inside the black—you go on with the others. If we cain’t find no hole in the wood, or you didn’t get in the black—”
“I go home empty-handed,” Titus finished. “What if I put one on the line?”
The sharp-nosed assistant answered, “It don’t count.”
And the judge added, “You got to make it a clean shot in the black smudge.”
“Certain enough.” Hoisting his bag off the table, Titus said, “I’m ready.”
“In just a shake now we’ll call out for to start,” the judge replied as Bass started away, motioning the tall man forward who had been standing behind Titus in that short line of finalists.
For the better part of a half hour Titus kept his eyes moving across the crowd continuing to grow in the shade of that rim of trees swaying with the gentle, warm breezes. None of his family had shown, not any uncles nor cousins. Disappointed, he tried telling himself it made no difference about them—not one of them saw any value in the things Titus held to be important. Nonetheless, with every minute that crawled by that late-summer afternoon, he found his young heart sinking lower and lower.
“You gone and set yourself up prime for taking a fall, Titus,” he murmured to himself.
All through the years he had competed in the youngsters’ matches, Titus had hoped his family would attend the shooting, supporting him as one behind their own. But time and again his father and mother had made their excuses, saying there were other more pressing concerns they had need of attending to at the same hour the matches were held. Matters of seed and discussions of weather cycles. Something, anything more important than coming to see their son strive to do his best. If only once a year he tried so hard to be the best.
So it was he had promised himself that this year it would be different for his family, convincing himself they would all show up now that he was shooting with the finest marksmen in the county. No longer among the boys, now he would stand at the same line with the menfolk, ready to show one and all that he had the stuff of a winner. And surely his pap would finally see he was worthy of his love.
At long last his father would congratulate him for a job well-done, would put his arms around his son and tell him how proud he was of him. Mayhaps even tell his first-born son just how much he loved him.
“It’s all right, Pap,” Titus whispered to himself aloud, still snared in his reverie as the judge called out for the contestants to move up to the shooting line. “I know how hard it is for a man to say such a thing to his young’un. Just you being here tells me enough—”
“You coming, boy?”
Titus suddenly snapped to with a shake of his head. Before him stood one of the shooters, a tall, lanky, bearded man with a graceful fullstock slung at the end of his arm.
“Me? I’m coming,” he answered, striving to make his voice sound as low as possible—angry at his shame to be caught talking to himself, off in another world.
Eight shooters waited for him and the tall marksman to reach the line.
“You’re ’llowed to grease your bar’l ’tween each shot—with a patch if you’re of a mind to,” one of the judges kicked off.
“Other’n that,” the first judge said, “it’s pretty much straight-up shooting. Off-hand. No rest. You can take your time on each target. Ain’t being judged on how fast you shoot or load. Just how pretty you make each shot.”
“Let’s get on with it,” one of the older men said with an impatient growl.
Titus nodded and moved off to the right end of the line.
Out close to seventy yards across the grass, which barely undulated in the faint breeze, stood a crude framework. As the judges called out names of the ten contestants from left to right, two men were placing the corresponding wood targets atop the highest plank on that framework. The shooters spread out a little more along the firing line as the crowd fell to a hush. That pair of range marshals scampered off to the side in different directions.
“Finish loading your weapons—then fire at will,” said the man who had registered Titus for the contest.
Bass stood at the end of the line, his target the last on the right. Titus pulled the stopper from the large powder horn he had made himself of a scraped bullhorn, and measured out his charge of black powder into a section of deer antler hollowed out to hold just the proper number of the coarse black grains he used shot after shot.
From this twelve rods—he ciphered as he stuffed the stopper back into the narrow end of the powder horn—it would take little to put a ball from his grandpap’s .42-caliber fullstock into that black circle of candle smudge. With the round ball of soft lead barely started down the swaged muzzle of the barrel, Titus pulled the long hickory ramrod free of the thimbles along the bottom of the forestock. He gave a push, moving the ball partway down the barrel, the lead sphere surrounded by a linen patch cut just a bit larger than the outer circumference of the muzzle itself, that piece of cloth soaked in the oil rendered down from a black bear he had taken not far from Amy’s swimming hole early last winter. One of the few he figured hadn’t been killed or run out of that part of the Ohio River country.
His mother had taken the thick yellowish fleece Titus had sliced away from the connective tissue between the hide and muscle, melting it into an oil in one of her cast-iron kettles over low heat on a trivet she swung over the coals he tended in their fireplace. It was something she had not done very often for her husband, seeing how little he hunted for the family. Thaddeus had harumped several times during the rendering process, content to leave that as his only comment from the chair where he rocked on the uneven plank floor while repairing broken leather harness using a big glover’s needle threaded with thick strips of waxed linen.
“Waste of time, that oil,” Thaddeus had said. “A lot of work for little gain.”
Titus remembered again that winter’s evening and how he had realized his father’s skimpy appreciation for the pleasure a person might reap from a task far from work, a task taken on for little more than its own sake. To accomplish nothing productive but for the joy of the task itself. With his father, and his mother most times as well, everything had to serve a purpose, every day’s value weighed only by what had been accomplished before one laid one’s weary body down that night.
As he threaded the ramrod back into its thimbles below the barrel of the fullstock, Titus knew he would never be a man such as his father—at least the sort who found little joy in each day’s modest passing for its own sake.
Thumbing the dragon’s-head hammer back to half cock, he snapped forward the frizzen a Belleview gunsmith had resoled two years before so that it would once again bestow a plentiful shower of sparks into the pan where Titus now sprinkled a dusting of the fine-grained priming powder from the smaller of the two horns hanging from his possibles pouch slung over his left shoulder.
By the time the youngster brought the frizzen back down over the pan and dragged the hammer back to full cock, two shooters had taken their crack at those first targets.
He raised the butt to the curve of his shoulder and nestled it in against the thin strap of muscle beneath the worn, much-washed hickory shirt his mother had made him years before.
Another of the finalists touched off his shot. The firing line began to drift with the gray gauze of powder smoke suspended on the heavy, muggy air.
Titus laid his cheek along the smooth half heart of the small cheekpiece carved into the buttstock, trying hard to shut out the sounds of the nearby crowd murmuring, laughing, cheering on their favorites, the clamor of children at play, the unsteady and surprising boom of other shooters firing their rifles behind him. If he wasn’t careful, Titus reminded himself, some man’s shot just might surprise him, and he would end up jerking on the trigger instead of concentrating on nothing more than his own squeezing caress of the trigger.
When his longrifle went off, he watched through the curl of gray muzzle smoke while his target went spinning to the ground. As he brought the weapon’s buttstock down to rest upon his instep, Titus turned slightly, finding the other nine shooters watching him as if he were delaying them.
