The Rifle (7 page)

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.

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.

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

    
   

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

    
   

3. 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?
   

    
   

4. 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?
   

    
   

5. Crafting this sweet rifle was perhaps the greatest achievement of Cornish's life. What skill do you hope to perfect in your lifetime?
   

    
   

6. There are so many variables that caused this rifle to end up where it did. If any number of small, random occurrences had been different, the fate of the rifle—and of course, the fate of Richard—would have also been different. Think of a time that you had a bad day. If you could go back and change anything that happened, what might you change so that your day would end up differently?
   

    
   

7. So often in the news we hear about terrible accidents like the one that killed Richard. Did reading about all the moments that Richard missed out on by dying young, his family's grief, and Harv's guilt give you any new insight into the possible far-reaching effects of such events?
   

    
   

G
ARY
P
AULSEN
has written nearly two hundred books for young people, including the Newbery Honor Books
Hatchet
,
Dogsong
, and
The Winter Room
. He divides his time between a home in New Mexico and a boat on the Pacific Ocean.