It was nearing midnight that Thanksgiving evening many years ago. The fire had waned to pulsing orange embers, the room captive to darkness beyond its failing glow, but for the single, small table lamp by Daddy’s chair.
The night was mellow as moonlight on a meadow, midst birth-home and family, the old house creaky with cold, though bountifully sweet with lingering fragrances of Mama, of thankfulness, candied yams and punkin pie. The day had been, so richly again, one of many blessings, and now in its dying minutes there was little thought it could possibly gift even one more. Yet it did, one of the most cherished of a lifetime.
Before me, on a homemade pine bench rived from its father-log by my grandpa when he was a younger man than me, lay his Ithaca double gun. I was happily engrossed with cleaning it, closing down the years by doing what he would have done, for we had shot birds that afternoon over Lady and Sam. Now, as I did, glancing back to watch him again in mind’s eye, in his tattered canvas coat and vest…coming up on his side to address the birds…but pausing, holding us for proper moments to suitably behold and herald the dogs.
Always you honored the dogs, I remembered, before you flushed, before you shot. Or you didn’t shoot.
The Ithaca, his legacy gift, there ever to remind me, though by then the ritual had become an inviolable mantra of my own. His other gift, among the very many.
With no thought arising to me—the son of his son—that I was about to receive as the night ended, another. From the man who had inherited from him an even greater portion of his heritage, and from it had caringly crafted his own. I, myself, a living part of it.
Taken with my task and tranquil with yesteryear muse, it was a deeper sense that brought awareness of his presence. Unexpected, for I thought he had long before retired. Looming partly in shadow at my side, his image was monumental, for he was a big man, a tall man, and to me—as he will always be—the very much larger than that.
He held before me upturned palms, and within them lay the something he knew I most longed for. As I knew it was probably the one thing—short of family—of greatest value to him as well. Not only as a beautifully desirable and formidable thing of its own, but as a gift to him too, for 40 years of fidelity to an old-time work ethic. Though, yes, I had quietly coveted and longed for it. Never by jealous expression, but by fervent admiration when he used it.
“I want you to have this,” he said.
My response was spontaneous, for I was shaken by both astonishment and hesitation. He was not yet an old man then. It was not time.
“No, not now. You have years….
“Not now.” And truly I meant it.
“Yesterday’s gone,” he said, “tomorrow may never come.
“Have it now. I do not want to bear the chance something could happen, and you might never.”
Then he said to me a thing I have learned since, many times over.
“You can only control something while you’re here, nothing of surety when you’re gone.”
And he laid it in my lap, a piece of himself, and faded into the darkness before I could say more, or was able to tell him…how much it meant…as I have so many times since, in so many quiet and fire-lit places.
It was not the first time he would come to me bearing a dream. One that, through me, would become his own.
A western pulp magazine illustration by Harold Winfield Scott. Artwork: Heritage Auctions.
Mid-20th century, hard across from the small town hosiery mill to which he dedicated a great fraction of his life and loyalty, was a two-by, hole-in-the-wall sporting goods store. Its stock was as pauperish, by today’s measure, as a Jugtown collection plate, but to me then, it was every bit as bedazzling. He would let me ride to work with him on Friday mornings to watch the spinnery, amid the constant, deafening clack of the machinery, which was a fearsome curiosity unto itself. In which he knew I delighted. But he sheltered no quandary that my most imperative destination would be the little huntin’ and fishin’ emporium ’cross Salisbury Street.
Its proprietor was an old friend to him, and, therefore, me. It was small town America then. No man could call another a stranger. I could barely hold my taters each week until the new merchandize arrived, when within his congenial and instructive stewardry I was able to hold and behold nearly every entrancing addition.
Hardly prepared I was, however, for the day late in 1957 when I hurried into the store, and collided with the most gorgeous and alluring object ever to greet my gaze. There, scarcely arrived—behind the counter, top-center shelf, was the dream to end all dreams. One I could not possibly hope for.
But I did.
Gunsmoke, two years along the trail, was ridin’ tall, and I was right there in the saddle, every Saturday night. A man had to have an iron on his hip, to stand on his own. I was a boy then, but I was comin’ a man.
Hope turned into harassment. I begged, pleaded, whined, whimpered, almost cried and then cajoled. But it all came up flat broke. Nothing I could contrive or do swayed the Suwanee. The impasse being Mama, who orchestrated a triple-decker duck fit, forbidding even the thought of it…convinced I was too tender, and that it could only be the instrument of my early demise.
Time and time, I returned to the scene of the shrine, and there it lay, still. Gleaming and beckoning. Night-to-day, I lived in immortal fear that someone would come along and steal it away, before I could convince the jury.
Then one day, I simply gave up, figured not to go back the more.
What manner of Friendly Persuasion that evening he finally enlisted to sway Mama I couldn’t know then. I had to grow up and see the movie, with Gary Cooper and Dorothy McGuire, before I could reckon.
But the very next day, in servitude to kindling splitting when he pulled into the driveway after work, I noticed a divergence. As he got out of the car, he tucked something into a paper bag, a small box that I saw for only the moment, but that somehow and suddenly seemed strangely familiar.
Then he stopped at the steps, motioning me to the house. About the time Mama came out, and I saw him ease the bag under his coat. But I noticed too they traded liquid glances, and that he kissed her a little longer than usual.
I followed him to my bedroom, with all the hides and feathers tacked around the wall, and when we went in, he closed the door.
When he turned, he pulled the bag from under his coat, took the little box out and laid it on the bed. My heart leaped, and I looked up into his eyes, and knew in that moment just why a boy comes to love his father so. Even the more, when later I learned that he had placed it on lay-away weeks before the truce with Mama.
He opened the lid, and there it lay, in incomparable western splendor. The real thing, with the little, rearing Colt imprint on its stock.
“You can’t quite have it yet,” he said, “but it’s yours.”
“Can I hold it?”
He nodded, and I held it for the first time, maybe like when you hold a girl close for the really first time, and you go all quivery and flush.
“It’s just that under Mama’s orders…for now at least…I’m it’s keeper, and you’re not to use it ’less I’m along, to make sure you ain’t gonna…well, you know. Just like we both know a shotgun or rifle’s one thing, and this here’s another.
“’Bout tomorrow afternoon, I’ll slip out early from the mill, and we’ll go have a showdown with a Prince Albert can or somethin’.”
Then I had to put it back in its little box, and relinquish it to the warden. But only for a short time after. Mama was soon friendly and persuaded the more, and ’fore long it came belovedly to my custody.
I’m amazed so many times at how Fate grabs up and paints a thing all pretty colors that don’t really come to show right then, but glimmer through a long time later. For in that little box was a 7/8th scale Peacemaker, a first-run, Q-series Colt Frontier Scout 22 Long Rifle. And the gun he laid in my lap that greatly blessed Thanksgiving midnight, with embers gleaming in reflection on its richly polished nickeled frame, was his 357 Magnum Colt Python. Two of the most classic Colts ever built. Not distantly after that evening, I added another Python, and later, after he was gone, put matching stocks on both. I treasure them now…like to think of them as him and me, travelin’ on down life’s highway, together.
Gifts of legacy don’t have to be special to be valuable. They’s all kinds o’ valuable. But it don’t hurt nothing neither, when they are.
A knife, a rod, a gun, a tattered old hunting coat, a painting, a carving, a call, a snuff can full of 22 Shorts, an old hat, a boat paddle, a pair of suspenders, the initials on a beech tree, a feather in a shotshell, a little polished rock from a tiny mountain stream where brook trout lived, and you were happiest, when you were together there. Legacy gifts, from someone dear. Priceless for our lifetime, large or small. Spiritual mirrors into which we can gaze and see our world again, as then. Talismans of remembrance, of a day and a way, a good way, that through them you can relive again.
Though any one of them was never singularly a gift, we come to find, but both a gift and a trust. A trust that hopefully in our own time, we will lovingly and in kind forge a heritage of our own, that will anoint them the more.
So that they become always priceless, in someone other’s.
This article originally appeared in the 2021 Guns & Hunting issue of Sporting Classics magazine.