Robert Lautner - The Road to Reckoning

Thomas threw down. ‘Don’t you turn your back on me, you son of a bitch!’

A single-shot percussion, too small for its holster. A belt gun with a short barrel. The under-hammer type where you just pulled the trigger and it fired. No man who had dollars to buy a gun had one. I doubted he had that pepperbox also. But I did not think that gun so little then. It was a cannon pointed to my father’s back.

There was the giggle again from the black rear. It sounded like it came from a short, fat throat. I still had faith that mister Baker was in charge of this room. He had said that he had a double-shot rifle and I hoped it was as much of his workplace as his apron.

My father gripped my hand and did something that I did not understand then.

I have made my peace with it.

He switched from holding my hand and squeezed both my shoulders and put me in front of his waist, in front of the gun.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘My boy?’

The gun stared at me with its innocent Cyclops eye and swallowed me whole, a chasm before me. My father behind.

‘ Please, ’ he said again.

I cannot remember how he said it but in my mind it sounded like the ‘Amen’ that people say too loud in church for show to their neighbors rather than in devotion.

Thomas Heywood roared, buckled over with a callous glee. When he came back up his fist was empty, the flap of his holster closed.

‘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.