Memories in Blue Steel

"You need to pick up my guns and take them home with you." The words cut like a dull knife. Merle's rifles were staples of his rancher life. Along with fence pliers. A saddle and bridle. Spurs. Cowboy hat. A bandana to protect his neck against a winter wind, and to wipe the sweat off his brow in the summer heat. He never left the house without any of them. He'd had to give up the ranch when the coal company made an offer he couldn't refuse. The stress prompted a heart attack, then a stroke. Even to him, it was obvious that fighting was futile. Moving to town was giving up, giving in, but it was the only option. Now, 20 years later, he was moving again. They call it assisted living - three squares a day and a room where people attentively watch over and care for him. While secure, it was a far cry from gazing out over thousands of acres of your own sage and pine-studded prairies where cows bawl, deer roam, and silence envelopes night skies peppered with diamond crystals from horizon to horizon...I opened the hidden closet in his house, camouflaged by a pantry wall of canned goods, and the rifles gleamed in the dull light. Clean, oiled and ready for use, albeit never again by him. I picked up the Winchester Model 88 .243 that I had refinished and reblued for him just before he'd left the ranch years before. He'd traded it for a saddle or something. While the rifle shot well when he got it, it looked like it had been dragged behind a horse over miles of cactus and prairie scrabble. It probably had. Over the winter, I'd sanded and refinished the walnut stock into factory-new condition. A gunsmith recheckered the stock, making it look better than new. After the rifle's barrel and action had been reblued, a gun-buyer friend of mine offered me two months' mortgage payments on my house for it. Wisely, I'd refused. That fall, Merle had shot a beautiful four-by-four mule deer buck with it. The next year, he'd made a great shot on a three-by-four buck that took one step and collapsed. Six years, six bucks, six shots. Deadly accurate in the hands of someone who loved the rifle and knew what to do with it...more