asked me if I had cleaned the Springfield rifle yet. That was something I got along with the key to the gun room: the duty to clean the guns.
Felix says now that Father made such an honor and fetish out of the key to the gun room because he was too lazy to ever clean a gun.
• • •
Mrs. Roosevelt, I remember, made some polite inquiry about my familiarity with firearms. And it was news to Mother, too, that I had the key to the gun room now.
So Father told them both that Felix and I knew more about small arms than most professional soldiers, and he said most of the things the National Rifle Association still says about how natural and beautiful it is for Americans to have love affairs with guns. He said that he had taught Felix and me about guns when we were so young in order to make our safety habits second nature. “My boys will never have a shooting accident,” he said, “because their respect for weapons has become a part of their nervous systems.”
I wasn’t about to say so, but I had some doubts at that point about the gun safety habits of Felix, and of his friend Bucky Morissey, too—the son of the chief of police. For the past couple of years, anyway, Felix and Bucky, without Father’s knowledge, had been helping themselves to various weapons in the gun room, and had picked off crows perched on headstones in Calvary Cemetery, and had cut off telephone service to several farms by shooting insulators along the Sheperdstown Turnpike, and had blasted God-only-knows how many mailboxes all over the county, and had actually loosed a couple of rounds at a herd of sheep out near Sacred Miracle Cave.
Also: After a big Thanksgiving Day football game between Midland City and Sheperdstown, a bunch of Shepherdstown tough guys had caught Felix and Bucky walking home from the football field. They were going to beat up Felix and Bucky, but Felix dispersed them by pulling from the belt under his jacket a fully loaded Colt .45 automatic.
He wasn’t kidding around.
• • •
But Father knew nothing of this, obviously, as he blathered on about safety habits. And, after Mrs. Roosevelt made her departure, he sent me up to the gun room, to clean the Springfield without further delay.
So this was Mother’s Day to most people, but to me it was the day during which, ready or not, I had been initiated into manhood. I had killed the chickens. Now I had been made master of all these guns and all this ammunition. It was something to savor. It was something to think about and I had the Springfield in my arms. It loved to be held. It was born to be held.
I liked it so much, and it liked me so much, since I had fired it so well that morning, that I took it with me when I climbed the ladder up into the cupola. I wanted to sit up there for a while, and look out over the roofs of the town, supposing that my brother might be going to his death, and hearing and feeling the tanks in the street below. Ah, sweet mystery of life.
I had a clip of ammunition in my breast pocket. It had been there since morning. It felt good. So I pushed it down into the rifle’s magazine, since I knew the rifle enjoyed that so. It just ate up those cartridges.
I slid forward the bolt, which caught the topmost cartridge and delivered it into the chamber. I locked the bolt. Now the rifle was cocked, with a live cartridge snugly home.
For a person as familiar with firearms as I was, this represented no commitment whatsoever. I could let down the hammer gently, without firing the cartridge. And then I could withdraw the bolt, which would extract the live cartridge and throw it away.
But I squeezed the trigger instead.
10
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT, with her dreams of a better world than this one, was well on her way to some other small city by then—to raise morale. So she never got to hear me shoot.
Mother and Father heard me shoot. So did some of the neighbors. But nobody could be sure of what he or she had heard, with the tanks making such an uproar on their way to the proving ground. Their new engines backfired plenty the first time they tasted petroleum.
Father came upstairs to find out if I was all right.