Rising Sniper

CHAPTER THREE

Deacon Cole was hunting. With his dead pa’s rifle held in hands calloused from farmwork, he watched the morning light spread across the mountains. He was on the trail of a big buck he had seen once or twice from a distance while roaming these hills.

Most days in the woods, he carried a shotgun with him, an old Iver Johnson double-barrel, because it was usually small game that he scared up, rabbits or squirrels that chattered down at him, scolding, until he settled things with the shotgun. If he was lucky, he’d startle some quail or a pheasant.

Whatever game he brought home helped to feed his mother and sister, Sadie, back at the Cole family’s hardscrabble farm. Like most people these days in the mountains, they were barely scraping by. Sadie was just as good of a shot, but she had stayed to help their ailing mother.

“You go on, Deke,” Sadie had said.

He felt his belly rumble. When was the last time they had eaten a decent meal? Sometimes Deke thought that he should be like his cousin, Jasper, who had joined the navy. He was out in Hawaii, a place so distant and exotic in Deke’s mind that it may as well be the moon, eating regular, and sending money home. But there was more than one boy in that branch of the Cole family to work the farm. Without Deke, what would his ma and Sadie have done?

He smirked at the thought that Sadie would inform him that she could take care of herself just fine. Deke had to admit that she’d be right about that. While it was a toss-up as to which one of them was the better shot, there was no doubt that Sadie was his equal when it came to farmwork. The trouble was, there was a lot more work than the two siblings could do.

With their pa gone and Ma so sick, he and Sadie had done the best they could to keep the farm going. Having fallen into a struggle for subsistence, there wasn’t much to take care of anymore: some hogs and a few chickens, a couple of horses to pull the plow over the rugged fields. The rocky land was stingy, and their crops hadn’t been good for years.

The Depression had sunk its teeth into the mountain people like a mean dog, and it hadn’t let go. Pa had taken out a mortgage on the land that the Cole family had owned since at least the Civil War. That mortgage had turned out to be a disaster.

To be sure, he had distant relatives all over these hills and mountains. The Coles were Scotch Irish, having settled the area when there were still Indians in the woods and valleys. Mostly, it was poor land that nobody else wanted. It had suited the extended Cole clan just fine.

You might say that the Coles didn’t live all that much differently from the original settlers. They ate whatever vegetables they could grow in the thin soil, sold firewood or made moonshine, and relied on hunting for meat. Rumor had it that the rest of the world moved faster and faster, but here in the mountains, life was very much the same as it had been for a hundred years or more.

With the farm not making any money, Pa had been desperate to pay back the bank. He had managed to get a job down at the sawmill, but that was dangerous work.

It had fallen to the county sheriff to drive out to the farm with the news that they all feared might come someday.

They knew that something was wrong as soon as the dusty county car pulled into the barnyard. The sheriff was a big man, but his shoulders seemed to droop as he took off his hat and approached the door.

“Mrs. Cole, I’m afraid that there’s been an accident at the sawmill,” he had said, his brown eyes sad in his broad face. “Your husband has been killed.”

“He’s gone?”

“I’m afraid so, ma’am.” The sheriff seemed relieved that Mrs. Cole didn’t ask for the details. He looked around, apparently taking in the ramshackle house, the barn with a sheet of canvas covering a hole in the roof, the forlorn chickens scratching in the yard.

Their mother had nodded once and gone back into the house, leaving the sheriff on the front porch, hat in hand.

“Sadie, Deke,” he’d said, nodding at them. “I’m real sorry about your daddy.”

The sheriff’s eyes had wandered down to the boy’s bare feet. Deke could have explained that his pa had needed the one pair of boots they could afford to work at the mill.

The sheriff looked up and opened his mouth as if to say something, then closed it again. There were times in his job where words failed him. His whole county was dotted with farms just like this, where families were barely hanging on. A man could do only so much. He got back in his car and drove off, raising a cloud of dust as he went.

With Pa gone, it seemed like everything had rolled downhill faster and faster, like a boulder bound for rock bottom. There was some insurance money to pay the mortgage for a while, but when that ran out, payments to the bank had been sporadic. Ma had taken to bed, the payments to the bank got further behind, and there wasn’t anything to eat unless Deke or Sadie found it in the woods.

In a sense, Deke had fled to the woods this morning. Just last week, the bank had foreclosed on the farm and scheduled for it to be auctioned on the steps of the county courthouse. Once again, it had fallen to the county sheriff to drive out and give them the news that they had one week to vacate the property. This time, he wasn’t alone, accompanied by a man wearing a suit and shiny shoes.

The sheriff introduced the man. “This here is Mr. Wilcox from the bank. He’s the one who called in the note on your farm. Well, I ought to say, the bank’s farm now.”

Mr. Wilcox didn’t say a word, but he looked around with a lordly, proprietary air. He frowned, clearly not pleased by what he saw. He approached the porch, stepping carefully around some chicken droppings so as not to get any on his fancy shoes. He gave Deke and Sadie a look similar to the one he’d given the chicken shit, like they were just another annoyance.

Their mother hadn’t risen from bed, so it fell to Deke and Sadie to meet the sheriff once again. “I’m sorry about this, son,” he said, handing Deke a document. “That’s an order of eviction. It says you need to vacate the premises within seven days.”

“I’m being generous,” the banker spoke up, not bothering to take off his hat in Sadie’s presence. What did a banker care about a mountain girl without any shoes?

“Where will we go?” Sadie had asked.

“Not my problem, darlin’,” he replied. “You just be off this property by Tuesday noon next week, or I’ll have the sheriff here throw you off.”

“We can get the money, mister,” Deke had said.

“How? You gonna sell those chickens, maybe? No, the bank waited for its money long enough. This is a done deal.” The banker narrowed his eyes as he noticed Deke’s scars for the first time. “What the hell happened to you, boy? Looks like you tried to shave with a rusty razor — or maybe with a garden rake.”

The banker looked away, taking in more of his new acquisition. Deke had been splitting firewood and held an ax, the edge sharp and bright. He glared at the banker. Deke’s eyes were a startling shade of gray, like rainwater. Those eyes held a cunning animal glint, the feral eyes of a fox.

Deke shifted his grip on the ax and took a step toward the banker.

The sheriff looked up in alarm, realizing he was too far away to prevent what was coming next. “Son—”

But Sadie put a hand on Deke’s arm, a gentle gesture that stopped him before he could take another step.

“That’ll do, Deke,” she said quietly.

“You can keep the chickens if you want,” said the banker, barking a short laugh. He hadn’t noticed the ax in Deke’s hands or the look in the boy’s eyes, apparently oblivious that he’d come within a heartbeat of having his head split open like a ripe watermelon.

The sheriff knew, though. He’d seen it all. The thing was, he couldn’t bring himself to blame the boy.

“Come on, Mr. Wilcox,” he said sternly to the banker. “We’ve delivered your letter. Let’s go.”

That had been nearly a week ago. Tomorrow, they would need to be off the land. This morning, Deke planned to hunt here one last time. It was his way of saying goodbye.

“Now, where’d you get to?” he muttered, pushing thoughts of the future from his mind and turning his attention back to the hunt. “I know this is where you like to be.”

He had brought the rifle this morning because he wasn’t after squirrels or quail. He was hunting the big buck that he had seen a couple of times over the summer. That much meat would have gone a long way toward feeding them right into the winter — maybe with some left to share with the neighbors.

Deke focused his sharp, searching eyes on the woods. The gray-brown coat of the buck with its splashes of white would blend perfectly with the trees, so he would need to keep a sharp eye out. If he wanted this hunt to be a success, he would need to see the buck long before it saw him. It occurred to him that his family had been hunting these deer for generations on this same ground.

He moved through the woods quietly, carefully, his footsteps silent beneath the whisper of the breeze in the barren trees. Winter was coming on fast. There had already been several hard frosts. It had been a lean harvest, and their milk cow was nearly dried out. In the morning, there was ice to crack in the water trough. A trip to the outhouse was invigorating, to say the least. Soon there would be snow, and real winter would arrive in the mountains.

For the deer, he needed the rifle. He doubted that he could have gotten close enough to the buck to take him with buckshot. The rifle was an old Winchester that had been owned by his father. Lately, Deke had realized that he was starting to forget his father’s face. It was no more than a vague memory, like a half-remembered dream. But when he held the rifle, he could remember clearly. The rifle was the best connection to his father that he had, because his father had handled this same wood, and his eyes had used these same sights. It was strange, but when Deke carried the rifle, he felt as if his father walked with him. It was his father, too, who had taught him to shoot. Here in the mountains, it was one of the first and most important lessons that a father taught a son — or a daughter. Pa had also taught Sadie to shoot.

The rifle gave Deke power. It made him the equal of any man. As long as he held a rifle, and was willing to use it, to stand up for himself, there was nothing that Deke needed to fear. His father had passed along that lesson too. What did a man have if you took away his ability to defend himself?

Out of habit, he touched the deep scars on the left side of his face. They reminded him of furrows in a plowed field, still angry and red after all these years. The scars ran down his neck and across his torso. He always kept his shirt collar buttoned up tight and usually wore a bandanna knotted around his throat on the rare occasions when he went into town, but there was no hiding the scars on his face.

He followed a game trail deeper into a thicket, the brush closing in around him, the smell of musk rising from the damp earth beneath his worn boots. He emerged into a mountain meadow. He kept low, crouching, not wanting to spook the buck that he knew must be just ahead.

He scanned the meadow and caught sight of the buck. The deer stood on the far edge of the meadow, head dipped to graze on what remained of the green grass.

Deke raised the rifle to his good shoulder and put the sights on the deer. His arms were sinewy with muscle from hardscrabble farmwork, so that his aim held steady. It was a long shot, but Deke didn’t fret over that. He rarely missed.

All at once, the buck seemed to be alert to something. He raised his magnificent head, the antlers held high, catching the morning light. The broad chest turned to Deke like a challenge. Up here in this remote mountain meadow, there wasn’t much that this big buck in his prime had ever needed to fear.

Deke lowered the rifle. It had been an easy shot — there was no doubt that he could have taken the buck.

The buck held his eye, some primitive glimmer of acknowledgment there, then bounded away.

Normally Deke would have wanted the buck to be hanging from the big tree out back long before then, which would mean the difference between a hungry winter and a starving one. But where would they be spending the winter? Not on the farm. Not anymore.

The day had come and gone when they’d had to leave the farm. With nowhere else to go, the three of them had had to move into a boardinghouse in town, sharing a single room. For someone who had loved to roam the woods and fields, the cramped room might as well have been a prison cell. Deke slept on the floor, while Sadie and his ma shared the lumpy bed. The money that they’d gotten for the pigs and chickens had been enough to pay a month’s rent in advance — and that was all the money that they had.

He’d thought about joining the navy, like his cousin Jasper had done, but he hated to abandon Sadie like that. With no alternative, Deke had gone to the sawmill where his pa had worked and asked for a job. The foreman had been reluctant, saying that they didn’t have any work because the Depression was hanging on, but he had relented. It seemed like the least he could do, considering that the boy’s father had died in an accident at the sawmill.

And so Deke had worked there for almost a year now, the noisy mill being a long way from the fields and woods of the farm. He hated that place. It was too hot in summer, and bone-cold in winter. The relentless spinning blade was always present, as threatening as an insatiable monster, a reminder of his father’s death on the cruel steel.

Ma had passed that fall. The doctor couldn’t even say what her ailment had been. It was as though she had just given up and faded away.

But Deke and Sadie had to go on living. The days continued for Deke, each of them passing as miserably as the next, his pay barely enough to cover the rent at the boardinghouse. In his pain, feeling sorry for himself, he sometimes bought a pint of cheap whiskey and drank himself to sleep, hating himself for that when he awoke with an aching head the next morning, as miserable as ever. Sadie didn’t approve.

Then again, she had been too tired to do much about it, working herself to the bone as a maid for one of the few families with money in town. Each day she seemed to grow thinner, a shadow of herself.

Life in town wasn’t easy, and he felt like an outcast. The scars on his face that made people so nervous around him didn’t help.

Once, he had seen the banker who had evicted them driving by in a big car. He had glanced at Deke without any recognition, as if his gaze had gone right through him. In the banker’s eyes, Deke was not worth noticing. Deke balled up his fists at the anger that went through him. If you didn’t have money, it seemed like you weren’t worth anything.

Deep down, he knew that he was grieving for his parents — and for the farm, a way of life that had been lost to him and Sadie. He needed to get out, to do something different, but he felt helpless as a bug caught in the current of a mountain stream.

And then came the December day when the foreman had shut down the sawmill. This in itself was unusual, and the men had gathered around as a strange quiet settled over them. Beyond the mill, people filled the street, and he could hear excited shouts. It was clear to Deke that something big had happened.

“What’s going on?” one of the sawmill crew asked.

“The president just gave a speech over the radio. Congress voted, and we’re going to war,” the foreman said. “They’re setting up a recruiting station on Main Street, and I’m sure that some of you men will be signing up. Don’t expect to be paid for the time you’re gone doing it.”

Like everyone else, Deke had heard the news about Pearl Harbor the day before. He was worried about his cousin, who was stationed in Hawaii. He hoped that Cousin Jasper was all right, but for the first time in months, Deke felt a sense of purpose. If the United States needed soldiers, he’d be the first in line.

The big saw blade was still spinning silently when he walked out of the sawmill without saying a parting word to anyone.

He didn’t know anything about war or being a soldier, but he was about to find out. He enlisted the next day. Two days after that, Sadie was on a bus bound for Washington, DC.

Later he would realize that the war had saved him, and maybe Sadie, too, and started him on the greatest adventure of his life.