Renewal 4 - Down on the River Read Online Free PDF Page B

fourth shot, I was starting to relax. The rifle was not nearly as powerful as I was expecting, and I was slowly learning not to fear it.
    On the fifth shot, the can flew off the top of the stump. Dad and I both jumped and hooted in celebration, which of course got me in trouble for waving the rifle barrel all over the place. Dad reset the can in front of the stump, so that it wouldn’t fly away every time I hit it.
    Two full magazines later, I was able to hit the can almost every time. Dad stopped me at that point because I was getting tired and starting to miss. He watched me unload and safe the rifle before he picked up the other rifle and shot a magazine himself. I never thought of my dad as a hunter, but he could shoot. His groups at fifty yards were small. It was getting hard to tell, though. The can was punctured by at least fifty holes.
    “Good enough,” Dad said. “Nice job.”
    My reward was a hike home carrying a fully loaded weapon.
    When we reached the campsite, everything was just as we had left it. Kirk was taking his turn at wood splitting. Mom was tuning out Francine, who had gone from completely catatonic to downright chatty since she had met Mr. Carroll and heard the magic word, “Marine.” Lucy was on babysitting duty with Tommy and Jimmy, and they were all up in the treehouse, playing some kind of game involving pirates.
    Without even trying, we had all learned everything there was to know about Francine. She had three kids, all in their forties, and all with kids of their own. She had lived through her husband’s three rounds of cancer from his exposure to chemicals in Viet Nam, and she had watched him go from the ultimate fighter in the first round, to a man just hoping the pain would end by the third. She didn’t blame him for giving up on himself on a school playground in Tennessee, but she surely did blame him for giving up on her, just when she needed him the most. On the other hand, she was the picture of gratitude to my family, and was willing to help in any way she could.
    Francine assured my parents that she could shoot quite well, and convinced my father to let her wear a handgun. It was on her belt at all times. A couple of mornings later, Dad had put all of us through his version of basic weapons training. Even Tommy and Jimmy received a chance to shoot, but Dad was more concerned with teaching them the gun safety aspect than how to actually shoot. He figured the best way to do that would be to let them shoot and to get the curiosity out of their systems. They returned to camp with an obvious respect for the weapons, and it turned out that they learned their lessons well.
    Between Francine’s obvious confidence with the gun, and the fact that she seemed to be entirely recovered from the trauma of her husband’s death, Dad made the mistake of choosing her for his scouting trip to the schoolyard. The group that had refused to leave the school during the Breakdown were still there, as far as we could tell, and after a solid month, Dad felt some pressure to investigate. We all stood and watched as Dad and Francine headed toward the quiet schoolyard.
    Lucy gasped and asked, “What if they find her husband on the playground?”
    Mom clenched her jaw with the tension, and replied, “Your father and Arturo buried him by the tool shed. It was the only right thing to do.”
    Lucy breathed with relief. “Oh, good. That would be horrible to see.”
    “Yes,” Mom said, thinking about her husband walking into a potential nightmare. She probably couldn’t imagine any situation in which those people were doing well, and she was right.
    An hour passed. It was a hard hour for all of us. Even the young boys were watching carefully for any sign of Dad and Francine. We had seen enough by that point to know how much could go wrong, even though we couldn’t imagine what that might be. Kirk made a point of watching every point of the compass while the rest of us stared in one direction. I finally