Paradise Sky

I said I needed to think on it a spell, but it was a short spell. I answered within a few moments of putting my mind to it.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll settle on your idea until I have to fly away from it.”

“Good, then,” he said, and he looked really happy about it. “Now, I think it might be a good time for us to exchange names. I didn’t do it right away in case you might need killing. I find it a lot easier to kill someone whose name I don’t know. By now I think we can make that swap of information without fear of murder, dismemberment, the loss of an eye, or a stretch of hurt feelings.”

“Willie Jackson,” I said.

“Mine’s Tate Loving,” he said.

“Glad to meet you Mr. Loving.”

This was the begi

4

Now, at this point I’m going to jump ahead a bit, because after us giving each other our names it was the begi

Some nights I would sit up there with that loft door open and find myself looking at those constellations Mr. Loving was always telling me about and the stories that went along with them. They nearly all seemed to end with someone getting killed or raped by a duck or a goose or a bull or some such and getting thrown up into the sky as a batch of stars by way of apology, though why that was supposed to be a satisfying reward I couldn’t figure.

That loft was mighty cozy. Half of it was given over to stacks of hay, but the other half had a good bed in it with solid ticking. There was a table and chairs, a kerosene lamp, and some odds and ends that made it a nice little home for a runaway ass-looker, part-time horse thief, and sometime farmhand.

I was given a hive of clothes that had belonged to Mr. Loving’s son, including lace-up work boots and riding boots with pointy toes made of fine, soft black leather. Them was for dressing up. If I had some place to go, you bet I would have worn them. As it was, I tried them on now and then with some of the finer clothes and walked around up there in the loft like I was about to strut off to a barn dance. It all fit like it had been made for me.

Thing that surprised me most was I was given plenty of time to myself at the end of workdays—or, rather, at the end of our di

When I wasn’t on my own time, me and Mr. Loving was working in the fields, bringing in this crop or that. While we worked he was telling me about something or another from one of his books. The books was stacked every which way in the house, and how he found what he was looking for I got no idea.

Some nights after we’d done our chores we’d sit in the main room and he’d read aloud for an hour or two from one of his books. In spite of myself I was learning a thing or two about all ma

I didn’t forget about Ruggert, but in time I began to relax somewhat, because it was rare anyone ever come down that road to Mr. Loving’s house. When they did, I was usually wearing my big hat and the clothes Mr. Loving had given me, so I wasn’t someone to immediately be taken for myself. Mr. Loving told me it was like a story by a fellow named Poe who wrote about hiding a letter in plain sight so those that was looking for it would overlook it. But it’s one thing to hide a letter and another to hide a large colored fellow with big ears.

One afternoon when the chores was light and I had plenty of rest time, Mr. Loving climbed up to the loft in the barn at just about the time I was thinking of playing with my pecker. Fortunately he caught me at rest, right before I came to that part. He snuck up on me like a ghost. He was standing on the ladder to the loft, and all I could see of him was his hat and his face peeking over the edge.

He said, “You got some time on your hands. I’d like you to meet me out at the sitting tree in about fifteen minutes.”

Mr. Loving went away, and I got up and put on my boots and hat, climbed down the stairs, and drifted out to the sitting tree.

I got there before he did, sat in one of the chairs, and waited. It wasn’t more than a minute when I seen him coming along from the house carrying a big wooden bucket in either hand. When he got to me, he set the buckets on the ground. I seen one of them was filled with what I thought at first was a bunch of mud balls, though I couldn’t figure on how or why that was. The other one had cardboard boxes of ammunition in it, and stacked on top of it was two pistols.

“You rub up against Ruggert, or them that might support him, it may be good if you could hit something with a pistol without having to throw it. I studied on that old revolver you had, and if the ammunition in it had been good, which it wasn’t, and had the pistol been in good shape and well oiled and well cared for, which it wasn’t, you’d have probably got so much kick from it that it would have come back on you and the barrel would have smacked you in the face hard enough to turn you into a white man. It’s an old muzzleloader, cartridge-converted. Whoever done the job might have been a good farmer but was a lousy gunsmith.”

“I don’t rightly know how it got set up,” I said, and that was true, though I suspected my pa might have been responsible.

“All right,” Mr. Loving said. He plucked one of the mud balls from the bucket and flipped it to me. I caught it and realized it was a hardened ball of clay, not mud. I balanced it in my palm.

“I made these myself. You got to bake them in the oven like a chicken after you get them all rounded out. Takes a lot of mud and a lot of time, so kind of watch any you might miss, see where they fall. We’ll try and collect what we can of them that don’t bust.”

“What about the ones you miss?”

“I don’t miss. Well, now and again, if I’m drunk or sick or blindfolded.”

He took the pistols out of the bucket, held one in either hand. “This here,” he said, balancing one of the pistols in his left paw, “is a Colt Peacemaker, .45 caliber. Probably no one makes a better pistol, though Smith and Wesson has some fine ones. It’s easy to use. Single action, which is a surer cock and better to aim with. Double action jumps around more, though with a single you got to take time to thumb the hammer back, but it makes for a more regular aim. This other one,” he said, bouncing it in his right hand, “is rarer. Got issued to some of us in the Civil War. It’s a LeMat revolver.”

“Do I really need to know what kind of pistol it is?”

“It makes you less ignorant to actually know what you’re talking about, so listen to me.”

I shut up then. Mr. Loving said, “The Colt .45 uses .45-caliber ammunition. That’s something even you can figure out, it being called a .45 and all.”

“Yep,” I said. “I got that part.”

“It’s a good gun, and this shorter barrel length is my choice, on account of it’s less likely to get snagged. Holsters tend to grab at it like a hand when you try to draw it quick. Regular holsters, that is. I got some that are hardened considerable by use of salt water and proper drying around a wooden frame; they hold a gun much better, and they got a hammer loop on them to help hold the pistols in, so you see some business coming your way, you got to get that loop off the hammer. You don’t like a holster, you can use a sash, but you got to file the sights off if you go that route. These pistols got their sights, so they wouldn’t be of much use that way. Another thing to do is to line your coat or pants pockets with leather, lightly grease the inside so you can get a smooth draw.