Read Online Lake People by Abi Maxwell - Free Book Online

at that, and gave Malcolm’s back a tap so hard that the boy keeled forward. When he came back to, Mike Shaw said, “Out west, Malcolm. Open road, open land. A man needs his freedom, you understand. You like babies now but you’ll be a man one day.”
    Malcolm said yes and asked only, “How long?”
    Mike Shaw said, “Nope.”
    That gave Malcolm courage. Or a kind of anger that he had not felt before and that certainly disguised itself as courage. He asked how Mike Shaw would hold up his end of the deal.
    Mike Shaw clapped his hands together and gave a little laugh, and then, seeing the boy was serious, he said, “Anything you like.”
    To care for his mother, to be a man, that is what Malcolm would like. He said, “A gun. I would like a gun and I would like to learn how to shoot it.”
    “Well then,” Mike Shaw said.
    They shot off the dock, with Malcolm saying a silent apology and prayer about the noise and the danger of it. It was a rifle and the first shot made him buckle back and fall into Mike Shaw’s firm body and Mike Shaw said, “There we go. Now you canprotect my woman.” Next shot he told Malcolm to kneel down so he didn’t fall again.
    “I am not a child,” Malcolm said, and he shot the gun and did not waver and next he said, “I would like to take it home with me.”
    “Your gun,” Mike Shaw said.
    “You cannot expect me to carry a gun through town.” Where had his bravery come from? Malcolm could feel it, a slow boil in his chest.
    “Well then,” Mike Shaw said, his voice lofty, a way to put an end to the child’s demands. Still, he went to his truck and found the boy a duffel bag, which fit nearly the whole gun into it, along with the squash and cornstalks. It would do.
    “Look,” June said when they returned inside. She was at the window and Malcolm went to her just as a loon made its dive under. “Guess where it will come up,” she said.
    Malcolm pointed and together they counted and in forty-eight seconds the loon rose just where he had said it would. Mike Shaw tapped the boy on the back and the boy slung the bag over his shoulder and it was the last Malcolm would see of him for years and years to come.
    In his mind, things had been much different. Perhaps the turkeys will emerge sometime before Thanksgiving, he thought once, but the thought was fleeting. Mostly Malcolm thought that sometime in the future he could learn to hunt. First he would put the gun in the woodshed, where Sophie would not find it. Slowly Malcolm would grow accustomed to the weapon. He would carry it in the woods. The Randolph boys, they must know how to hunt, and Malcolm rather quickly imagined asking those boys to teach him. With this skill, oh, how he couldimpress his father. Perhaps even teach his father. Shooting a turkey for this holiday was not something Malcolm had expected to do.
    The lane of old maples stopped just as the hill crested and the land spread open and the two houses—Malcolm’s own and the Randolphs’—came into view. The Randolphs’ house lay to the west and Malcolm’s tall white colonial just twenty steps above. To stop and simply watch the sweep of the land—Malcolm was not accustomed to that, but now he did it and it felt the sort of thing a man would do. Standing in that way he decided that his house was beautiful, strong and solid, and that it looked like it had come from the time of the revolution. Instinctively he began to march his feet. Inside he hummed. The wind swept from the north, up through the lane of trees. Malcolm turned. There the biggest of all the turkeys stood perched on the stone wall. The gun was loaded. Without thought or complication Malcolm took the gun from the bag, aimed, and shot. The turkey’s chest rose outward like a balloon and then sank in a series of convulsions. The flutter of her family behind her was loud and quick. Now, alone, that great big turkey lay. From where he stood he could see a small red stream emerge. Was it a leaf? Yes, surely a