Grammy taught him how to shoot when he was eight. She let him use the little pearl-handled derringer she kept under her pillow at night and made him promise not to tell Ma. She said when he got big enough, she'd show him how to clean the revolver.
Every Sunday, he ran to her house after church while Ma and Matty and Pa went home to make supper. Sometimes, she gave him cookies she baked her own self and let him play with Grampa's old toy soldiers.
The best days were the ones they spent tramping down weeds in her backyard and chasing rabbits and squirrels out of the bushes. The first time they brought meat for supper, he couldn't tell anybody but he would swear he'd never tasted anything better - not even the orange Matty brought home from school once.
When she died, he was seventeen. He didn't spend Sunday afternoons at her house anymore. As soon as the preacher closed up his book, he took off for the roughest end of town and mingled with the pilots who drank there. They slapped him on the back and bought endless rounds of beer or whiskey and told him stories about worlds he'd never even heard of.
She left him a letter on her best paper. He opened and read it in the backyard where only the squirrels and the rabbits could see him cry. When he was done, he folded it up neatly into the envelope and tucked it in his shirt. He carried it with him until the night he got rumbled on Persephone.
He walked through her house, running his hands over her pictures and gewgaws and stirring up dust. The derringer was under her pillow, right where she left it that last night. The revolver was at the back of the drawer where she kept the family Bible.
He left the derringer with his ma when he was nineteen and bound for the black. He promised himself that the revolver wouldn't leave his side until he saw his Grammy again. It was the least he could do for the woman who taught him everything he knew.
