Aunt Mary's Rifle

Mary Estelle Murray was my mother's mother's sister, my great aunt, but I just knew her as Aunt Mary. She was an enormously influential force of my childhood. She was a retired school teacher, never married, who even into her late '70's grew an incredible vegetable garden while finding time for us two kids and still giving a lot of hours to her church and community.  She taught me to garden, and that really stuck.  We had to literally steal her ladder to prevent her, at 78, from going up onto her steep roof and raking leaves off.  With the hindsight of near middle age I recognize her as one of the best people I've ever known, and as a child her status with me was somewhere between Jesus and Buddha. I'm no longer religious, but if more of the self-righteous zealots that clog the airwaves and tubes were like her, I'd consider relapsing.

Now, if you are expecting a story of how she used the above-mentioned rifle ardently and provided us with game galore, you will be disappointed. She did provide, in spades, but the most violent thing I've ever seen her do was disjoint a chicken from the Piggly Wiggly or maybe dispatch a snake with her hoe.  Not saying she wasn't capable, as a child of a depression-era farm I'm sure she did everything there was to do on it. 

Anyhow, not long after I killed my deer on Catalina my daddy told me I could have the loan (on a more or less permanent basis) of a .270 rifle.  I was happy to hear this, since I planned to buy one anyhow and they ain't super cheap.  It was a little bit roundabout getting it (nothing serious, just typical family relations) but when I retrieved it from my brother's safe and took it back to show it to daddy, he told me a simple story.

When Aunt Mary was dying in 1992, daddy did a lot to help take care of her, essentially voluntarily taking over the duties power-of-attorney and other such legal issues while he made sure she got the best care possible.  She did, unfortunately, have to stay in a nursing home for a couple of months (she was incapacitated by a series of strokes) but thankfully that situation didn't last very long.  I couldn't bring myself to be in the room when she died, but Daddy was, and one of the few times I saw him cry was when it was over.

According to Daddy, by SC law the executor of an estate can charge a fee to that estate for the services.  Since we didn't have a deer rifle (we hunted with shotguns and dogs) daddy decided us kids might want one and that it was fair to charge the exact purchase price of a Savage 110 .270 with scope at the local Ace hardware (a modest purchase, actually).  I remember him bringing home the gun, and shooting at targets in the field behind the house.  To my teenage self it kicked like a mule and was loud as all Hell. 

Unfortunately, I guess the timing was bad, since I was losing interest in hunting and my brother was following in my dad's interest in dog hunting.  My dad also admitted that it just didn't fit him right so he never used it himself.  It had sat in a closet or a safe all these years, with probably less than a box of rounds going through it.  It has not yet killed a deer.

So now that rifle is effectively mine.  And I'm taking it to Catalina.  Hopefully, with Aunt Mary's blessing, to make its first kill.