A Tale of Shame
It’s said that confession is good for the soul. Well, I don’t know about that. I do know it can be painful to admit one’s failings.
As midnight approaches I sit here behind my keyboard, sipping a Scotch and preparing for confession to a group of guys I know and like, yet don’t really know at all. Never met a one of them. Does it matter if they offer words of understanding, or encouragement, or maybe even absolution? Yes, I think it does.
My wife is in bed, still awake and reading. I’ve always been a night owl – she, only recently so. She’s accustomed to my late night sessions with the computer, or playing with little projects, or fooling around with “all of that gun stuff”. Earlier this afternoon I brought a gun in from the detached boat shed/workshop and she said “what are you going to do with that rusty old thing?” “I don’t know” I said, “maybe clean it up and hang it on the wall”. “Ugh” she said, not knowing its regal linage. I didn’t try to explain.
So there it sits in the corner, a few feet away. With a glance to my left I can see its rusty barrel and lock, its dinged and scratched wood, its missing thimble and ramrod, and its tarnished brass. I try not to look.
It wasn’t always like that. Once it was beautiful, at least in my eyes. I built it myself in 1963. The 13/16” .40 caliber Numrich barrel and the rough cast brass trigger guard and butt plate came from a Dixie Gun Works catalog. The lock and trigger plate were picked out of a box of junk parts at a gun show. The thimbles and nose cap were formed from sheet brass from a tiny long gone hardware store owned by a cranky old man. The stock – ah, the stock! Actually, I called it the “Pig $hit Stock”.
There was an abandoned pig farm on the Mississippi river batture that had fences made with scrap wood from the adjacent, and also abandoned, Freiberg Sawmill. That mill handled a lot of timber from South America, shipped up the Mississippi River. One of the corner posts on an inside pen in the nastiest part of the pig wallow was a piece of 3” x 8” rough cut mahogony that I pulled out of the stinking slushy ground. That wood smelled of pig excrement throughout the shaping process and for its first year of life as a gunstock. You could smell it when you shouldered the gun. I suspect that a little sanding would still produce a porcine aroma, even now.
It was a lovely little gun. Six and a half pounds of companionship. I didn’t know the lines were wrong, and I didn’t know it wasn’t representative of any particular style of muzzle loader in history. I didn’t know most of the furniture was poorly inletted. All I knew was it shot patched balls accurately, made a lot of smoke, and killed rabbits, squirrels, nutria, and tin cans as though they had been struck by the Hammer of Thor. All of my friends with their twenty-twos and thirty-thirties thought I was crazy.
But I learned a lot of what I know and love about muzzleloading with that gun. So why did I abandon it many years ago to hang near the rafters in an un-insulated structure in humid South Louisiana? Why did I look up at it now and then and think “it’s getting rusty, I ought to clean it up and oil it” – but never did? I don’t know why, and I’m ashamed.
Maybe I can redeem myself to that gun - just a little bit. Make a new thimble with sheet brass just the way I did forty-plus years ago. Clean up the lock. Shine the brass. Refinish the stock and clean up the inletting as much as possible. Drop a hundred and twenty bucks on a Green Mountain barrel in forty caliber, or maybe thirty-six, and let her make smoke again. Maybe, just maybe, she’ll forgive me.
Last edited by Semisane; 05-30-2012 at 06:07 AM.