The phone rang around noon yesterday. I was still lying on the couch, swaddled in a blanket, periodically hacking up oyster sized lungers, half delirious from swigging on the bottle of Nyquill. It was little brother Smokey. "Hey, what are you doing?" he asked. I explained my regime of cough syrup and sweating that kept me put. "Stay where you are." he said "I'm driving "Jake" over on the bike." I wasn't going anywhere.
A few months back, anticipating Spring turkey season, I had asked Smokey if I could borrow the Old Man's 12 ga. double barrel Parker shotgun? In those good old days of the 1980's, when I was still living on the Lower East Side (not hunting), the old man decided to give away his guns. At the time he and Smokey were decimating the Ct. goose population and he had bequeathed that beautiful gun to my little brother. When I started hunting again in the 90's "Jake" accompanied the Old Man and I on countless turkey hunting trips. A few years back, in such pain he couldn't stand it, laying on his death bed in late April, my father closed his eyes and moaned "Wake me up opening day." He never saw another season.
A little background: There's small silver plaque attached to the breech of that gun. It states- "Jake" Jacob McKinstry, William McKinstry, Edmund Ayres, Richard A. Osterhout, Ross J. Osterhout. We grew up in the small upstate NY town of Montgomery. Those names are a piece of history. In the midst of the gun control debate it is never mentioned how a gun can be a family heirloom. I don't know the full story of how the Old Man came to own "Jake". I remember him telling me how he had admired the gun and how one day E. Ayres handed him a couple of pieces of long pipe, wrapped in oily rags. It was that beautiful Parker. He was incredibly honored.
We all grew up admiring the sweet lines and smooth opening "click" of that finely crafted instrument. Ray Key (my turkey hunting guru) and I would always bust my Old Man's balls for "dragging around 20 feet of antique pipe" while we carried extra full choke, modern killing machines. The Old Man would just smile and pet "Jake". Truth be told, he rarely missed a strutting gobbler.
So now "Jake" lays on the couch next to me waiting for opening day. It's Smokey's gun. I'm just borrowing it. I love it as much as anyone can love an inanimate object. It reminds me of all the good times I had hunting with my father. I'm honored to know that Smokey trusts me enough to lend it out. It's a talisman, an heirloom that will never be registered with the government (no matter how the laws change). It's the kind of gun that is indicative of how deeply people can feel about their rights to bear arms. I'm not a member, nor a big fan of the NRA and all it's hysteria in the gun debate. But when it comes to "Jake".........my cold dead hands.
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