She stepped forward, over the line that was not a line in the gravel so much as a shared understanding of where private effort became public record, and the crowd quietened in a way it had not quietened for Ronnie or Pete or the older man, or even, in the end, for Danny. It quietened with doubt in it. She could hear the doubt as plainly as she had heard Danny's fifth shot ring true.
Somewhere behind her a phone was lifted. Somewhere behind her a man said, not unkindly and not quietly enough, that it was a shame her father was not here to see it, whichever way it went.
Willa set her feet.
Ahead of her the plate stood in the sand, small and rusty and leaning, and at its centre, invisible and absolute, the pin waited for its thirty-second year to begin, or to end.
Chapter 4: The Instructor's Daughter
When Willa Callen was six years old she could carry two empty rifle cases at once, one in each hand, provided nobody asked her to carry them far and provided her father walked behind her saying, at regular intervals, that she was doing the carrying and he was only doing the company. She remembered the weight in her shoulders more clearly than she remembered her father's face in those years, which troubled her when she was older until her mother told her that memory kept what it needed and that a face came back in other ways — in a doorway, uninvited, entire — and that the weight in her shoulders was a face, of a kind.
The range in those days was smaller, or she had been smaller, and for a long time she believed the two facts were the same fact. There had been no shade awning worth the name, only a corrugated strip over the benches that ticked in the heat and dripped all at once when rain came, which it did rarely and theatrically enough for the old men to talk about it for a month. There had been fewer banners and no broadcast truck. There had been her father, Tom Callen, in a shirt gone pale at the shoulders, with a notebook in his back pocket and a pencil worn to a length that other men threw away.
He was the range's volunteer instructor, which meant, in the language of committees, that he gave his Saturdays for nothing, and in the language of the range itself it meant something entirely different. It meant that if a kid turned up — shy, cocky, dragged there by an uncle, sent there by a mother who wanted him out of the house and into the custody of a skill — Tom would find the kid a place at the end bench, and a rifle that fitted, and a way of talking about the whole business that made it sound neither like a game nor like a war, but like work. Plain, repeatable work that a person could get better at by deserving to.
"Nobody is born holding still," he said to them, and to her, so often that she heard it in his voice in years when his voice was no longer available to be heard in any other way. "Holding still is a thing you practise, same as anything. Only nobody applauds you for practising it. So you have to be the kind of person who can do a thing without the applause. We'll see which kind you are."
He taught girls and boys in exactly the same tone, which at the time Willa did not know was a decision, and later learned had been a considerable one. She had grown up assuming a range sorted people by whether they listened. It was not until she was fourteen, and a visiting official from the county had watched her shoot a clean card and said, with genuine warmth, that Tom must be proud to have got a shooter out of a daughter after all, that she understood other sortings were going on around her, all the time, in the warm voices of people who wished her well.
Her father had answered, without looking up from the score sheet, "She got it out of herself. I just hold the pencil."
She had loved him for it so fiercely that she had had to go behind the equipment shed and be sick with a feeling she had no name for, which she later decided had been gratitude, arriving at an age when gratitude and anger are almost indistinguishable, because both of them mean that somebody has seen you and the seeing costs something.
That was the gift and the burden of Tom Callen, all in one. He saw the kids who turned up. He saw the nervous ones and the show-offs and the ones who had been sent because every other Saturday arrangement had failed. He saw, in particular, a skinny boy of eleven named Ellis who was not Sheriff Grant's son but his nephew, and who grew up to hand out water at this same final and to tell people, when Willa's name was read, that Tom Callen had once spent an entire winter teaching him to breathe without once making him feel like a problem that breathing needed to solve. And because Tom had seen so many people, so clearly, for so long, the range had difficulty, after he died, in seeing his daughter as anything but the place where he had last been visible.
"Tom's girl's here," they said, when she was seventeen and shooting in her own right and winning things that had her name printed on them in full.