Chapter 6: Look at One Thing Only
The notebook was smaller than people expected, and Willa had stopped trying to explain that to anyone years ago. They imagined, when they heard about it at all, a leather volume with her father's wisdom marching down its pages in capital letters, something suitable for a display case in the clubhouse, next to the team photographs where Tom Callen stood at the end of the row with his arms folded and his cap pushed back, grinning like a man who had heard the joke a moment before everyone else. The truth was a pocket notebook with a cracked green cover, bought in a strip of five from a discount store, its elastic band long gone, its pages swollen with range dust and one summer's rain. Most of it was not wisdom at all. Most of it was scores, wind notes, a phone number for a man who repaired boots, a shopping list in which ammunition and onions appeared without embarrassment on the same line, and a sketch, very bad, of her mother asleep in a chair with her mouth open, which Rose pretended to be offended by and had in fact once tried to steal. Wisdom, in Tom Callen's handwriting, turned up rarely and without announcement, usually in the margin, usually sideways. On the last written page, in pencil softened by twenty years of thumbs, there were eleven words. Look at one thing only. Let everything else be weather.
Willa had read those words so many times that they had stopped behaving like reading. They behaved like a door. On the morning of the standing final she did not take the notebook out of her bag at the range, because rituals, her father had taught her in deed if not in word, die the moment you start performing them for an audience. She had read it, as she always did, at home, at the kitchen table, at five in the morning, while the kettle made its old-man noises and the street outside Rose's house was still the blue-grey colour of a held breath. Her mother's shift at the school kitchen started at six. Rose was already in her uniform, already moving between the fridge and the counter with the brisk economy of a woman who had run a household on arithmetic other people would have called impossible, and she put a mug down beside the notebook without looking at it, the way you do not look at someone else's prayer.
"You'll eat after," Rose said. "You never eat before, don't start inventing things at twenty-three."
"I'm not inventing. I'm sitting."
"You're sitting at it," Rose said, and put toast in front of her anyway, because mothers and coaches share the conviction that advice improves with toast. "Your father used to sit at it too. Drove me mad. A man can make a silence last longer than a mass."
Willa ate the toast. The notebook lay closed by then. The eleven words were not for the kitchen; they had already done their work, which was to remind her where work happened. It happened at dawn, over years, in cold that got into the knuckles, when nobody's phone was up and the only witness was a magpie on the range fence deciding whether she was worth its attention. The final, she had come to understand, was not where a shooter was made. The final was only where other people found out.
She was nine the first time her father set her properly to a standing shot, though she had been around rifles, in the way range children are around them, for as long as she could remember — not as toys, never as toys, but as serious, unglamorous objects with rules attached to them like burrs. Tom had run his open mornings for any kid who turned up, which in practice meant the children of ranch hands, the shy, the broke, the ones whose parents worked Saturdays and needed somewhere safer than a parking lot for a child to be earnest in. He charged nothing. He kept a tin for donations that richer parents filled and poorer parents were never, ever seen to be watched near. "A range that only teaches children with money," he said once, to a committee man who suggested fees, "will produce exactly the champions it deserves, and bore the rest of us to death." Willa grew up fetching scorecards, sweeping brass, learning names, being useful, and absorbing, by osmosis as much as instruction, her father's central heresy: that attention was a form of respect, and you paid it to one thing at a time, completely, or you were only sightseeing with a rifle.
"Pick your thing," he would say to the kids on the line, walking behind them with his hands clasped behind his back like a vicar with a secret. "Not the score. Not the boy next to you, especially not the boy next to you, he's a disaster and proud of it. Not your dad's face. Not the wind, the wind is weather, the wind will do what it does and you will do what you do after it. One thing. The smallest honest thing you can see. Look at one thing only, and let the rest be weather passing over a house. The house doesn't chase the weather. The house stands there."