He said the word standing the way other men might have said a name.
"No bench," he went on. "No rest. No sling braced against a post, no knee on the ground, no leaning on your neighbour, however fond of him you may be." A small laugh went along the line, grateful for anything it was allowed to laugh at. "You hold the rifle, the rifle holds nothing but you. That is the whole of it."
Willa Callen, standing three paces behind the firing line with her father's rifle now in her hands, felt the familiar and unfair wish that the rules might be made longer. While Grant was speaking she did not have to be looked at. She could look, instead, at the middle distance, where the heat was already beginning to work on the air, and pretend that the morning would go on explaining itself forever.
It would not. She knew the order as well as she knew the grain of the stock under her palm. Ronnie had shot. Pete had shot. An older man from the county over, a quiet man with forearms like rope, had shot and shaken his head at his own card before any judge could shake it for him. Danny Mercer was still to shoot, and so was she, and because the organisers liked a story as much as any crowd did, they had put the defending finalist and the one nobody had expected in the last two places, in that order of billing if not of shooting.
Grant turned a page on his clipboard, though Willa was fairly sure there was nothing on the new page that he had not memorised in the truck on the way out.
"The target," he said, "for those of you who have come out here for the first time and are wondering what all the fuss is about, is that plate."
He pointed, not with any drama, down the empty lane.
Everyone looked, although everyone had been looking, on and off, all morning.
It stood alone in the sand at a distance that made fools of the eyes. From the line it was not imposing at all, and that, Willa's father used to say, was the cruelty of it. A big target forgave you in public. A small one told the truth in private, through somebody else's binoculars, a long time after you had already lowered the rifle and decided what kind of day you were having. The plate was rectangular, rusty at its edges, paler where years of weather had scoured it, set on two legs that drove into the sand at a slight and permanent lean, as if it had once been knocked sideways by the wind and nobody had thought it worth straightening. It had been hit, over the years, often enough that its surface carried a history. It had also been missed, clean and entirely, by men who had walked off this gravel afterwards and driven home in silence with their rifles in cases behind the seat.
"In the centre of the plate," Grant said, "there is a raised pin."
At this distance the pin could not be seen at all, and Willa could feel the crowd understand that and resent it a little. They had driven out on a dirt road in hard sun to watch a thing they would not, in the end, be able to see happen. That was the nature of the Standing Final, and it was why half the old men who claimed to love it also claimed, in the same breath, that it had been better before the phones.
"The pin is the dead centre of the plate," Grant said. "It has been there since the first challenge, thirty-one years ago. A shot on the plate scores. A shot that takes the pin clean takes the bonus, and takes the day, whatever the rest of the card says."
He paused.
"It has not been done."
He did not dress it up. He did not need to. Thirty-one years settled over the gravel more heavily than any speech could have made it settle. Willa heard the man in the straw hat murmur something to his neighbour, and this time the neighbour did not answer louder.
Grant told them, because the rules required it and because he believed, privately, that a crowd which understood a thing behaved better while it watched it, what had come closest. In the fourth year a schoolteacher from the north of the state had clipped the edge of the pin and set it spinning, and for one held breath the whole range had believed, until the judges walked down and found the bright mark sitting half on and half off, a judgement that had been argued about in bars for a winter. In the eleventh year a left-handed boy of nineteen, who had shot with his cap turned backwards and his father's wedding ring on a cord around his neck, had put a shot so close that the plate had rung true and the pin had shown a smear, but a smear was not a strike, and the boy had taken it well, which people remembered longer than they remembered his name. In the twenty-third year, on a day when the wind had dropped to nothing at noon in a way that had made even the officials look up at the sky, a woman — the only woman before Willa to reach the last five, a fact Grant stated plainly and without looking at her — had put three shots in a hand's breadth of the centre and gone home with the second card of the day, and with a line in the little printed history they sold at the gate for two dollars.