The Collected Stories of William Humphrey by William Humphrey Page A

it off the table, and settled himself comfortably. They all sat waiting intently, each securely in possession of his spot.
    Sister yawned and rubbed the sleep from her eyes and raised herself to her feet with a mighty stretch.
    She made her way down the dark hall, stepping over a pail someone had left in the way. Passing the windows, she could see the cats listening to her approach and gathering in the moonlight near the door, purring all together.
    Sister held the door open. Huckleberry was the first one in, and Sister, with a smile and a nod, watched him make straight for his spot under the Swedish fireplace.

The Shell
    T HIS WOULD be the season, the year, when he would have the reach of arm to snap the big gun easily to his shoulder. This fall his shoulder would not be bruised black from the recoil. The hunting coat would fit him this season. This would be the season—the season when he would have to shoot the shell.
    It was a twelve-gauge shotgun shell. The brass was green with verdigris, the cardboard, once red, was faded to a pale and mottled brown, the color of old dried blood. He knew it intimately. On top, the firing cap was circled by the loop of a letter P . Around the rim, circling the P , were the two words of the trade name, Peters Victor; the gauge number, 12; and the words, Made in USA . The wad inside the crimp of the firing end read, Smokeless ; 3¼; 1⅛-8. This meant 3¼ drams of smokeless powder, 1⅛ ounces of number 8 shot—birdshot, the size for quail. It was the one shell he had found afterwards that had belonged to his father, one that his father had not lived to shoot. So he had thought at first to keep the shell unfired. But he knew his father would have said that a shotgun shell was meant to be fired, and he, Joe, had added that any shotgun shell which had belonged to him was meant to hit what it was fired at. For four years now it had been out of Joe’s pocket, and out of his hand fingering it inside his pocket, only to stand upon the table by his bed at night. For four years now he had been going to shoot it when he was good enough, but the better he became the further away that seemed to get, because good enough meant, though he did not dare put it to himself in quite that way, as good as his father had been.
    He had been in no great rush about it during those first two seasons afterwards, then there had been time—though now it seemed that even then there had been less time than he admitted. But on opening day of the third, last year’s season, he had suddenly found himself sixteen years old—for though his birthday came in May, it was in November, on opening day of quail season, that he really began another year—time was suddenly short, and then overnight gone completely, after that day when he returned with the best bag he had ever taken and, in his cockiness, had told his mother about the shell, what he had saved it for and what he meant to do with it.
    He had not allowed himself to forget that at that moment he could hear his father saying, “Do it and then talk about it.” He had argued weakly in reply that he was telling only his mother, and then it was not his father but the voice of his own conscience which had cried, “Only!” Because whom alone did he want to tell, to boast to, and because already he knew that that was not what his father would have said, but rather, “Do it and don’t talk about it afterwards either.”
    She had seemed hardly surprised to learn about the shell. She seemed almost to have known about it, expected it. But she handled it reverently because she could see that he did.
    â€œAren’t you good enough now?” she said.
    â€œHah!” he said.
    She was turning the shell in her fingers. “I always knew nothing would ever happen to him while hunting,” she said. “I never worried when he was out with a gun … Well,” she brought herself up, “but I worry about