"Wilbur, when you pull that trigger, you'll be standing here, and the seat of your pants'll be on the Grand Canyon."

Why should I have remembered that then?

Dad said that to me seventy-five years ago. He was an awful tease, and he had me believing that firing the shotgun would hurt me more than whatever it was I was planning to shoot. It came back to me as I sat by Pearl's bed, watching her thin chest struggle to lift the weight of the yellow sheet covering her. We had been married for fifty-three years, but the last eighteen months of her illness had compressed our lives into something flat and unrecognizable. It was like living in a period room at a museum -- everything was background and suspended movement. On the surface it looked nice -- an eighty-five-year old man taking care of his terminally ill wife -- but underneath, the living part that used to be there had dried out, and I felt more and more out of place moving through a house drained of everything but the past.

When Pearl fell into a coma the last month of her life, I knew she didn't want the feeding tube in her stomach or the IV in her arm. She had told me as much every time we visited a friend hooked up to pouches and bottles. The problem lay in the gap between knowing something and doing something about it. I had a gun in the closet, and Pearl would have wanted me to use it, but an end like that freezes everything forever. It's not entirely right to say you can't live on love, because you can, but sometimes love draws down hope so much that what you're left with is not life at all, just a room in a museum marked by a plaque, and a dim sense of what was.

My constant chafing at Dad to let me use the shotgun paid off the year I turned ten. He finally figured out I wasn't going to be scared off by his exaggerations of the kick. He gave me one shell and instructions not to point at anything I didn't intend to kill. Before turning me loose, he also made a hard case against shooting near livestock. It was the same year we had taken to bringing the cattle into the barn at night because of wolves.

One July day that summer I found a heifer acting strange near the stock pond. She was a beautiful animal -- a registered, Polled Hereford, deep hindquarters, perfect udder, nice markings -- but one of our Angus bulls had gotten loose during her first heat and mated her. She was too young to calve though, and Dad was sick about what had happened.

She was standing in a circle of trampled clover, tail hitched high in the air, her curly white face hanging down on her brisket. Unable to decide whether to lie down or stand up, she'd drop to her knees for a minute, and then struggle to get back up. The hide across her belly was stretched tight as a drum; so tight that Dad thought she might be carrying twins. With the birth sac starting to push out of her, she looked scared. I felt sorry for how uncomfortable she must have been with all her getting up and down.

The bird I downed with my first, closed-eye shot was a rust-colored sparrowhawk. I don't recall the make of the gun, but I do remember the sturdy, mute power of it in my hands, and the way the one shell weighed down my pocket like a chunk of hot uranium. Like Dad had told me, I carried the gun open at the breech, hoping that whatever I happened to scare up wouldn't be frightened away by the cold click of it snapping shut.

Pearl's coma had descended on her like a cloud of hushed crows, and I needn't have worried about the chance of her hearing the lighter sound of cylinder meeting barrel in my revolver. Sometimes to make sure, I took the gun out of the closet and practiced sitting with it in my lap by her bed. I watched for signs that might have shown she sensed the nearness of death: the flare of a nostril, a movement towards the other side of the bed. There weren't any.

It was obvious the heifer needed help. I slipped around behind her and started to tap her flanks with a switch, hoping to get her pointed to the barn. She seemed almost grateful for the choice, and responded to the switch by setting off slowly for the barn. It was around a quarter mile away, and Dad was waiting in the dark when we got there. We steered her into the pen on the south side of the barn and put down fresh hay. Dad took one look and told me to fetch some lanterns, along with a rope and halter. The sac was the size of a cantaloupe.

The sparrowhawk was perched on a post of an abandoned fenceline that cut through a stand of pin oak and walnut north of the barn. It was near dusk, and I had already passed on a sure shot at a meadowlark, as well as an outside chance at a rabbit. I didn't see the hawk right off. Adjusting my eyes to the spotty sunlight in the trees caused him to look like the jagged top of a rotting fencepost -- but as I stood just inside the treeline staring hard, his head swivelled and his body came into focus. I couldn't make out a color, but the hard and clean shape of his silhouette told me it wasn't a potbellied meadowlark or a curlicue-topped quail. Dad loved the quails' singsong whistle, and he had forbidden me to shoot them. It was perfectly quiet in the trees.

Other than an occasional soft groan, Pearl hadn't made a sound in a month, and the silence that surrounded her had crept throughout the house. The only interruptions to it were the sounds of my cooking, or the clink of the mail slot in the front door.

It was getting harder for the heifer to get back on her feet after she lay down in the pen, and she finally gave up and rolled on her side. It was an unusually cool July night, and clear. The stars shone as though someone had thrown handfuls of sugar to stick against the blackness of the sky. I could hear the heifer's drawn-out lowing all the way back at the house, where I had gone for the jackets.

The quiet in the trees was interrupted by the quick chattering of three red squirrels who scolded me as I fumbled in my pocket for the suddenly slippery shell. I squatted down, hoping they would stop betraying me if I could somehow make myself smaller by being closer to the ground. They weren't fooled, especially after the tightening muscles in my legs pitched me forward onto my knees, crackling last year's oak leaves. I saw the almost-pink underbellies of two of them circling down the trunk of a nearby walnut tree, angrily clicking their tongues. The other one kept his distance, twitching his spindly tail from his post on the branch of a small oak.

The area I was kneeling in was overgrown with oak scrub, and one of the sapling's branches made a jagged 'V' that framed the sparrowhawk. Surprisingly, all the commotion hadn't frightened him away, and he kept stock-still on his perch as I slid the gun into the crotch of the 'V.'

The last time I got the revolver out and sat by Pearl's bed, her face was lit up softly by the lamp that stood on the bedside table. It was amazing how much she looked like her mother Sarah, when Sarah was near death in a nursing home. A healthy Pearl bore little resemblance to her mother, but the cancer had taken its toll, and her face seemed to have drawn tight to her skull the same way Sarah's did right before she died. We were with Sarah that night, and together with our pastor, we held hands and prayed at the foot of her bed. The wrinkles on Sarah's eighty-seven-year old face had been pulled smooth and shiny, and the round domes of her cheekbones sloped down to thin blue lips, parted a bit by her shallow breathing. We didn't pray for miracles that night, only a painless end. That was miracle enough for all of us.

I didn't ask for guidance when I knew Pearl's end had to come, because it wasn't guidance I was after. I thought I knew what was right for her. It was a hard stretch to call her life living, but when that's all you have, who's to say? Our fifty years together counted for a lot in my mind, and her sad assurances that she did not want a lingering, painful death, assurances she made to me each time we visited a dying friend, made up for most of the rest.

I was with her throughout her sickness, and I watched her transformation into the very image of Sarah, with her high cheekbones, and wispy white hair brushed back from her shiny forehead. Right at the end I couldn't do much more to comfort Pearl than to hold her cool hand while I sat in the chair by her bed. By then I was worn out by hoping; what I prayed for instead was forgiveness for what I had decided to do.

When I got back to the pen with the jackets, the calf's head had emerged. One of its front legs had gotten ahead of itself, and was hung up under the calf's chin. Dad said that would never do; one of them, the heifer or her calf, would surely not make it in that awkward position. Somehow he got the heifer to her feet and put the halter on her, tying the lead to a fencepost. Being that the calf was all twisted up, he said we needed to get the other foot out, or get the one that was already out back in. The heifer was pushing too hard for us to reposition the calf, so Dad took off his jacket, rolled his shirtsleeves up to his shoulder, and began worming his hand into the heifer's vagina. There wasn't much leeway in there, and he was in up to his elbow before he caught ahold of the other leg and guided its small hoof out next to the one under the calf's chin. He had a worried look on his face, and the heifer's backside was starting to sway. The short lead on the halter forced her to keep her head up and facing straight ahead, but she was fighting it and trying to turn around to see what was going on behind her.

By then, the calf's head was completely out, but its legs were choking it. Dad grabbed the rope and tied a half-hitch around them, just above the small, pointed hooves. He played out the rest of the rope straight across the pen to the opposite side, pulling up the slack and tying another half-hitch around a fencepost with the other end. He told me to stand at the midpoint of the rope and push down on it.

The heifer let out a bellow when I pushed the rope. I let up right away, but Dad yelled at me to push down harder or we would lose them both. It pained me to do it, but I did as I was told.

In the trees that long-ago summer day, forgiveness for shooting the hawk was not on my mind, only the hope that my one shell wouldn't be wasted, and that I wouldn't part with the seat of my pants. Boys that age don't think of themselves as cold-blooded killers, and the power that comes from a gun is in some way disconnected from the actual taking of life.

The two chattering squirrels had given me up as a lost cause, and they joined the one in the oak tree. All three of them pranced nervously on a branch, snapping their tails in unison.

The heifer's eyes were darting frantically, her pink tongue waving around, licking at the bubbly mounds of saliva stuck on her jaw. I was pushing down on the rope for all I was worth, but I couldn't pull that calf out one inch more. Dad came and helped, but even then it was all we could do to get the calf out of her to its shoulders. By then it was too late, the calf was dead.

I swallowed hard to keep my heart down in my chest as my finger closed around the cold curve of the shotgun's trigger. The barrel pointed at the hawk seemed a mile long, and the BB-sized sight at the far end looked like a buoy bobbing in the middle of the ocean.

The heifer was confused and hurting, and she had stopped making noise. There was a dark rivulet of blood pulsing out of her, tracking down the slick leg of her calf. Dad told me we had to get it out fast or she'd hemmorhage to death. There was a catch in his voice that told me he didn't hold out much hope of saving her, but he leaned his two hundred pounds into the rope anyways, telling me to climb the fence near where the far end of the rope was tied. He wanted more leverage, and he told me to get on the rope with my feet and push down with everything I had. Every time I pushed down, the heifer let out a painful yip, and I found myself trying to go easy on her by not pushing so hard.

The hawk was still motionless, and as the tip of the barrel roamed up and down his body, I tried to keep my eyes open so I could steady my aim right on his middle.

I didn't have the luxury of distance when I aimed at Pearl. I could recognize her mother's drained face on hers, even under the yellow sheet I had pulled over it. I held the gun against her forehead and fumbled with the safety before settling my finger on the trigger.

In the end I couldn't keep my eyes open. I closed them when the sight passed over the breast of the bird and tugged at the trigger.

The blast exploded the silence.

When my eyes opened to the dry smoke of gunpowder, I saw that the hawk wasn't on the post anymore. After realizing that I was still in one piece, I got up and ran through the underbrush towards it.

He was fluttering in an elderberry bush that grew up around the base of the post. There wasn't much life left in him, but the only wound I could see was a small, red stain, high up on his white chest. His milky-pink eyelids were half-closed, and the black centers of his eyes were glassy and unfocused.

All of his fluttering had sifted him down through the outer branches of the bush to the middle of its tangled base, and when I snaked my hand in to get him out, he opened one wing in a last try to get away. The coppery underside of that wing flashed for a second, and then it was over.

The heifer's hemmorhaging had gotten worse, and there was a dark stain spreading on the hay under her rear end. Dad knew we had to hurry, and he climbed the fence and put his big boots next to mine on the rope and started pushing like he was the one going to die if we couldn't get the calf out.

There wasn't enough time. A whole night of tugging and pulling had worn the heifer's insides out, and right when the sun started to light up the eastern sky, she keeled over, her head held up at a crazy angle by the halter, and her rear lifted slightly off the bloody hay by the rope tied to her three-quarters born calf.

Dad said that calves sometimes have congenitally dislocated hips, and he figured that was what was wrong; the calf's hips had caught on the immature heifer's, causing her to hemmorhage from all of our fighting to get it out.

It was one of the only times I ever saw him cry -- losing both of them after trying so hard was a heavy blow. "We can't pretend to know God's plan," he said. "We did all we could."

I pulled the hawk out of the bush by his neck, and when I laid him out in my hand, his soft head drooped over the side of my palm. The branches of the bush had ticked up some of his feathers, so I preened them until he looked like a picture out of a book. He was warm, and his feathers were satiny and stiff.

The sheet covering Pearl had been ruffled by the shot, and I ran my hands over her one last time, smoothing the sheet over her quiet body. Blood soaked the yellow sheet over her forehead, reaching out in spidery veins like stray blood that finds its way into an egg yolk.

I went to the closet and got down a blue calico quilt she had sewn, unfolding it quarter by quarter over the bed. It tented up over the tubes running into her stomach and arm. I remembered her working on that quilt in her sun-filled sewing room, her sure hands gathering up stitches. She could never have imagined that it would someday be used for this. How could she have? How could she have imagined her slide into unconsciousness, her husband with a gun sliding out of his hand?

How could I?

I turned the lamp off, shut the door, and went into the kitchen to call the police.

Waiting for them to come, I washed the one cup and plate from my breakfast and cried over our life together. My father's congratulations on my one-shot aim in killing the hawk skipped through my thoughts.