Guns and Butter

I have something to say about guns. When I was an infant, about six months old, my father, a couple of other relatives, and a bunch of guy friends got rip-roaring drunk and started shooting real and imaginary rats in the rickety old farm house where we lived. My Aunt came by the next morning and, as the family story goes, she counted six holes made by gunshots in the crib in which I slept in the dining room of the house where the rat shoot occurred. That was the first time I was removed from the home because of appalling living conditions.

My next real experience with guns was when I was ten years old. At the time, my family lived in a very rural setting, gravel one-lane roads, dirt floors in some houses, and outside water. We were among the lucky ones with indoor plumbing, real floors, and a party line telephone connection. The closest family lived about a quarter of a mile away, straight uphill. Our driveway was another quarter mile long, going deeper into the woods. One bright summer morning, a young girl ran to our door screaming bloody murder. The little boy she was babysitting in the house trailer on the hill had shot her sister with a big rifle. My mother sent me running back to help the girl while she started making phone calls to get help, first interrupting an ongoing call on the party line, assuring the conversants that it was a real emergency, and finally connecting with the local authorities. Meanwhile, the girl and I, she was about two years older than I was, had made our way to the house trailer. Seemingly, nothing had changed in the room since she had left it. A four-year-old boy sat on a couch holding a rifle that looked many times longer than he was tall. A two-year-old boy sat at the feet of his brother on the couch doing nothing. An eight-year-old girl lay on her back on the toy-strewn floor, as if she were looking up at the ceiling. But she could not look up because there was just a huge red mass where she should have had a face, and eyes. The shooter must have been in shock. I don’t think he moved a muscle in the next hour while police came and people put the girl on a stretcher, and then she was gone. I walked home, alone, in the quiet canopy of trees with the sound of gravel crunching beneath my feet.

When I was twelve, we still lived in this country home, but other houses were growing up around us and the gravel had given way to black-top. The house was about five miles from the small town where I went to school. The house in the woods was deep in the woods, but only about 50 feet up the bank from a large river with a strong current. The river featured a small, iron one-lane bridge. There were side rails at the bottom and the dive from the top was easily 20 feet high, as if from a two-story house. As it happened, this was the night that a group of four young men, aged 18 to 24, broke into a house in town whose owner was known for having a substantial collection of guns, in cases on the walls. I knew the house well because its previous owner was my father’s best friend, who also died a violent death, but not by gun fire. In any event, this particular night, my father and I were alone at home, seated in a room closest to the river. We heard a loud vehicle stop on the bridge. Its passengers were also loud and they stood on the bridge, yelling to each other, and talking and laughing. They were drinking and the sound of smashing bottles on the iron sides of the bridge made a sort of fascinating sound. Eventually, we heard a large splash, followed by yells and panic and literally hundreds of gun shots into the water below. What had happened was that one of the four boys had backed out of the gun robbery at the last minute. His friends had taken him along to the home robbery as a hostage. They were not really sure what to do with him, so they shot him in his head and threw his body into the bed of the pick-up truck that had parked on the bridge. He was the package that they threw off the bridge, and when he hit that cold January water, he regained consciousness and started swimming. The panic and follow-up shots had been his friends’ attempts to shoot him while he frantically swam away from the scene. Our reality at this point was to hear a party of guys on the bridge, a large splash, and the disintegration of the party into panic and gun shots. We commented to each other, Dad and I, but didn’t even get up from our seats to see what was happening. About 30 minutes later, there was a scratching sound at the door. The dogs were in. They went to the door and began a frenzied barking. The scratching continued. My father went to get a gun to kill whatever animal was on the porch and disturbing the dogs. He held a handgun in his right hand as he opened the door with his left. As the door opened, the guy fell straight into the room, right at our feet. He survived the shooting. I used to see him around town. The bottom right half of his face was missing where the bullet had exited. Whenever I saw him, he always said, “Thanks.”

That was the same year that my mother had tried deer hunting. She saw a gorgeous six-point buck exit the woods into the clearing that surrounded the house. She decided to get a gun and shoot it. So, she ran into her bedroom, with me close on her heels. I leaned back against the dresser while she foraged in the closet for a gun, choosing a shotgun. She tossed the gun onto the bed while she turned to find ammunition, but the second the gun hit the bed it went off, blasting the dresser where I stood with a round of pellets. I of course jumped out of the way and miraculously was not hit. The holes in her dresser didn’t stop her though. She had the taste for blood so she grabbed up the gun and went outside and shot her deer. But, it didn’t kill the poor animal. Instead, it limped off into the woods leaving a trail of blood. She went inside. Not knowing the morning’s events, my father and my uncle were in the woods trying to erect a barbed wire fence when a bleeding, limping, horribly injured buck wandered into their site line and dropped in a heap near them. They were appalled at the condition of the animal, but it wasn’t dead, so they decided on a mercy killing. Neither of them had a gun, so they placed a fence post across the neck of the poor beast and rocked on it until the buck finally gave up on life.

That experience may explain to some extent and in some weird way, why my father moved to a life in which he was never more than an arms-length from a gun. The guns remained in my parents’ bedroom closet. They slept with one in the headboard of their bed. It was a large pistol. Another took up residence in the front hall closet. For my sixteenth birthday I received a small, pearl handled “purse gun.” My brother had more guns in his bedroom than I can describe. In the basement, where a substantial accumulation of old canned goods stood in anticipation of the coming apocalypse, an entire section was given over to guns and ammunition. One night, the dogs set off the alarm and it was discovered that some guy was stealing our car. Well, my dad had been in the tub taking a bubble bath (don’t ask me) and he ran covered in bubbles to the door, carrying the gun from the hall closet and started firing straight at the car. First, he blew out the front windshield. The back window was soon to follow. The car thief hadn’t been in the car after all. He was standing to the right of the car looking pretty surprised, before he started running.

My father continued to accumulate guns and there are more stories for sure. When my mother died he piled them on. There was a gun in his bathrobe pocket, a gun in every coat, a gun between the mattress and box spring, in addition to the gun that remained in the headboard. The rest of the family had a running joke that “Ole Sara” must have been good protection because he replaced her with so many guns. But really, we were all deeply afraid he would accidently shoot one of us. Or, maybe, he’d lose that last marble and become a shooter. The insatiable appetite for guns by a certain segment of our society is mirrored by our nations’ love for armaments. It is past time for our nation to end the carnage and finally pass meaningful gun-control legislation. The money saved can feed the hungry and house the homeless.