Stories. A Fairy, Once

Brightly Colored Burdens, Brian Kershisnik

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread...
The Song of Wandering Aengus
W. B. Yeats

Once I thought I saw a fairy.
No, once I thought what I was looking at was a fairy, and I thought so for really a long time, as time goes. It was this time of year, just the turn from summer to fall when the mountains are rust and red and russet and pumpkin and golden and all the colors in a bonfire but below them, where the people live, only the black walnuts, boxelders and locusts have begun to show the yellow under their green. Xanthophyll, rich and glowing.

It happened because my parents had purchased a bit of real estate, a small rectangle of land mostly covered by a large square red building built of large square red sandstone blocks. It had been, in its time, the town hall, movies had been shown there, boys used to send the skinniest kid down the coal shoot to open the door from the inside so they could play basketball there. I wouldn't have done it for money, a bet, a dare or a threat. That basement is haunted and the coal room is pure evil. Tell you about that sometime. It was first a dance hall, Rebel Hall, built because the powers that be frowned on drinking at the church dances across the street. There used also to be an open-air dance floor in Kanosh, with magical colored lights and a bandstand and a snackbar, but the city tore it down and they only dance once a year now in Kanosh, in the park on the 24th of July. The main floor of the building my parents bought is one big room, two tall stories high, with a pressed tin ceiling and wood floors where the out-of-bounds lines and the painted key are wearing away beneath the basketball standards. Nearly a full court. We used to roller skate there after school in the winter when I was little. We used, sometimes, to sit around at home and talk about how we could live there, someday, build a house for us within the sandstone shell. Some of us were excited by this prospect, some were terrified and some angry; these reactions shifted by turns among as we aged and altered.
I couldn't say, now, what my parents originally, truly, wanted the building for, thought they could use it for, other than for being old and wonderfully cool and holding an almost endless amount of stuff, first just theirs, then, slowly, stuff from everyone in the family, here a little, there a little, you almost never see it come but it grows and grows. Piles and piles of stuff to skate around. An empty building with a tight roof is not conducive to right thinking, not straightforward or clean or simple for people. With enough storage you never have to own up to this table you bought for nearly nothing and which would be worth nearly something if you gave it two weeks of your life in stripping, patching and repairing. Never have to face clothing you were sure to fit into, again, someday. If you were a Mormon (and we were) you could collect food storage but never have to wrap your house around it. What if you could just keep all the things that must have meant something to all the dead people who never coped with their junk before they shed it for good? What if you had so much space, cheap space, that simple geometry was never going to force you to answer to yourself for the load you carried? Well, then you'd have what, over the years, crowded itself into what my family calls The Old Building. Piles, stacks, heaps, mounds, troves, caches, bundles, knots, accumulations, collections, messes. Things don't want to be tossed aside, they want to be kept, counted, told over, petted and planned on. They want to snuggle up against our warm human skin, wrap around our legs and arms, nuzzle where we breathe moist and regular, twine and twist through our thoughts, even if only for a moment now and then. That's enough, that will keep objects from turning to dust, from blowing away, forgotten. Children exploring backlots and outbuildings learn to be careful what they pick up; things come with snags and burrs and claws and hooks. They stick. Turn it over, check for spiders. Remember that journeys of acquisition leave foxtails in your sneakers; you can never get those out.

When I was grown and the painter settled it into his heart that he would not teach or be in other ways sensible, just paint and paint, we bought The Old Building on very easy terms from my mom and dad. The painter cleaned, cleared, scraped and seared the building and bought it to him, to his heart and to his soul. Maybe I'll think about that quest another time, about how so many people had set down things in The Old Building for a moment, only for a moment, and not one of those people wanted anyone, certainly not this painter who wasn't even an actual family member, not a Christensen at all no matter how he pronounced what he called his last name, to tell them it was time to come back on in here and take up this burden again. He persevered, he conquered and dominated and for those pains and all that exposure to hantavirus, the world's best studio he achieved, and of it gained an untold measure of painterly satisfaction. That doesn't come into this story, this story is about a fairy, but it might come into another story, another day. You can come see him in his painted glory, if you like, this Saturday, September 25th, from 1-5 in his briefly open studio. But that information has no place here.

When I saw the fairy outside, around back, it was early days yet, the building stood empty and echoed with possibility and with a gathering of otherwise homeless ghosts.

Hor. Day and night but this is wondrous strange!
Ham. And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Hamlet

I was exploring.
The Old Building came with only a strip of land around it, an easement on the east of four or five feet, maybe double that on the west and a bit more along the back. At that time in back, on the south side, there was a great, dried out, disused barn. It belonged to the Turners; their lot fronted Main street, ran east to west and backed The Old Building, which fronts on Center street. I never trespassed in that barn, never a single step, which is marvelous and strange to me now that I am old and turn it over in my mind. I would write, if this were fiction, that the child I was would have overstepped boundaries, would not have felt right and easy without knowing what sort of things and places bordered my things and places. We never did, to my knowledge, not any of the sisters. I find as I review my life I'm deeply, disappointingly law abiding, it shows up again and again, then too the barn was frightening in its own right, old and somber and sad from emptiness. I left it strictly alone. It burned to the ground not so long ago, scared the painter to death, sure it was his studio, and the fire probably would taken his Old Building had its walls and roof been other than metal and stone. Stupid, bored, destructive children alone and filled with possibilities. No surprise there, no plot to speak of, not really.

I was poking around in the quiet late afternoon, just exploring the back strip of land on the first day my dad took me over there with him because now this was ours.
And I saw the fairy and the fairy saw me.
This is what I saw and how it happened.
I came around through the old knotty, bumpy boxelder trees to the quiet tangly back part and there was a bunch of junk there, like there always is behind a place people have used and used. Those back parts are like whirlpools and eddies; flotsam and leaf mold and strange large iron implements and partly burned milled lumber and rolls of fencing and baling wire and maybe a bucket and some weird plastic lids swirl around and just settle there in the rye grass, the cheat grass and the mustard. I was cataloging all those things when I realized a fairy was watching me across the back of an overturned cast iron bathtub. Seeing him (it was a him) more than froze me in place, it nearly dispatched me, deprived me of my breath and will. Both of us stared, very still for a long, long time, as time goes.
The fairy (in my mind at the time I called him an elf; I would have called something smaller, more brightly colored and winged a fairy. I've learned a thing or two since then) had his hands resting on the tub, close to his cheeks and was watching me with the part of his face that showed above the curve where the bottom of the tub would become the side. Just the top half of his face, no mouth or chin. Nose, two eyes, two hands and tiny fingers and he had on a hat, maybe ears and a little hair. He did not seem very happy and he did not move. My heart hit the inside of my chest so hard I thought it would bruise, would split. Real. He was real and he didn't go away or turn into something awful and dumb like the shirt you hung over the back of your chair when you got into bed. He kept his hands on the tub and stared and I stared and my breath burned and cut me because the fairy was real. Real. Can you understand where I was? Where I suddenly found myself? A chipped enamel kettle would have been an epic find, a square-headed nail a treasure, a pretty bit of patterned china a jewel, a chunk of etched and crazed blue or purple glass from a old broken power line insulator a charm and token to keep forever in my private box of lovelies, but instead I had walked into a real fairy. Not an arrowhead or a painted china marble or even a silver dime. A living fairy that could see me, too. Real. Looking at me in the soft, silent golden air of a day in early autumn in a backlot in Kanosh, in America. At ten I grasped the delicate irony, even the gentle indignity of the situation. Not in Cornwall, not in Japan, not in India. Just in the no man's land between Turner's barn and The Old Building. Not even Olde. Just old. American Fairy.

Such an imposition, such an invasion, but I was entitled; I had studied and believed. I lifted my right foot slowly, so slowly it jerked, as slowly as my hair was growing, and he held steady. So I set it down like glass, like a glass foot on a granite world and I was one step closer. He didn't move and he didn't turn into a combination of old ski cap and dried out cowboy boot. He remained what he was, still and watchful. I marshaled all my resources so as not to faint or scream because that would be toweringly stupid, an idiotic thing to do just then and grew six years older while I stepped without breathing, stepped like someone living in a world of honey, like the golden light slanting through the yellow boxelder trees with dust motes all floating silent and calm was really honey and not air, stepped again. He didn't run, he watched. He let me get close, one terrible, heartrending step at a time, just watched me come, dark eyes gleaming. He let me come within a foot of his tub before, between a step and another step he suddenly dissolved into plumbing parts on the bottom of the tub, looking nothing at all like the fairy I had until that moment been, well, hunting. Stalking. Believing and approaching. To claim, to have been right about, even if I could never touch, never tell. Just to know, with joy and such world-filling love but also with proof, to know with my brain rather than the heart that had known from the first moment he looked at me and for the years and years before that. He left me as alone as I will ever be.

I'm not going to hurt you, please don't not be. Unless being made a proof hurts and undoes you.

My children build fairy houses, especially the oldest and the youngest. One fall day the sisters took all the children, little ones and teenagers, to a tiny tributary of the creek in our canyon in Kanosh, to a wonderful bank under weeping trees, gnarled roots and half-buried stones and floating logs and mossy stepping stones and cress (don't eat it, no matter what anyone tells you) and they made a fairy town till it got too dark, ports and piers and islands and mansions and huts and stairs carved into the bank and paths and bridges and oak cups and tiny boats laden with end-of-summer gatherings, so much stuff, so many things. After, we went home to a fairy tea, tiny magical foods (this part was not my part, I'm not so good at this part) and we all made beautiful and frightening masks from the fiercely colored leaves we had collected, piles and mounds and troves of leaves. Those masks hung in bedrooms for years, shouting at us with their bonfire leaf eyebrows and noses. Happy things, just the top parts, no mouths or chins. My middle child asked me only a day or so ago as we walked among the golden trees, "Do you remember the leaf masks we used to make? We never do that anymore," and she sighed with longing for her little-girl days and with frustration at the people we've allowed ourselves to become. The real is that if anyone gathers the leaves and the face forms and the glue, spreads them out on the table, sits down to work, she will blow through headed for her job but she will forbid us to put anything away because she is absolutely making a mask tomorrow when she has hours of homework and dance practice and after that days of leaf mess will go by till we put all the things away and one day, later, she will suddenly say, "Did you guys make masks? Was it fun? I want to see. How come I never get to do anything?" And she will sigh at what her life has become, filled, stacked, piled and knotted with too many things she enjoys. Do you remember the things we used to do? When the real is that we did this, once. No less real, for all that.

My youngest shows me, on every walk, every hike, places. "Ooh, come over here, Mom, come see this place." I know what she means, what she looks for. A place to build a house, sheltered within an already magical, accidentally perfect spot. A place to hold the things she would bring, sticks and rocks and grass, for making houses. A house you buy to yourself, to your soul, to your heart. A Faerie place. It hurts her a little, bruises her heart, the tug of these places while her brother is so far away, too far away to build with her, to send tiny boats laden with gatherings of late summer things from his teensie upstream warehouses to her bitsy mercantile establishment further down and to receive as payment acorn cups or buttons or swirled marbles or the tiny black seeds shaken out of poppy heads.

I wonder if on a day, someday, one day, she, he, I will see a fairy, still and staring from behind a boxelder tree gone yellow in the early fall. Xanthophyll, always there under the green, under the life-giving chlorophyll. Real. Truly. As it is undeniably real, is it also enough? Enough to let be, let go, walk slowly away, glass feet on a granite world, the seen and the unseen which is believed and hoped for living together in an unexpected and accidental place. A home. It was never a question of keeping nature's first green; the leaves are always gold and green, red and orange too, when they can manage it; unhampered, undefined by the little we can see. When they grow old enough, in their dying, as they shed what have been necessary things, they unpack their hearts and we can finally, briefly, admire their flaming fierceness. I'm wanting to believe I can grow old enough to remember, claim, own, the real of what I look at, regardless of the things I cannot see. Without proof, without hurt.

Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.
E. B. White

Please, don't not be.

Noah's photo

Life. Black Powder

The storyteller is talking about hunting. He asks, "Black powder? How many of you have gone on a black powder hunt?" and I raise my hand. I don't always raise my hand when the tellers ask questions. Questions like,
"I had a friend when I was young. Any of you have friends?"
"How many of you have ever yelled at someone, been really angry?"
"Have any of you ever had a parent?"
Sorry, but nope. I know they're trying to ease into their story but, no, not gonna grace that with a response. My youngest leans over, concerned. "Mom, you have a parent. You yell. You should raise your hand," and she tugs at my arm.
I push it down. "No, honey. I don't have to be in this conversation." She worries about me. It's because where she is dutiful, loving and good, I am allergic to annoyances, to accidentally picking up obligations, like cat hair on a black sweater.
But this one's different, this is a legitimate question. This I'll answer. Turns out, if they are to be believed as they lift their hands, a surprising number of audience members hunt or have hunted with powder and shot. Or, I don't know, this is Utah, maybe it's not so surprising. My friend turns to look at me, sitting up and back, a bit, in surprise. "Black powder? Seriously?"
Well, yeah. My father had no sons, I remind him, so, of course I've hunted that way and every other way. Of course I have. Obviously. Only I suspect from the architecture of his expression that he has not hunted with powder and shot although he comes from a family of all sons, where his dad could have reveled in male hunting parties one stalking and shooting season after another all through the year. So, the black powder hunt is not a given after all, I guess. It seemed that way to me, in our house growing up.

Black powder. Seriously.

He never reproached us for being girls. He liked us. We knew he was lonely, though we didn't know why, at first, didn't know there was a difference between boys and girls. We might have been anything that wore a dress to church, while he wore a suit but that seemed more a lapse in judgment on his part than a hard and fast barrier between us. While I can't speak for the sisters, my baby opinion was that my not wearing a suit was a firm matter of preference, nearly of morality. Dresses and tights were nasty enough, well, not the dresses, I've always worn dresses of my own free will, but the tights were hellish and slips, too. Just imagine a belt and tie. Suits have all those parts. And shoes you couldn't slip on. He wore wingtips. Horrors. Though our little-girl bedroom was pink and red madness that meant nothing to us, we had not been consulted in the matter, those colors were imposed upon us and we did not feel defined thereby. I don't know how it would have worked out if we'd been asked. Blue and green, my favorites, would have caused trouble, would have screamed BOY COLORS and yellow, the nice safe gender neutral of my childhood, gave me a bad headache and a little bit of a stomach ache. (It's better now, between me and yellow, but I have to be careful. It is kind of fun, though, like there's a whole new color in the world now that I am old.) So. We didn't at first get it about not being boys because we thought we were just people. He wore a suit to church and we wore dresses like our momma and he carried a gun to work but I carried a lunch to school and the sisters were too little to do anything so they played all day and our mom cooked and sewed because she was in the house with the stove and the sewing machine handy. We were all different. Differences that might have occurred in any group, that might have been coincidental or preferential. And then, too, in the early years none of us realized we were part of a pattern worked in one color, girl on girl. It was not till later, till the fourth sister came along when I was about ten, that I really began to take it in. No boys, no sons. Not ever.

So, black powder. Seriously.

In case you don't know and want to, but just very briefly so you won't be driven to a design blog in despair, what you (probably) think of as a bullet is actually a cartridge, containing bullet (or shot), powder, and a primer (also called a cap) in one tidy package called a casing or shell. You find spent shells when you go on hikes; you use them for whistles and carry them home in your pockets because your dad reloads them. More on that later. If you put that package, that cartridge, in a gun and the package is facing the right direction when you pull the trigger the pin in the gun's hammer will connect smartly with the cap (remember I said this was simplified) causing a small explosion in the casing which hurls the dense lead part, the bullet, out the barrel of the gun and on its way to whatever end you had in mind. Or perhaps to some end you never even considered, but that would be your fault and nothing to do with either the bullet or the gun. Fortunately for us all, you cannot load a bullet (cartridge) backwards and if somehow you did, nothing could happen.
Now, in the old days, cap, shot and powder had each to be loaded separately and most carefully into the gun every time it was fired. Laboriously and painstakingly, powder had to be measured, poured down the barrel (or muzzle) of the gun, covered with a cloth, pounded into place, the bullet sent down the muzzle and pounded also, then the cap set carefully on the firing pin. That was a loaded gun. This had to be done each time a gun was fired before it could be fired again. You remember this, you read this process in Little House in the Big Woods. Originally a cartridge was a paper tube containing a measure of powder (called a round or a charge), the end of which a soldier bit off to pour into his gun. If you watch movies with cannons that shoot cannon balls you'll see this same process on a large scale. In the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan there is a gorgeous costume on display, Turkish (as I recall), the chest covered by two double bandoleers covered with hand carved wooden cartridges, each fitted with a cork held by a little string. Think how much time you'd save on the battlefield, with all that pre-measuring. Of course, you have to reload standing up straight and tall and making a marvelous target for, let's say, a guy with a slingshot (the "shot" used in a slingshot is the same word as the "shot" which is a bullet).
There you are, the history of gunpowder warfare from, like, ancient Egypt (look it up on Wiki) through roughly the American Civil War, when they started using breech loading rifles (which you could reload while lying down), and after which guns firing cartridges in the modern sense quickly became the norm. A gun requiring the old fashioned sort of labor intensive loading is commonly called a muzzle loader and the hunts dedicated to this type of gun are referred to as muzzle loader or "black powder" hunts.

OK?

That's what the storyteller was talking about, asking who'd been on a black powder hunt. DON"T YOU LOVE LEARNING THINGS? I know I do.

What sort of person, you're asking yourself, hunts like this?
And what sort of person knows this stuff?
And, why?
Your answers, in order of asking, are, my dad, his girls and I really could not tell you.

The sort of person who'd lug powder, shot and caps with him is my dad. The purist, in it for the shooting experience. Get your deer on the first shot, there won't be a second one. Or, kill the cougar or bear coming after you with that one shot. When hunting with a muzzle loader you aren't required by either the laws of the land or your own common sense to wear traffic cone orange, which no deer in its right mind ever, ever wore in nature. As with the bow hunt, on the black powder hunt you can disguise yourself as a tree, or as brush, or as a deer, and this because neither arrows nor lead shot ever hurt anybody. I mean, think about it. Examine our history. Usually bow hunters manifest in camouflage and for black powder you look like a mountain man. I think that's a big draw, the costumes. Back in the day my dad hunted all of everything (bow, muzzle loader, doe, buck, elk, moose, elephant, python, Kodiak bear, cannibal, and a bunch I've forgotten) but now you have to draw out for your hunt so he only goes once. If he's lucky. When I was small, though, there was plenty of hunt for everyone.

We all went, the sisters, one time or other. I don't think any of us ever carried a gun. They're heavy, you know, and we'd have had to take hunter's safety courses and all that nonsense and for what? I think my middle sister got her licence when she was old, I don't remember. Maybe they all did and we just never discussed it at the dinner table. Or I put it out of my mind. Really, I think most of us turned out to be girls, in the end. Certainly all the sons-in-law and (I think) all the grandsons have had licences, even Noah who I'm not sure could kill something if his life depended on it. Maybe if someone else's did, his sister's, maybe. The youngest sister. For me as a child, hunting was about keeping my dad company, about feeling he was very lonely in some far off way and wanting badly to do something other than sort of stand around aching for him about that.

My clearest memories of those hunts were of hiking, of eating the lunches he carried for us and of being told to sit and wait very quietly till he got back.

The hiking was fraught, much more so than at other times, with the awareness that while you and your dad were creeping along quietly and carefully, all around you were other people, possibly hundreds of other people, moving quietly and carefully who very much wanted to shoot something which would be dressed in brown, like you were, and which would also be moving along quietly and carefully.
I say it was more fraught than at other times because we were very well aware that in the mountains of the American west there may at any time be people creeping about who want to shoot things, maybe you. But at those other times they might be distracted, and there would not be near so many of them as in the fall of the year, when they were likely also unusually focused. So you had to be careful. For me, being careful meant keeping my dad between myself and whomever might be wanting to shoot at me and as I never knew from moment to moment where these people might be I had to shift my position frequently as we glided along. Shifting as often as I felt was necessary for safety hampered my gliding abilities and got me into trouble with my dad who wanted me to pick a spot and glide in it. And sometimes there was a little sister tossed into the mix; was she then an additional shield or a civilian requiring my aid and comfort? Striving in vain to avoid examining the huge dilemma of sheltering behind living people in the first place. Suppose I shifted at the crucial moment, triumphed and it was my dad who was shot, not me? What then? I knew how to find a stream and knew that in Utah all streams lead to people, but, for reals? That's what was going to happen? And what about the questions my mother and the police would inevitably ask regarding my position at the time of the shooting? Knotty moral conundrums I could wrestle around, distracting myself from freezing feet and fingers.

The lunches he brought remind me of outfits I see on people in the street. I often ask people (in my mind, only in my mind) what they were hoping for when they assembled those articles of clothing and how they were able to tell when they had finished. What, I ask them silently, was this supposed to have done for you, had it gone well? My little girl self felt like that about the lunches. My momma's lunches were organized around a theme, say, tuna sandwiches, and had accessories appropriate to that central idea, cut up apple perhaps, potato chips and milk. A cookie or two for after if you ate enough apple and fish. My dad's lunch choices appeared to be completely random gatherings sharing only two defining principles.
1-You could carry it without mess in your pockets.
2-You seldom or never saw this food on our table at home.
Notice that none of the considerations were
3-Little girls will eat this,
which was how I first met kippered snacks and learned hunger is not the worst thing that can happen to you, not by a long shot (archery term). The best lunch memory is of my dad carefully opening a can of Vienna sausages so that the pull-off top stayed connected on one side, making a handle. He balanced the can on the edge of the fire (always build a fire. always) so the sausages would heat up in their own juices in their own tiny pot and he could lift them from the fire and spread them on bread. I was so impressed by his cleverness, his canny way with food and fires and cans. I did not know it but I felt just like I was in a Hemingway story with Nick. Big Two-Hearted Creek. My dad was so cool. Warmed up Vienna sausage on bread was not chosen because little girls would eat it, but it carried nicely in the pocket and was certainly not something that would ever show up on our table at home.

After lunch and more gliding there always came a point when I was positioned on a rock and told to wait quietly till he came back and no matter what not to move from that spot. I'd sit on the rock and watch him gliding away, brown on brown, till I could no longer see him moving through the trees. I suspect now that I am old this was the only real hunting time on days when he was blessed with company. For me it was alone time for more philosophical reflection. Ruminations on mortality and the certainty of death, on the human tendency to worry and imagine the worst and the fruitlessness of making contingency plans, and some serious puzzling over the oddness of an obviously lonely person wanting to leave a companion and go off to be by himself. I wondered how he would ever remember where he left had me (though I doubted less after I saw his wilderness cooking skills) and adopted the technique, which I have used ever since, of setting an arbitrary deadline, of deciding when to turn worry into action. If he isn't back by the time the sun touches those trees...
Now I use it with my kids. And the painter. If he hasn't called in an hour...if the fever goes up another degree...if she comes home crying one more time...then...
I'll find the stream and follow it home.

Black powder. Seriously.

Not last weekend, because I was listening to stories last weekend, but the one before that, I took my youngest child camping. With some of the sisters and their families and my folks and my brother-in-law's folks. It's important to camp with Mike's parents so someone brings the seriously good food. On the last day they got out the rest of the eggs (they brought waaaaay too many eggs, funny thing) and shot them with a BB gun. Eggs give a tiny jump and then explode softly when shot. Silly, wasteful and very cool. Everyone was taking turns except some of us old people who were just watching and my little girl, who stoutly refused to join in. Oddly. Because, it dawned on everyone at the same time, she didn't know how to shoot and didn't want to learn in front of everyone. Not that she wouldn't have had enthusiastic teachers. I think that was the problem, too many coaches.
Now here's the thing. I felt horrified, a failure, like I do when I realize she knows almost no nursery rhymes. What's with that? How could that have happened? I don't congratulate myself when she discusses The Winter's Tale or her favorite museums in Amsterdam. Feels normal. But not knowing how to shoot? I was at a loss. She did give in, finally, after her aunt convinced her a BB gun never, ever kicks. I watched my dad watching her shoot. There had been a disagreement (elbow lifted and held out straight (an archer's prejudice) or tucked in tight (sensible)) and he stood close as her aunts taught her how to sight along the barrel at the eggs. I was behind, watching her, watching them, watching my dad stand with his hands in his pockets, letting somebody else do this, teach this. He doesn't shoot as much anymore, he doesn't see well.

Time was a gun dealer would bring a gun newly in his possession to my dad, to shoot, to break down, to give his opinion. But he won't wear glasses. Some of us think maybe he is a little vain. He watches my girl getting advice from everywhere at once. Not much from him, though he weighs in on elbow position (up).

Time was he loaded his own cartridges, tables covered with presses, casings rolling around or standing in ordered rows like soldiers, containers of shot and of powder, tiny, grainy, black spills. He could tell you, by the sound, the gun that had just been fired. Movies really bothered him. "You don't get a ricochet in the middle of a sandy desert." "That pistol wasn't used in that war." "Wrong caliber!" Grrr.
"Careful where you point that," he bellows suddenly, "I don't care whether it's loaded or not!"

Time was he would go shoot for the joy, for the exercise of his will and his wit, to blow off frustration and to be better and better where he already excelled. He stands with his hands in his pockets, thin, hunched in his shoulders. A cold wind has come up, blowing us out of our camp. My little girl is taking aim (badly) and breathing deeply. She's anxious, I wonder why. I hear him telling me to shoot between my breaths.

ping

She's smiling and asking if she can shoot again and she does, again and again. She's in love with that BB gun. Never hits an egg. Hits the watermelon they set up next, though. She's delighted. My dad looks back at me, smiling, pleased, wondering. I remember asking him, why, why shoot? Why get good at it? For war? Aren't we supposed to be spending all our time trying to be like God? So why? And him looking at me with his left eye over his left shoulder and asking back at me, you don't think God's a good shot? and blowing away the Miracle Whip bottle set up on the top of an old nasty bureau at the dump. bam smash tinkle slither

Time was he shot at man-shapes in the FBI firing range.
Time was he kept a gun under the seat of the car.
Built his ammunition. Shot with black powder. Fed us the meat he hunted off the mountain.
Time was he shot for discipline, for precision, for perfection.
He brought the watermelon. I watch him standing, watching his grandkids filling it with lead. Strange family outing. Never will be entirely sure why he brought the melon.
Time was you could only vacuum under the sofa with difficulty, what with the guns lurking there. Not like that anymore. I own a gun because of him. So does the painter. I'm fully expecting my lovely little daughter to ask for a BB gun this Christmas. Along with the pocket knife she's been begging for, along with a blow dryer and make up and glitter and fairy dress ups. He stands watching his daughters shoot, their children waiting impatiently for a turn. Stands alone. The shooting's not perfect anymore. He watches. I watch him, both of us alone.

Sit here on this rock and don't move till I come back.

Black powder. Seriously.


Noah's photos