MY GIFT under the Christmas tree the year I turned twelve was a single-shot .410 gauge shotgun. It was a fine-looking little gun, with a dark-wood stock and forepiece. It breeched with a sharp metallic crack, so that a shell might be dropped into the chamber.
The shells were another gift, a bright box of number six shot. And also a canvas hunting jacket with a game bag built into the lining, and a canvas cap as well, with earflaps that could be pulled down in case of cold weather. Next to these was a stiff bright pair of wool boot socks, gray with a red stripe around the tops.
Not only were these things under the tree, which would have made my life complete in any case, but also a small sturdy metal box with two suitcaselike latches. I flipped open the latches and saw what was almost too good to be true, a sectional ramrod, a bottle of cleaning solvent, patches of cotton swabbing and a length of soft cotton rope. Also, a can of gun oil, a bottle of something called “blueing,” and a thin pamphlet titled “Care and Cleaning of Firearms.”
It was just daylight Christmas morning. My father was puking in the bathroom from drinking too much the night before. The fat red Christmas tree lights were shining and there was an angel on top of the tree. My grandfather was in his room smoking a cigar, though it was only six o’clock on a misty Mississippi morning, and the house stunk weirdly of tobacco and oranges.
I was holding the shotgun across my lap where I sat on the floor.
My mother said, “Do you like it?”
I said, “It’s okay. Yeah, it’s fine.”
She said, “I wasn’t sure it would be what you wanted. I was guessing. I hope I guessed right. Is a .410 all right? Is a .410 what you wanted?”
I said, “You can’t hunt deer with it. It’s too small for deer hunting.”
My mother said, “Well, but maybe you wouldn’t want to start with, you know, big game. Maybe you’ll want to hunt, maybe, squirrels at first, until you’re more experienced, maybe. Maybe rabbits.”
I turned the gun on its side. I had to force myself not to pet it, like a living thing. I read the writing stamped into the barrel. Winchester .410 gauge Full Choke
I said, “Full choke.”
My mother said, “Was full choke the wrong thing to get? Mr. Gibson at the Western Auto Store didn’t mention anything about ‘choke.’ Or if he did, I mean, I guess I didn’t hear, wasn’t listening carefully. I don’t even know what ‘choke’ means. Is full choke all right?”
We could hear my father finishing up in the bathroom. The big finish this morning, with the final gags of dry heaving and the scuffing sounds of his crawling on the floor, where he had been lying with his head in the toilet. Now the spitting and the cursing. Next the gargling.
Even my mother had to notice. She said, “Dad’s driving the porcelain bus this morning.”
I said, “‘Modified’ or ‘open’ choke would be better for quail.”
She said, “But how about squirrels, or maybe rabbits? Just to start, you know, to get some experience first. Would full choke be all right for either of them?”
My mother was sitting on the floor beneath the Christmas tree with her hands in her lap. The fat red bulbs burned among the tinsel behind her. I cocked the hammer, and then eased the hammer back to the ‘Safe’ position. I sighted along the barrel, out the window at a pecan tree, black with rain from the night before.
I knew nothing at all about guns. This was the first gun I had ever held in my hands. I lowered it from my shoulder and did not look up.
I said, “Full choke is perfect for squirrels.”
In my room, behind the closed door, I held the gun, I breeched it, and cocked the hammer. I even loaded it once, dropped a dangerous bright little plastic-coated cylinder into the chamber and snapped the gun shut and cocked the hammer and aimed from the hip at my closed door and knew that I could shoot right through it.
I took the gun apart, barrel and stock, and laid each piece on my bed separately. Then I put the parts back together.
I read Field and Stream magazine. I read about rifled slugs, about removing musk glands from animals, about cooking wild game, about constructing a dove blind in a harvested corn field. I read advertisements for insulated boots, for “pocket warmers,” for battery-operated socks, for long underwear and waterproof shell bags. I looked at the men in the ads wearing flannel and leather and canvas and rubber. Men with pipes in their mouths and color in their faces.
And sometimes I even took the gun to bed with me, beneath the covers. I dumped the shells out of their box and scrambled them with my hand over the sheet, just to listen to the click. I picked them up and let them run through my fingers like gold.
THOUGH I did these things, I did not go hunting. With the exception of one aborted attempt soon after Christmas, my father resisted steadfastly all my mother’s suggestions that he take me. Whenever the subject came up, he lapsed into sentimental memory. He told of a man who hunted with “a little beagle dog, sweetest baby voice you ever heard on a dog, like banjos far off in the woods somewhere,” and when that poor man accidentally shot and killed that sweetest of animals one day, why, my father said, “He set down on the bumper of his truck and believe it or not because he was a big man, six foot ten or eleven, he set down on the front chrome bumper of his truck and he cried. I mean cried like a baby.” He would tell this story several times in rapid succession, only varying the height of the crybaby on the bumper of the truck.
And yet, at night beneath the covers I fed a romance of nature and all its rhythms of forest and field.
For weeks my mother worked her small manipulations. “You know, there’s nothing quite so beautiful to me as a father and son together,” she might say at the dinner table. She might actually place her right hand on my father’s shoulder and her left hand on mine and make a physical connection between us. Her words were the blessing and benediction that should have made the magic work.
Nothing did work, of course, hinting least of all. And not direct pleading. “Please take him, Gilbert. Take the boy hunting. Get to know him, you hardly know the child.” This had as little effect as her subtler attempts.
Then one frozen Saturday morning in February, I woke up with both of my parents standing above my bed, my father saying, “Get up, Sugar, I’m taking you hunting.”
My mother was actually wringing her hands. The wedding ring on her left hand, a simple thin gold band that fitted loosely beneath the knuckle, was for a moment the only thing of her that I could see, and it struck me to the heart with loneliness.
“Get up,” my father was saying, harshly. “We’re going hunting.”
I rubbed my eyes and sat up against my pillows.
My mother said, “But will you be careful? You will be careful, won’t you? Sugar, please be careful, listen to your father. Gilbert, teach him about safety. I’d just, I mean if anything happened to him, I’d just, just. . . .”
My mother and father had had a fight. It could have been about anything. This was his punishment of her.
My father took the canvas coat and cap from my closet and tossed them onto the bed beside me. He said, “Dress up like a hunter. Let’s have a look at Mama’s little hunter.”
My mother wrung her hands and then picked at the frayed sleeve of her robe. She said, “Teach him safety, Gilbert. Please? Teach him all about safety.”
He said, “You’re the one wants him to go hunting.”
To me he said, “Bring along that fine gun-cleaning kit too. You might need to clean your gun, you don’t know. You never can tell when you might need a gun-cleaning kit along with you.”
MY FATHER was wearing no hunting clothes, and he had no gun. He was wearing a pair of slick polyester pants, shiny as a lizard, and he had on a heavy corduroy coat and a pair of yellow plastic shoes, loafers of an unbelievable strangeness, that somebody had told him were the latest thing, and for which he had paid five dollars. It was difficult, in the presence of those plastic shoes, to keep on believing that I was a person who would ever resemble the men in Field and Stream who stirred fragrant pots of wild stew over campfires in the wilderness.
We left the house with my mother still wringing her hands and saying, in as cheerful a voice as she could invent from her despair, “Now you boys be careful, just be real extra careful, and, uh, and have yourselves a, uh, you know, good time.” As we pulled away in the car, she called out, “Teach him firearm safety, Gilbert!”
AS I’VE SAID, this was not the first time my father had set out with me to go hunting. The other time was a few days after Christmas, before the first of the year. Then he had said, “Hole up just a minute, Sugar, I’m thinking I might stop off at the Delta Cafe for a minute.”
He was stopping to drink, of course. “You stay out in the car,” he said. “I’m not going to be but one minute.”
I stayed in the car for an hour. And then I took off my canvas jacket and hat and walked to the big plate-glass window and looked through the sign painted on it—I peered through the big hole in the D of Delta—and saw my father sitting on a stool at the counter with many other men. One of the men had a wicker basket full of newly born puppies. He must have been trying to give them away, to find homes for them.
Then I saw my father take one of the pups from the wicker basket and rub its little head with his forefinger. He held the pup up to his face and seemed to be talking to it, sweetly I thought, and then he talked to the man with the basket in his lap. My father drank a shot of whiskey and made his face, like oh yes! and then took a sip of beer behind the whiskey. Then he did the most remarkable thing I had ever seen anyone do.
He turned the puppy around and took the dog’s tail in his mouth, between his teeth, and bit the dog’s tail off, clean off, and spat it onto the linoleum floor, under a table where a couple was eating catfish. I could hear no sound, but the puppy was obviously squealing with surprise and pain.
There was blood all over the front of my father’s shirt and on his chin. He was grinning proudly, as if he had done something fine. When the dog’s owner had recovered himself—it took only a second or two—he took the pup from my father and looked at the other astonished faces sitting behind beers at the counter and said not a word. The expression of complete disgust for my father was sufficient. No words were necessary. He wrapped the puppy’s tail in a napkin and picked up the rest of the pups, in the basket, and turned to leave the café. I wanted to run, but I stayed there and watched the man come out the door.
As the door opened I could hear my father’s voice. He said, “Put a little salt on that nubbin to help it heal!”
SO IT IS miraculous that for even one second I had been deceived by the romance of this possibility of a hunting trip.
Mr. Shanker was the pharmacist. This time my father and I were not stopping at the Delta Cafe for shots and beers. We were stopping at the drug store for opium. My father said paregoric was good for a hangover if you didn’t mind the constipation. And to be helpful he sometimes gave Mr. Shanker an injection of morphine to help him sleep. Mr. Shanker was the only man in town to whom my father seemed sober in comparison.
Immediately now I received a clear picture of how the two of us looked, my father and I. We were clowns. He was wearing yellow plastic shoes and lizardly pants, and I was wearing stiff new canvas clothing several sizes too large for me, and the new leather of my unoiled boots was almost as yellow as my father’s. My feet hurt like torture.
I was paralyzed by shame for the two of us. I was my father’s son, there was no doubt in my mind, and it was impossible for me to tell which of us was more worthy of loathing and disdain. In addition to my preposterous outfit, I was carrying a shotgun and a metal box with the words Gun Cleaning Kit stenciled on the front. “Don’t forget your hunting equipment,” my father insisted in his ironic way when I tried to leave the gun and kit behind in the car.
I followed my father through the front door of the drug store and breathed in the strange chemical fragrance that hung forever in its unholy air.
There was no one in the drug store.
My father called out, “Shank!”
There was no answer. Mr. Shanker was rarely conscious.
Again, he said, “Shank, where are you, boy?” He said this in his ironic voice, and then looked at me and gave me a sharp wink.
I felt loaded down with clothing and the shotgun and the gun-cleaning kit. There was a long soda fountain with a marble top, and a long mirror behind the counter.
In the reflection I could see clearly the shelves of things behind me, the tonics and patent medicines and mustard plasters and bunion pads and suppositories and boxes of Kotex, all the bright primary colors of their bottles and boxes and packaging. I could see a glass counter where Mr. Shanker had placed costume jewelry for sale, large gold-looking earrings and necklaces, impressive large bottles of perfume with French words in the name and glass stoppers as big as the bottles themselves, bud vases and ceramic masks and even chocolates in gold foil, stale for a decade.
But I could not see myself. I could not bear to look. I could not permit reality to swamp the invention and romance of Field and Stream. I looked in the mirror and saw the drug store, but I could not, would not see myself.
Mr. Shanker was in the back room, my father told me.
Still carrying the .410 and the gun-cleaning kit and with a loose box of shells click-clacking in my jacket pocket, I followed my father through the large silent old barn of a pharmacy, with its perpetual chemistry and perpetual twilight and antique soda bar.
Mr. Shanker was in the back room all right. He was not dead yet, but he soon would be. He was filthy and soaked in his own urine and lying on an army cot beneath a wool army blanket. He was shivering so hard I thought he would fall right off the cot and onto the floor. The room was narrow and high-ceilinged and cramped and black-dark, and everything I needed to know of it I could smell or hear, the piss and the rattling of the cot against the floor, the rattling of something else, something inside Mr. Shanker, some clatter in his chest.
My father groped around above his head in the darkness and finally laid a hand on a string hanging from the ceiling. An enormous light bulb flashed on and filled the cavelike room with harsh light.
Mr. Shanker’s eyes looked like a busted-out windshield. His face was an incredible orange color in the glare of the electric bulb. He was literally bouncing on the cot, his shivering was so extreme. The smell of his urine was strong.
Even so, Mr. Shanker made the last joke of his life. He said, “Gilbert, they wont no need for the boy to shoot me. Those yaller shoes of yours’ll do the trick by theyself.” When he finished saying this, he opened his mouth and his enormous blue tongue rolled out like a snake. There was no sound, but I understood this to be laughter.
My father said, “Look like you bout to need a pick-me-up.”
Mr. Shanker finished his weird tongue-laughter and motioned with his eyes to the syringe and morphine in a small black leather case on a low table nearby. The tongue sucked back into Mr. Shanker’s mouth like a blue runner into a hole.
I said, “Daddy, he’s dying.”
My father said, “Lemme see that kit.” He meant the gun-cleaning kit I was holding in my arms like a baby.
Mr. Shanker had swallowed his tongue and was choking to death.
I was rigid with fear.
My father said, “Gimme that goddamn kit, Sugar, you want to kill Mr. Shanker or what!”
I shoved the metal box toward my father and he took it in his hands. He set it on the low table and snapped open the latches. He said, “Now ain’t that just the way the Lord his mighty works doth perform?” He was saying what a fortunate thing we had this gun-cleaning kit along with us, just at a time when Mr. Shanker was swallowing his tongue. My father was in a spiritual mood.
My father stripped the shortest section of the ramrod loose from the velvet-lined box and jammed it between the choking man’s teeth and pried open Mr. Shanker’s mouth. He said, “Hand me that box of swipes.” He meant the package of cleaning swabs that normally fit at the end of the ramrod to clean gunpowder residue from a barrel.
Now he had Mr. Shanker’s mouth open, with one section of the ramrod cracking the enamel off Mr. Shanker’s teeth and his fingers down Mr. Shanker’s gullet groping around for his tongue. The cleaning swab between my father’s fingers gave him a good grip on the slick tongue, and so it was not long before he had grabbed hold of it and pulled it up to the surface like a fish. Mr. Shanker was actually breathing again.
My father was competent and calm and in control of the situation. For a moment I felt almost good about my life, I felt less lonely and more hopeful than I had for a long time. Mr. Shanker’s tongue was as big as a bullfrog, and while it was no longer hopping, it did seem to have a life of its own, and to breathe in a healthy, regular rhythm, unlike Mr. Shanker’s own real breathing.
My father said, “Hole on to this thang for a minute, Sugar.”
He meant the tongue. He meant Mr. Shanker’s unbelievable reptilian tongue.
I said, “I cain’t do it, Daddy.”
He said, “Shore now. Jess put down your mighty weapon there and grab holt of it.”
Mr. Shanker’s eyes were popped out and throbbing with blood and jaundice.
I leaned the .410 against the wretched army cot and moved into position behind my father. He set the gun-cleaning kit carefully on the cot beside the shotgun.
He said, “Use that-air swipe. You can get a better grip.”
I said, “I don’t think I can do it, Daddy.” I took a cleaning swab between my fingers and reached around for Mr. Shanker’s tongue.
My father said, “Have you got it?”
I was holding the tongue on one side and my father still had a grip on the end of it.
He said, “Okay, I’m letting go.”
I said, “You’re letting it go? You’re letting it go right now?”
He said, “Have you got a-holt of it? Are you ready?”
I said, “I got it. I think I’ve got it.”
He said, “All right then, I’m doing it, I’m letting go.”
My father let go, and I held on like a bulldog. I had Mr. Shanker’s tongue by the balls. This tongue was going nowhere. We had passed the baton.
My father said, “Good, good. Good work, Sugar-man.”
I stood there holding the tongue while my father prepared the shot of morphine. Mr. Shanker’s tongue was as passive as a fed cat.
It was almost like hunting. It was almost like Field and Stream. The great strange electrical bulb swinging from a cord above us was the blazing Mississippi sun, it was corn fields and sorghum and sugar cane, it was a campfire in the woodlands, it was a lantern to skin squirrels by, it was the harvest moon to sleep beneath, it was the Milky Way and all the stars above, it was electrical socks and a brier pipe and chocolatey tobacco, it was father and son together in a place so primitive that age and old hatred and all of history made no difference, it was love and bright water and dark wood.
My father filled the syringe and found an uncollapsed vein in Mr. Shanker’s skeletal arm, and swabbed the vein with cleaning solvent, and tied a tourniquet from the small coil of soft cotton rope.
He said, “Keep a hold on that tongue,” and I tightened my grip so hard that I pinched a blood blister into it with my fingers.
THERE IS not much way to tell the next part except just to go on and tell it.
My father inserted the needle in the vein of Mr. Shanker’s bruised and filthy arm, and pumped the little handle of the syringe, and filled Mr. Shanker’s blood with morphine, and killed him dead.
There was a brief seizure and a few seconds of jerkiness, and maybe even a little vomit, but not much. It was a sudden death, if you look at it the right way. Mr. Shanker was dead of an overdose of morphine that my father administered thirty seconds after saving his life from suffocation by tongue.
My father said, “Some days I swear to God it don’t pay to get out of the damn bed.”
WHAT HAPPENED next is a strange and marvelous thing.
There was nothing to be done for Mr. Shanker. He was dead. I don’t know what I expected my father to do, or say. I had never seen a dead person before, though I suppose my father had.
My father sat down slowly on the edge of the cot beside Mr. Shanker. The electric light bulb overhead still cast its odd harsh light over everything, the filthy cot, the army blanket, the table, the drugs and crumpled clothing on the floor.
My father said, “I’ll have to call Big Boy.” He meant Mr. Chisholm, the town marshall.
I said, “Are we in trouble?”
He said, “No, Sugar. We’re not in any trouble. Shank wouldn’t want me to say I killed him.”
I said, “We just found Mr. Shanker here like this?”
He said, “I’ll work this all out with Big Boy. Don’t you worry, Sugar-man.”
My father kept on sitting there. He patted Mr. Shanker once on the knee, and then sat a little longer.
At first I didn’t move, and then I started to pick up the bits and pieces of my gun-cleaning kit and put them away, the tip section of the ramrod, with Mr. Shanker’s spit and tooth enamel still on it, the solvent my father had used to sterilize Mr. Shanker’s arm, the used swabs, the cotton rope. All of it I fitted carefully back into the velvet-lined box, and then I snapped shut the latches.
For a little while neither of us spoke.
My father said, “I look like a fucking fool in these shoes.”
It is hard to say why, but I am certain that this was the closest moment my father and I had ever shared. I was very much in love with my father, though I might have known even in this moment that something inside me had frozen solid and would be a long time in thawing.
I said, “Is the hunting trip, you know, is it off again?”
My father rubbed his unshaven face with both his hands.
He said, “Do you still want to go hunting?”
I said, “Well, I wouldn’t mind. Sure. Okay.”
He said, “You’re not just saying this? You really want to?”
I said, “Well, you know—if you want to.”
He shook his head. He said, “Tell you the truth, if I was a fine boy like you I wouldn’t much want to go hunting with a man like me.”
He put his hands in his lap and studied the backs of them.
I said, “You mean a murderer?”
He looked up. He said, “Oh, well yeah, that too. I was more thinking about, you know, these damn shoes. Going hunting with somebody wearing yellow plastic shoes.”
I sat down on the cot beside my father and the late Mr. Shanker. I could feel the warmth of my father’s arm against my arm, and the warmth of Mr. Shanker’s dead body against my butt and lower back. I leaned comfortably into the corpse.
My father said, “Do you really think I’m a murderer?”
I said, “I don’t know.” I said, “But you could throw the shoes away. That’s something you could do.”
My father said, “You’re right there. I could do that. I could get rid of these damn shoes.”
My father slipped off one shoe, very slow, and held it a moment and then dropped it into Mr. Shanker’s paraphernalia-cluttered wastebasket. Then with the other shoe he did the same. He crossed his legs and rubbed his foot with his hands.
He said, “They wont even comfortable.”
Mr. Shanker was very warm. I wondered how long it took for a body to grow cold.
I said, “You could cry like a baby.”
My father said, “I couldn’t do that, Sugar-man. Oh-no, I don’t think I could do that.”
I said, “I guess not.”
I thought of my father’s father, the bitter old man back at the house. What did he have to do with this strange moment in my family’s history? I could smell cigars and oranges.
I said, “I’ve never fired a gun.”
My father said, “Well, you’re right. You’re right about that. And that’s another thing we can do something about.”
He stood up and took the gun and the gun-cleaning kit out of my hands.
He said, “Here you go, let me carry these for a while.”
I handed everything over to him.
He said, “I think we’d better find me some decent shoes and call Big Boy Chisholm and figure out some way for me and you to burn some gunpowder before this day turns out to be a total loss.”