 
The Sweet 16 Back in the late 1940s and early ’50s when I was a child, Daddy would walk in after quail hunting and set his shotgun in a kitchen corner. It was a 16-gauge Browning semiautomatic, stalwart and steady. He’d take off his game coat, hold it, and nod for me to come and get the birds out of the big game pocket. I’d pull them out one by one, usually no more than five or six. Sometimes one or two would still be warm. I’d lay them out on a newspaper spread on the kitchen table. Mother would sidle her stool up to the table, then clean and pluck the quail—just like she did chickens, except the quail didn’t need scalding. Daddy would find a chair, sit, and hold the gun in his lap. “Okay, come on,” he’d say. I’d walk over and pull the trigger. Click. “Just once,” he’d warn. “Too many times will wear it out.” I inherited the Browning when my father died. And then during a house renovation last year, while my family was away from home, it was stolen. Since then, I’ve been calling and visiting pawnshops, trying to find it. I’d hoped to pass it to one of my children. It had been, since my father’s death, my main gun. It shot sweeter, with less apparent kick, and it fit my shoulder and arms naturally, like a coat you don’t feel. Uncle Bob’s Remington Each December, my father, mother, and I drove our Ford to my uncle Bob’s home in Ocala, Florida. Uncle Bob was Mother’s brother and a bit wild, a nonconformist, an avid quail hunter. He and my father, decidedly not wild, hunted on a twenty-five-thousand-acre posted ranch out in the flat Florida country. We hunters (early on, I was just along for the ride) were thus poachers. I’d watch Uncle Bob uproot three adjacent cedar fence posts, lay them down flat, and drive his Jeep over the barbed wire. I loved his swagger, laughter—the way he’d squat and look me in the eye, sock me on the shoulder. Sometimes his brother, my uncle Clem, who lost his left arm in World War I, went along on our hunts. He could shoot with his one arm. He lived half the year with Uncle Bob and half the year with my parents and me. Uncle Bob’s shotgun was the second gun that I got to know well—a 20-gauge Remington semiautomatic with a Poly-Choke on the end of the barrel. Its wood was blond, unlike the dark wood on my father’s Browning, and so it seemed ordained with a kind of freewheeling Florida personality—like a man in white shoes. Uncle Bob often asked me after a hunt to wipe it down with the oily rag he kept in his gun case. He’d say, “See, this is all you have to do to keep the scratches out. You do this after every hunt and it’ll never look all scratched up like your daddy’s gun.” He’d won the Remington in a card game. One December day in 1953—I was just eight years old—a flushed covey of quail uncharacteristically lit in a grove of trees rather than spreading out into distant grass and palmetto. We walked into the tree grove. “Is that a quail sitting up there?” I asked. “Well, it sure is,” said Uncle Bob. “You want to shoot him?” My father was uneasy. I’d never shota gun. “Yes, sir,” I said. Uncle Bob knelt, showed me the safety, how to aim and hold the gun tightly against my shoulder. With my index finger I pressed the safety button to the off position, aimed, pulled the trigger, and the bird fell. That gun is now mine. It tells me of the Florida hunts, of the dogs, of the time we were chased across the ranch by authorities, of Uncle Bob’s old Jeep bearing a tractor seat on the front fender—my seat. A word about attitudes. In my lifetime, I’ve moved through stages of good luck and three college degrees, gradually moving out of my native Culture A (concrete, nonacademic, rooted in the land) and into my present Culture B (abstract, academic, rooted in ideas). Most folks of Culture A are comfortable with guns—or with guns around—whereas most people of Culture B are not. I’m sure that none of my colleagues who teach would protest if my guns were displayed in a gun cabinet or above doors in my home, but many would probably be thinking: I didn’t know Clyde was so violent. On the other hand, Uncle Bob, were he alive, would say to me—about guns in the attic: “Put them over the damn door, son. You might need one—and quick.” Because I’ve been cleaning closets and the attic and now plan to display my guns in my home office, I’ve been remembering my times with them, clarifying their importance in my life. The Hammer Gun It’s an old double-barreled Remington 12-gauge, with external hammers. One hammer is different from the other, and each resembles the hammer on an ancient flintlock black-powder rifle. The gun used to belong to my mother’s father, Israel Warren (born 1865), and was handed down to Uncle Bob, who loved it. He kept it over the kitchen door in the back of his store and grill and often told the story of how as a small boy he crawled under his parents’ bed, found the gun, pulled the trigger, shot a hole in the wall, then got a significant whipping. From the get-go, Uncle Bob promised that he’d leave that gun to me. Two years before he died he told me to “go ahead and take it home.” Another of Uncle Bob’s stories that involve that gun—as he told it to me: “Yeah, Izzy [my grandfather] was hunting on Old Man Cole’s property. Old Man Cole had all that property, you know. Izzy shot a quail and Mr. Cole came walking up out of nowhere and said, ‘Where’d you shoot that bird, Izzy?’ and your grandpappy said, ‘I shot him in the ass I reckon. He was flying from me.” The best story about the old double-barrel: “I guess I was about seven years old,” said Uncle Bob. “One night I’d heard some shooting down in the woods about where Shaw’s still was. I walked into the kitchen a while later and there was old Shaw himself sitting at the kitchen table. And Papa was standing behind him with a knife, picking and cutting buckshot out of his scalp. What had happened was: Shaw’d come in and said, ‘The revenuers are down at my still. Can I borrow your gun?’ Your granddaddy reached above the door, got down the loaded gun and gave it to Shaw, along with extra shells. We heard all this shooting and the next thing I knew there was Shaw sitting there at the kitchen table getting shot picked out of his head.” Shaw was a black man. That fact gives the story a meaning otherwise absent. A certain intimacy had been established between my grandfather and a black man in their 1900-era rural Southern community—an intimacy absent from my own growing up fifty years later, a few miles away. There may have been a business relationship involved to help explain the friendship of Mr. Shaw and my grandfather, but the story itself and its telling were not tainted by the racism common to the time and place of its occurrence. The Old Single-Shot My last gun once belonged to my father’s father. He bought it for four dollars around 1900. My father and his brother, my uncle Clyde, ran a grocery store in the 1950s and ’60s. A feed room was attached to the store and in a back corner of that room, I found—among odds and ends—an old single-barreled 12-gauge breech-loading shotgun. I was fourteen. My father gave me the gun, and it was soon my choice for rabbits, squirrels, and dove. I remember carrying a small nail keg of freshly picked wild muscadine grapes in my left arm and the old single-barreled 12 in my right hand late one afternoon when my pal, Crafton Mitchell, and I were walking home from a hunt. We flushed a covey of quail and I had no better sense than to shoot from the hip with one hand. The tip of the hammer tore into my hand as the gun kicked. No birds fell, but I had a brag wound: “Oh, that? Shooting from the hip with my grandpa’s shotgun.” A last story, a sad story, is associated with my father’s Browning 16-gauge. One day in 1977, my mother took her brother, my uncle Clem, eighty-three, a heavy drinker suffering from depression and a dependence on prescription pills (the one-armed uncle who’d hunted with us in Florida), to the veterans’ hospital in Durham, North Carolina, to seek admittance. He couldn’t sleep when not taking his pills and he couldn’t stay awake when he was taking them. He was living with my mother and father as he had been, off and on, since they were married back in 1932. He and I had shared a bedroom during much of my childhood. Uncle Clem was not allowed admittance to the hospital. He was told that the hospital couldn’t handle “drinking and drug problems.” When he and my mother got back home, she went out back to pick blackberries. My father was away. Uncle Clem found my father’s gun, the Browning, went to my bed, and sat down. He arranged the Browning so that the barrel end rested against his chest over his heart. Apparently, just as he found the trigger and pulled it, the gun slipped and shot him through the shoulder. He stood, walked out of the house and into the backyard, where he fell. My mother found him, lying conscious in the yard. She screamed for help, asked why he did it. He said he didn’t know. He died thirteen hours later. That’s a story I probably won’t tell once the guns are displayed in my office. It’s very much a part of my history, Uncle Clem’s death, but it seems outside the other stories, an orphan, one that hasn’t severed my attachment to the family shotguns. |
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