“There’s a gun I brought over from the condo that I want you to have a look at when we get back.”
Aunt Linda said this when I first arrived over a week ago to vacation with my family in Florida. She brought it up again when we were driving back to Tennessee with Linda’s granddaughter in the front passenger seat and her boyfriend driving.
“All the farmers and anyone who owns land around here have a gun for snakes and to scare off bears and things. I’ve got it in one of those old ammunition boxes and I want to show it to you when we get back. You know you really should have a gun.”
I knew I wanted to see it but I wasn’t sure I wanted a gun. I wanted to think about it more.
The car trip back ended up being kind of grueling — eleven and a half hours with several breaks and lots of rain.
I slept late the next day and went out to check on the land when it was nearing dusk. Even if I wake early it’s hard to get an early start. I like to do my daily partner-write in the morning while I’m fresh. Then I want to read some of the day’s news and there is usually something about logging, building or a tool that I want to research.
On my third afternoon on the land I was working up at the fallen cabin and a man came by on a four-wheeler. He introduced himself as Luke, my neighbor Steve’s son.
“I didn’t know Steve had a son as old as you?”
“Yeah, I’m forty and I have a brother and sister in their 30s.”
“How is Steve?” I asked.
I met Steve four years ago when I first started visiting the land. He’d bought a section near the steep base of the Clinch Mountains bordering my property where the falling cabin is. He’s almost finished building a beautiful home that he’s been living in since he got the roof and walls up. He milled much of his own lumber and said I could use the mill too.
“I’m sorry to tell you that my dad died on March 5th this year,” Luke said. “It was all over the news.”
It was a gut punch. I always had good conversations with Steve. As busy as he was he made it seem like he had all the time in the world to stand there on the dirt and gravel road and talk with me.
“What happened,” I asked?
“Well, it’s a terrible story,” Luke said.
He then told me about how his dad was shot accidently by his younger son, Luke’s brother Shawn, who was handling a gun in the back seat of Steve’s big four-door truck. There was a friend in back with Shawn and Luke was in the front passenger seat with his dad driving. They were traveling locally on the interstate.
I asked if they’d been hunting but Luke said no it was just a gun his brother was looking at.
I wondered if it caused them to crash. Luke said after their ears cleared from the ringing he hoped it had just gone off into the floor but his dad said he was bleeding pretty bad. Luke said it seemed like it took ten minutes but it was only a matter of seconds before Steve was able to pull over to the side of the road before going unconscious.
Luke said he worried about his brother every day and how he was dealing with the guilt.
I googled the news stories and obituary. Steve had told me he was retired but working harder than ever doing some construction work. The oak siding on his house was taking a long time to finish because he was doing these extra jobs. For this reason I thought he’d “retired” from construction but it turns out he had been a captain in the Knoxville Fire Department. He was sixty years old, the age I’ll be in less than a month.
He loved music and was a singer in a band. He told me when I first met him that he’d be interested if I ever wanted to sell my land. He wanted to start a music festival there.
He had a long white beard in retirement. I could see from the pictures on his obituary pages that he’d had a more cropped appearance when he was fire captain. The beard reminded me of the goats he had that came to visit me in my falling cabin. He loved those goats. The billy would sometimes come up and push against his leg while we talked.
When I told him in December I was going to take the cabin down for lumber, he said, “We’ll sure miss her.”
In late March I texted him about a new idea I had about how to keep the cabin up and use it as a place to store lumber. I wondered why I didn’t hear back from him. I just figured he was too busy and had forgotten.
The morning after learning about my neighbor’s death I asked Linda to see the gun. We were sitting in front of the tv and she immediately got up and went to the closet under the stairs.
She moved a vacumme out of the way and handed me a bag and then a box to set on the table behind me.
“Oh lord, what are we getting into here? This is where I keep all my Christmas wrapping,” she said.
“There it is. That grey ammunition box.”
She backed out to let me in.
“Be careful. It’s heavy.”
I went into the triangular space that gets darker toward the back and bent over the metal box.
“Oof. That is heavy,” I said as I lifted it out exactly the way I shouldn’t—not using my legs.
I turned around and set it on the dining room table and unlatched the four metal buckles that held the top down.
Linda lifted out a folded display mat and I unrolled it on the table to reveal about twenty pocket knives of differing size including a stiletto with a six-inch blade making it as long as a ruler when unfolded.
“Oh, there’s two guns in here!” she said, slowly pulling them out and setting them on on the table.
My breath quickened and I felt some extra heartbeats.
It’s different looking at a bottle of pills or a hammer or even the long stiletto which is plenty frightening. All these can be lethal. I guess I’m just not used to seeing guns and considering their power and potential for a serious accident. This was a good time to look at them after learning about my neighbor.
We heard something on the news and went back into the tv room distracted for a moment and sat down in the two big reclining chairs. It’s almost as if we needed a break from finding the guns and having them out.
All Linda’s partners have been gun owners. When I was a teen her first husband Wayne was interested in seeing my father’s family land and he brought along a short black semi-automatic rifle that he wanted to show off. I’d previously only fired a shotgun on a friend’s land in Mississippi.
My dad had a theatre pistol which I snuck into the back yard and fired into the air when he wasn’t there, but it only fired brass caps.
Wayne invited me to shoot his gun and feeling the kick and the ease with which I could pull the trigger was exhilarating. Then I turned while still holding the gun up and accidently pointed it at my dad.
“Whoa, Whoa, Whoa!”, he said.
My grandmother had a pearl-handled .22 which she kept hidden in the long medicine cabinet in her bathroom. When I was a young child I would climb atop the two-sink vanity, slide open one of the long mirrors and reach up for the loaded pistol on the top shelf. Children always find the things they aren’t supposed to.
I’d feel the weight in my hands and then quietly put it back in it’s place. I’d do the same with grandpa’s double-barrel shotgun, slipping between hanging clothes and clear, dry-cleaning bags to the back of the mothball-smelling closet. I’d catch a glint of the gun metal and feel for the barrel, then lift it into the room to get a better look. I had a reverence for these guns. I knew how dangerous they were. It was enough just to weigh them in my hands.
Linda rose from her chair and buzzed off to whatever her current activity was — laundry, dishes, watering plants, cooking. There are always a million things to do and at 82 she is still doing them.
After a breather, I went back over to the table and looked at the guns that had belonged to her second husband Ron. One had a long barrel that made it look a bit like an old west, gunslinger’s or a slightly larger, less ornate version of the pop guns that the character, Mike Teavee, played with in the original Willy Wonka movie. This one was a .22.
The other gun had a snub-nosed barrel. It was a .38 special. It looked more like a gun that a mobster or film noir detective might use.
Stamps on the barrels told me the manufacturer. The .22 was a High Standard and the .38 a Smith and Wesson.
Without pointing the guns at myself I looked at an angle to see the barrel of each—like peering around a corner in a dangerous neighborhood. The bore of the .38 was double the size of the .22 making it twice as deadly I suppose.
I couldn’t see if either gun was loaded. Only the chambers on the sides showed. I aimed the .22 at the floor and pulled the stippled hammer back hoping that would help me see better but it didn’t. Then I tried to slowly release the hammer back into its slot but my thumb slipped and it struck the chamber with force. I grimaced. If there had been a bullet in there it might have gone off.
I looked at the gun more carefully and figured out how to pull the rod that releases the chamber. It opened out to the side. I saw three bullets in there. I was just lucky that I hadn’t put a hole in Linda’s floor. Using the bullets as a starting point it was easy to count the chambers. This was a nine-shooter.
Linda entered the room to see how my inspection process was going.
“This gun had three bullets in it!” I exclaimed.
“Well what good is a gun that’s not loaded,” she said.
I held the gun toward the ceiling and tried to tap out the bullets from the splayed chamber.
“Look, even I know more about guns than you.”
She took the gun from my hands and pushed the chamber release rod the other way and it ejected the lipped shells out of the barrel into her hand.
She gave these to me and walked out of the room.
I pushed the release for the cylinder on the .38. Even though the gun was more compact than the .22, the cylinder was much larger and could only hold five bullets.
I carefully pulled everything else out from the ammo box and laid it on the table. There were rectangular boxes of bullets, several holstered knives, a small leather holster for the .38, a cleaning kit, and two more guns in a single wooden box that presented them on red velvet, yin-yang style. These were tiny, single-shot, Butler derringers that Linda called dueling guns—one with a pearl handle and the other dark wood.
Satisfied that I’d seen everything I packed it all back up until today when I took the guns out again and photographed them.
I watched a video on cleaning the .22 and watched a couple of other videos of a collector shooting both models at his homemade gun range. I gave some more thought to keeping one. Linda clarified that farmers also have guns in case they need to put down an animal that might be sick or suffering.
I considered maybe that I could at least take them out to the land and try shooting them. Then I thought about the noise. Even the string trimmer makes too much for my liking but I make an exception because my back appreciates not having to work for hours to clear the trails with a hoe. I decided the last thing I want to do there is shoot a gun. The bang will echo throughout Poor Valley (not that I haven’t heard it before).
It’s probably silly, but I don’t want the animals to think they can’t call my piece of land home. More importantly, guns still scare me …though maybe a little less now that I’ve gotten to know these better.
Spotty West Goes East 