In the summer of 1985, I was turning 12 years old. My birthday was right around the start of school, so I was one of the youngest kids in my class.
Most of my friends had graduated to the toys of adolescents during the year of birthdays I attended. We were done with the He-Man and Transformers of our childhood (at least, we said we were). We thought we were ready for something else. I had sat through a year of kids getting ATVs, mini-bikes, and of course, guns.
I didn’t know what I was getting for my birthday that year. My family was poor. There were always dreams but no expectations. I wanted something amazing, something that showed I wasn’t just a kid anymore. I got up that morning with dreams of mudding through the bottoms behind my house on a 3-wheeler or hunting squirrels and bringing them home for my dad to fry up their brains. Now, I had never had squirrel brains, but it was something that my dad talked about eating as a kid, and I wanted to try it.
My dad had also told me a story about how he and his brother Mike had wandered the countryside around the Weiss farm shooting sparrows and other birds with their .22 rifles. Local farmers would give them cash for killing the pests. It sounded like the best job in the world, and I was ready to take up my place as the local exterminator.
My dad woke me up that morning with the promise of a big surprise, and I rushed into the living room to find a long gift-wrapped box on the floor. I knew what it was before I ever tore into the paper.
The .22 gauge rifle was a one-shot. It was bolt action and had a cool design on the stock. I was in love.
My mom looked at me worried, but my dad assured her that everything would be fine. We walked out into the backyard, and my dad set up some cans for target practice. We spent most of the morning with him showing me how to hold, load, and fire the gun.
My dad is left-handed, and I believe I would have been too, except for the fact that they forced me to learn to write with my right hand in grade school. But, due to the fact that I had a left-handed teacher for most “manly” things, I do more than a few things as a lefty. One of those things is swing an axe. The other prominent one is firing a gun. Whenever I try to fire a gun right-handed, I always find myself cross-eyed.
My dad taught me all about the gun that day, and after we ate lunch, he let me head out into the fields and woods of my grandparent’s 80 acres alone with the warning never to carry the gun loaded and to never shoot back toward the house.
It wasn’t long before I spotted my first crow sitting in a tree along the fence line between woods and cornfield. I raised my rifle and fired. The bullet lodged into the tree near where the bird had been, but the crow flew off Kawing in annoyance.
I remember seeing a squirrel on the ground near an old oak. I stood there for a few minutes with the little animal in my sights but could never pull the trigger.
I have never actually shot an animal in my whole life. I have fished and frog-gigged. Once, the year before, I had killed a huge bullfrog with a rock, so I could fry his legs up to feed my dad for his birthday. But I have never killed anything with a gun.
I spent the rest of the afternoon looking around the old pond for frogs and snakes to shoot. My dad once told me that he and his brother had shot 20 water moccasins in the pond behind our house and then went swimming, but I found nothing that day.
It was almost dark when I heard a car coming up our driveway. It was not quite harvest time, but the corn was high, and you couldn’t see the road from our house. There was only the worn gravel path of the old lane. I walked back from the woods through a bean field as the car got close enough for me to see it.
It was the police.
The old Buick cruiser kicked up dust as it came up the drive and parked in front of our one-story farmhouse. I popped the bolt back on the little rifle and ejected the bullet into my hand before getting close to the house.
Two cops stepped out as my dad came through the front door. I was scared to death. My family had never taught me to love the law. Respect it by not getting caught was really the motto of my dad. When you are poor, and drugs are a daily part of your life, you understand that any interaction with the police, no matter how mundane, could go wrong quickly.
A thousand thoughts ran through my brain. All of them revolved around my dad being taken away. All of them revolved around the pot that he had sitting in a tin can under his recliner in the living room. The pot he had hanging to dry in the chicken house. And the pot he had growing in a few places out in the corn.
My dad stepped out to the cops, shook the hand of each, and stood there with them. He knew them both. It was and is a small area. He knew them, and they knew all about him. I didn’t understand it then, but that familiarity. That privilege of being of the same place, the same race, and most of the same beliefs as the authority in the county are what kept us safe.
They talked, and he listened. I saw him shaking his head, first from side to side and then up and down. As I reached the edge of the lawn, he looked up from the conversation and caught my eye.
“Come here, Bubba,” he said.
I walked toward him tentatively, worried that they might be taking me instead of him. My dad took my shoulder and pulled me in close as I stood before the two men. Both had sad looks on their faces that they tried to hide behind a smile.
“I’m sorry, Bub,” Dad said. “We are going to have to give your birthday present to these gentlemen.”
“Huh?” I said and tried to pull away. I felt the tears of a child welling up in eyes that I thought had earned adulthood.
“I’m sorry, son,” said one of the cops as he bent down to my level.
My dad held me tight, worried that I might bolt. I wanted to. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law” came into my head. A saying that I heard my dad say more than once in passing.
“The gun was stolen from another little boy,” said the officer as he held out his hand.
I looked up at my dad and saw the sad look on his face.
“Your dad didn’t know anything about it,” said the other cop. “You aren’t in trouble, but we have to take the rifle.”
It was my worst nightmare. My dad had bought the gun from one of his buddies. Bought may not be the right word for it since it was probably paid for with a bag of pot instead of cash, but this wasn’t said in front of the cops.
The buddy had stolen the gun along with some other items from somebody’s house in a neighboring town. When the cops picked him up, he gave up the location of the gun in exchange for some promised leniency.
This was the problem with many of my dad’s so-called friends. They were quick to give up anything and anybody to help themselves. Even at 12, I knew that this was a trait my dad did not share with them, and it was a trait that I should not have as well. I didn’t blame my dad for buying me a stolen gun, I blamed his idiot friend for giving up the gun’s location.
I handed over the .22 One Shot rifle with the promise from my father that he would get me another as soon as he had the chance. The cops went on their merry way, and I consoled myself with the knowledge that some kid would be happy he got his rifle back.
I don’t remember if there was anything to replace the gun for my birthday that year. Over ten years later, on the Christmas before my dad would report to prison for manufacturing methamphetamine, I sat in my parent’s house and opened a few Christmas presents. I was visiting from college, where I was completing my master’s degree in American Literature.
After all the presents were unwrapped and the boxes were being put away, my dad stood up and declared, “Oh yeah, I almost forgot.” He stepped over behind the couch and pulled out a long narrow box wrapped in red and green paper.
“Here you go, Bubba.”
He handed me the box, and I thought of that long past birthday. Of that little .22 that I got to spend the day with. When I opened the box, the .22 that was inside was not a small single shot. It was a strange custom rifle with a modified stock that looked like an M-16.
My dad smiled at me, and I tried my best to smile back. For a moment, I thought of that promise my dad had made to me and wondered if this was some kind of wish fulfillment. If, in his push to show that his Methhead wanderings and the problems he had brought to our family in the years before were just a phase and he was the same dad that had taught me to shoot that day in our backyard.
I stood up and walked over to hug my father. “Thanks, Dad,” I said.
“I hope you like it, Bubba”
I walked back across the room and slid the rifle back into the box it came in. My mom caught my eye and gave me a half-smile, half-worried look.
My youngest sister leaned close and said, “Dad can’t own any guns now that he is a felon, so he is giving them all to us.”
“I got his Desert Eagle,” my other sister said with a smile.
“We took his shotguns down to our place,” put in my first sister’s husband.
I shook my head and smiled. It wasn’t about that birthday at all, yet the look in my dad’s eyes said that it was. He was trying to tie up loose ends before he disappeared inside, and this one was as old as they got.
I thought about that day and the time I spent trying to be a hunter of crows and squirrels. That was all far behind me. I had probably shot a gun less than ten times since that birthday so many years before. I was not a gun owner and never planned to be.
When my dad went to take a nap later in the day, I handed the rifle to my brother-in-law. “You’ll have to take this one as well,” I said to them. “I can’t have it at my place.”
I never saw either .22 again.
The second of some memoir about my dad as we move closer to Father’s Day. Check out the first by clicking the image below.
Photo by Zain Ali: https://www.pexels.com/photo/crow-on-tree-branch-1060381/
Hoo boy, could I relate to this one. Got a tear out of me. Well done.
Such a sweet, sad story. It’s hard looking back at how much my parents loved me despite their flaws. I definitely relate to your feelings here.