I worried about all this a great deal, because once my father took me with him to throw a gun into the river. My grandfather had a pistol he’d picked up in Kansas before the war.
When he took off west, he left an old army blanket at my father’s house, a bundle rolled up and tied with twine. When we learned he’d died out there, we opened it. There were some old shirts that had been white once and a few dozen sermons and some other papers wrapped with twine, and the pistol. Of course it was the pistol that interested me most. And I was a good deal older than you are now. But my father was disgusted. These things my grandfather had left were just an offense to him. So he buried them.
The hole he dug must have been four feet deep. I was impressed at the work he put into it. Then he dropped that bundle into the hole and started filling it in. I asked him why he was burying the sermons, too — at the time I naturally thought anything with handwriting on it was probably a sermon, and this did turn out to be the case. There were some letters, too. I know because not an hour after he’d put it in the ground my father went out and dug it all up again. He put the shirts and the papers aside and buried that gun again. Then a month or so later he dug it up and threw it in the river. If he had left it in the ground, it would be just about under the back fence, maybe a foot or two beyond it.
He didn’t say anything to me. Well, he said, “You leave that be,” when he dropped that big old gun back into the hole. Then he gave me the sermons to hold while he shook out those shirts and folded them up. He told me to carry the papers into the house, which I did, and he filled in the hole again. He stamped it down and stamped it down. Then about a month later he dug the pistol up again and set it on a stump and broke it up the best he could with a maul he had borrowed and he tied it up in a piece of burlap, and he and I walked to the river, a good way downstream from where we usually went to fish, and he flung the pieces of it as far as he could into the water. I got the impression he wished they didn’t exist at all, that he wouldn’t really have been content to drop them in the ocean, that he’d have set about to retrieve them again from any depth at all if he’d thought of a way to make them vanish entirely. It was a big old pistol, as I have said, with ornaments on the handle sort of like you see on cast-iron radiators. It seems I can remember the cold of it and the weight of it and the smell of iron it would have left on my hands. But I know my father never did let me touch it. I suppose it would have been nickel, anyway. Frankly, I thought there must have been some terrible crime involved in all this, because my father had never really told me the substance of his quarrel with his father.
He rinsed out those two old shirts at the pump and hung them up by their tails on my mother’s clothesline, preparing to burn them, I was sure. They were stained and yellow, miserable-looking things, with the wind dragging their sleeves back and forth. They looked beaten and humiliated, hanging there head down, so to speak, the way you’d hang up a deer to dress it. My mother came out and took them right back down.
In those days there was a lot of pride involved in the way a woman’s wash looked, especially the white things. It was difficult work. My mother couldn’t have dreamed of an electrical wringer or an agitator. She’d rub the laundry clean on a washboard. Then it would all be so beautiful and white. It really was remarkable. And all the women did it, every Monday of the world. When the electricity first came in, they ran it before dawn and at suppertime, to help with the chores, and a few hours extra on Mondays, to help with the wash.
Well, my mother couldn’t tolerate the state those pitiful shirts were in. She had a strong sense that the population at large judged her character by what appeared on her clothesline, and I can’t say she was wrong. But there was more in her mind than that. My father had a favorite verse of Scripture: “For all the armor of the armed man in the tumult, and the garments rolled in blood, shall be for burning, for fuel of fire.” That is Isaiah 9:5. My mother must have felt she knew what he meant to do and felt there was disrespect in it. In any case, she took those shirts and scrubbed them and soaked them overnight and bleached them and rinsed them in bluing till they looked all right except for a few black stains she said were India ink and the brown stains which were blood. She hung them under the grape arbor, where no one would see them. Then she brought them in and ironed them with enormous care, singing while she did it, and when she was done they looked as respectable as their stains and their wounds would allow. Then she folded them — they were so white and polished they looked like marble
