On our street, the fathers who hunted had sons who hunted. Their rifles and shotguns, the working ones, were never visible, but each living room displayed a weapon from their father’s or grandfather’s past, some heirloom hung over the mantle like a flag that declared what sort of compact country you had entered.
Although he loved the outdoors, my father never hunted, and so I stayed silent while neighbor boys told tales in the language of blinds and points and net weight and taxidermy.
My uncle hunted, but had no sons. When I was eleven, he decided to teach me. An hour, that lesson lasted, while my father sat inside his brother’s house like a wife waiting for war news. Because I was nearsighted and never wore my glasses except to read a quiz written on a sixth-grade blackboard, I proved to be a terrible student. “A start,” was all that my uncle said, and never brought guns up again. My father, in the car, did not ask what I had hit or whether I intended, now, to hunt. What he said was, “If he had a boy of his own, he’d be different.”
He and I and that uncle lived apart for decades until the afternoon my father, who, by then, had outlived my mother by seven years, said, “He has a little cancer in his bones,” a few months before his brother would die. That day, we played bridge as if everyone were healthy. My aunt and father partnered for an hour. From time to time, my uncle coughed softly. As always, he held his cards like a weapon, expecting me, in kind, to handle mine like an expert, using each bid to reveal something important about the cards I’d been dealt. Afterward, my father said, “Frank knows what’s next.”
Fifteen years later, the last time I visited my father while he lived alone, he said his longtime neighbor’s son was dead, shot by a stranger on the back porch of the yellow-brick ranch we could see from his small bedroom window. “About your age, that boy,” he said, meaning sixty, his neighbor as near to ninety as he was, the son still living at home as if he walked, each morning, to the school bus stop with textbooks in a backpack.
“What’s next?” my father said. The answer was his moving in less than a week to an assisted living home where “what’s next” would not include his leaving the stove on or falling down the stairs or forgetting to take a full day’s worth of prescription drugs. In his backyard, a storm-felled tree sprawled so close to the house that the door couldn’t be opened. The television showed only darkness, and my father had said earlier, “You try,” as if I might resurrect the familiar reruns he watched as video lullabies.
“They say his boy shot the other man first,” my father finally said. The survivor found in the kitchen by my father’s friend came home from blood work meant to establish what medicine and how much of it might suitably be prescribed to extend his life. “A room I know by heart,” my father went on, citing the color of the chairs and how a small clock sat on a narrow wooden shelf above the window. How, if you leaned over the sink like his friend did, you could see the whole way down the porch after a bloody stranger nodded in that direction to answer your first question.
I have not touched a gun since my uncle lectured me about maintenance and safety and breath control before he allowed me to shoot. Not since he lifted the rifle from my hands, perplexed by my failure. He would likely be puzzled that each morning, always before dawn, I play a word game that seems important to solve because the site shows statistics that compare my results to those of a million others. How silly, I, too, often think, walking to a side window to watch the sunrise while listening to birds I am unable to identify by sound. Some mornings, however, I follow the brightening in the west from the other side, noting the moment I can make out the details of what sits on my neighbor’s screened-in deck.