The Gun Industry Fed Me and Failed Me: Part 2
Begin again: In the womb.
If you’re lost, start here: Part 1
When we left off I said that was the first time. I got to thinking about this a little more and while this instance is not part of my direct memory, IT should more properly be considered the first time. While I’ll ask you to forgive my second-hand telling of someone else’s recollection, I won’t debate whether you feel like it should “count”. It just does.
Weapon/Subject:
Handgun/My Father
“When your daddy blew through town I snatched him up quick as I could because he was the first boy I ever met that I knew for sure I wasn’t related to. And you know they’s some folk ‘round here that ain’t quite right on account of that they momma and they daddy is kin. That big ol’ waterhead across the way? His momma and daddy is brother and sister. BROTHER-AND-SISTER. But who can blame them? Nobody else was around to love I guess.“
My birth mother was doing her best to fill in the blanks for the time before I could remember, before Toast and before another mother and father had claimed me as their own. Before I was washed of my previous identity, before I was washed again in a baptismal font because the Lutherans were convinced the Baptists hadn’t done it right and I was still sticky with sin.
“They don’t know what they’re doing. They all TALK during church. It isn’t right. It isn’t done.”
She and I sat on overturned milk crates in a field of butter beans that was mostly harvested. The farmer always left a little for his neighbors, and when he called they came. My coming along with her was part of learning about my roots, and that meant getting my hands dirty.
I listened more than talked and didn’t want to seem over-eager to ask one of the million questions I had. The breeze rustled some of the dried beans in their pods, heightening my anxiety that a rattlesnake was nearby. I asked about the hospital we’d driven by on the way to this field, and whether that was where I was born. She said it was, but that she was surprised we’d made it that far.
I was reluctant to be born, hanging out in her belly far longer than my older sisters had, so she took someone’s advice to “swaller some castor oil”. When asked about a dose, she was advised to drink as much as she could stand until she wanted to vomit. Truth told, this advice may have been given to her by her doctor, the one who traded medical services for moonshine and is currently imprisoned for continually practicing medicine without a license.
Which she believes is a shame. He was a good doctor.
Finding herself suddenly in active labor, she needed my father to drive her to the hospital. Half way there, she told him to pull the car over. He refused.
“If you don’t pull this car over right now I am gonna shit all over the inside of it.”
He stared her down in that car, not the long black shiny Cadillac he’d had when he first met her. This was the car that he used to bring gators home, still thrashing their tails in the back seat. This was the car she made him sleep in because birth control wasn’t a thing. Or at least wasn’t available to her. Looking back now, she told me, she should have slept in that car herself with the doors locked because it was just one such night that he didn’t stay in there that she got pregnant with me.
He pulled onto the shoulder and she let the weight of the door fall open into the tall grass growing in the ditch. She hefted one leg out, and he grabbed her arm. He pushed the barrel of his handgun into her belly, pinching the skin of her bra-less left boob.
“If you drop my baby in the grass I swear to God I will kill you.”
For one second as she was telling me this, I found comfort. I’d never known a time when I was important to my father, when he loved me so much he’d do anything for me. I believe now this was it. He never loved me after I was born as much as he did before I was born. He loved me so much he would kill her, even if I died in the process.
She yanked her arm from his grasp and told him to quit being a stupid asshole or he’d have to be cleaning up blood AND shit from his car.
She did not drop me in the grass. I first breathed air safely within the confines of the hospital walls. When asked by the nurse about the mark on her breast, she blamed me.
“That little heffer pinched me when I fed her, that’s all.”
