Gunshot at Grandma

Grandma recounted how the revolver exploded like a last horrible heartbeat, how the bullet breezed her bangs as it bansheed by, and she showed me the bullet hole in the bedroom door, the door to that space where lovers should love with gentle minds and searching hearts.  The blue-hats told him knowingly to go “walk around the block” and “cool off,” as if overheating were his problem and all he needed was a little cool to salve the steam, but they would not see that the radiator was cracked and fouled.

In the mists of memory the boy came home from elementary school to an empty house and mixed flour with salt and cold shortening and cold water, and stewed a handful of raisins, and baked a raisin pie, and nibbled as he sat in the overstuffed chair and rocked away the silent hours.  The butcher knife leveled at the boy now a man because he dared to say no more hitting and to stand his ground and stare the knifer down and say No More Hitting! until the tyrant dropped the weapon and walked away.  There was thereafter no more hitting.

Grandma stood with me by her bedroom door as she recounted the revolver, and I cannot say for certain, now, whether the bullet hole was in that very door or in the vision of the storied door branded in my brain, in another bedroom, in another house, in another city, in another time, my vision of her memory merged with the immediate door of here – and I knew it did not matter, for the hole in the door was real, and the breeze of the bullet was real, and the ear-bursting bang of the gun was real, and the grimacing man was real, the overheated man steaming from the unbearable burden of her, my Grandma, making it her fault she was nearly murdered in her own bedroom.  To murder was not his purpose, of course, rather to compel the belief that he could and would if she stepped out of line.  To make her cower.

(Above Image by pixel1 from Pixabay )

My Grandma (1909-1994)

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Roger Baker is a career municipal attorney and hobby writer.  He is the author of Rabbit Lane: Memoir of a Country Road and A Time and A Season.  Rabbit Lane tells the true life story of an obscure farm road and its power to transform the human spirit.  A Time and A Season gathers Roger’s poems from 2015-2020, together with the stories of their births.  The books are available in print and for Kindle at Amazon.  See Rabbit Lane reviewed in Words and Pictures.