I backed the plate off at the kitchen table. When I saw what my grandfather had hidden inside that gun for sixty years, I had to set it down, because it was the gun.
The parts of it. Wrapped in an oiled rag, packed in wool, sitting in a hollow he had chiseled out of the buttstock of his own father’s shotgun with a wood gouge and a good deal of patience.
He took the working pieces out of it in 1963 and put them where nobody would ever find them, and then for sixty years he cleaned and oiled a shotgun that could not fire, and let every man in that family believe it was a working gun in the corner of the closet.
My father hunted beside him as a boy and never once saw him shoot. He always said Granddad let the boys take the shots.
Wrapped in with the parts was a piece of a paper sack, folded to fit, in that heavy pencil he used on everything.
This was my father’s gun and I will not sell my father’s gun. But I came back from the Pacific wrong in the head and there are three children asleep upstairs and I do not entirely trust myself on the bad nights. So it will hang in the closet and look like a gun and it will not be one. If you have found this, I got old, and that means it worked.
1963 is the year my aunt Bonnie was born. Third child. He was forty-one.
He went to the veterans hospital in Huntington in 1971, took the bus there and back every other Thursday for two years, and did not tell his wife what for until 1979. My grandmother told my mother that around the time he died, and my mother told me ten minutes after I called her from that table.
He got better. That is the thing nobody in this family ever knew there was to get better from. He was the calmest man I have ever been around, and he taught me to drive, and he sat through four hours of a rained-out ballgame with me in 1994 without complaining once.
And the whole time, the gun in that closet was a shell of a thing he had emptied out on purpose in 1963 so that whatever the war had put in him could never get to his kids through it.
I did not put it back together. I thought about it for about a week.
It hangs over the mantel in my house, and the parts are in a wooden box on the shelf underneath it, and the note is in the box with them. My son is eleven and he has read it twice.
My aunt Bonnie is sixty-two and she has that gun’s story now, and the part she keeps coming back to is that she is the reason for the date.
Everybody has a version of what a hard man does when he comes home from a war. My grandfather sat down in a shed in 1963, took his father’s shotgun apart, and hid the dangerous half of it inside the harmless half, and then said nothing about it for sixty years and got old on purpose.