Around the Barrel

My father told me to look down.

He said, “Look down, and don’t look back up until I tell you.”

So I feel at a loss, because when people ask what I remember, I have to say--

I remember dirt.

I remember how my shoes looked that day.

The shoes we had just bought.

White when my mother swore that white shoes were bad luck, because how could you help, but get them dirty?

I felt my father grab my hand and swing, and I didn’t understand. Not just the action, but the roughness of it.

My father never laid a hand on any of his children. He was not physically violent in any way. He was not a religious man, but he found the consequence of parental disappointment to be more effective in disciplining than all else.

I had never felt him pull at my arm in such a way.

A moment later, I was behind a barrel. One of those jobs you could go over a waterfall with if you so chose. If you felt as though your life lacked adventure.

Whatever adventure I would one day desire I received all in one day when the Dalton gang came through town.

The memories of a child are not history, but often, trauma.

You discover things as they happen to you, and so, you know love before you know what love is, and you know tragedy in much the same way.

My father never wore white shoes, because while he believed in the invincibility of youth in much the same way young people do, he felt that luck loosens as you age.

He wore boots. The same pair. From the time I was born to that day when I got my bearings enough to look around the barrel and see those boots pointing towards the sky.

I was all of seven, and the math of a situation when you’re that age often doesn’t come out in a way that’ll hold up for you later on.

Case in point--

I remember telling myself that Pop was taking a nap right there on the ground in the middle of a gunfight between two lawmen and one of those Dalton boys.

They had wanted to rob two banks on the same day--something that had never been done. Coffeyville seemed like a good place to make history. Nothing much ever happened there, and on most days, my father would leave his gun at home when he was taking me into town to speak on various topics with other residents.

I was not his eldest son, but my brother was only interested in physical labor and how it could shape him into the kind of man that had no need for words. That left my father with me as a vessel for all his hopes of one day having an academic in the family.

Books were acquired at great cost. More disparagement from mother. She didn’t see the point in educating a child who would surely never leave the confines of Coffeyville, but my father had other plans in mind. He had written to a school out East that would often diversify its student body with boys from all over the country so as to create the perception of worldliness.

My father had the letter in his hand accepting an offer to send me out there two days after my birthday the following month when the Dalton gang decided that their history and mine should intertwine.

I have never found the details of an event to be as fascinating as the future trail it creates. How an action can set about circumstances decades ahead that may be glimpsed momentarily by someone too young to understand what it is they are seeing.

That may be why, as my father lay bleeding to death on the ground, I saw my granddaughter and I standing in an ice cream shoppe. A car backfired. I flinched. The ice cream cone I had purchased for her hit the beautiful white floor. A smattering of strawberry scoops. She began to cry, not over the loss of her treat, but because her grandfather looked frighten.

By then, I’d be an imposing man. Tall. Like my father was. What could possibly frighten me?

That day, around the barrel, I did not know that my father’s blood was soaking through the letter that would set me on a course of natural avoidance. No dirt under my fingernails. No calluses on my hands. No crooked spine from a generational battle with soil and seed.

Had I known, my sense of self-preservation may have launched preemptively, allowing me to snatch the letter from my father’s hand, and deliver it to the postmaster at a later date. My mother would have insisted on me staying put, but I would have done something in my favor and not nothing, and that may have given me some comfort when looking back.

Instead I cowered. Bullets continued to ring out with a sound that is always louder than one remembers no matter how often they hear it.

The impulse is to demand that it all stop, and then, when it does, the impulse is to want it back, because the silence feels too imposing at first, and then, much too final.

I stayed around the barrel until Mrs. Kloehr found me and returned me home. My mother was stripping down a hen when I appeared at the door. She called for my brother, who was out in the yard, sharpening his tools. The story of my father and the Dalton gang was relayed, and we ate supper as though he’d been merely detained and not taken from us.

My brother put me to work the very next day, and if there was a funeral for my father, I don’t recall it. It’s possible I was not allowed to attend, but I doubt my mother or brother would have spared me such a thing. The life in front of me would be difficult, but I would still find a path out of Coffeyville by way of a business opportunity that my brother found foolish, but which made me wealthy enough to purchase the farm from him only to sell it for half its worth just to be rid of it.

By then, my mother was being cared for at a rest home, and with the money he made off me, my brother drank himself into an early grave.

The few times I drank enough to talk about the day my father died, I would find myself talking about my white shoes and how scuffed they were when I returned home alongside the kindly Mrs. Kloehr and people assume the pain of losing my father left me with the ability to only speak of the meagerest details.

When really, that’s all I have.

Imagery that, if taken with a camera, would look as though it were a mistake.

But my father said, “Look down” and so I did.

I don’t know when I looked up again.

It’s possible that, in some way--

I never did.