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Me.

GUNS
by Wilfredo Pascual

(anthologized in Anvil’s Father Poems edited by Gemino Abad and Alfred Yuson, 2004)

1.
My right eye is patched with gauze bandage.
First time, I fired a few days ago
live ammunition shots in a shooting range.
Aiming, I blurred the rest of life
and focused on the front and rear sight of memory
my father sleeping with two pistols under his pillow
the triggered dreams and how as a child
I sneaked alone, held its dark weight
bowed to the awesome terror, the power
it commanded and wondered if I acquiesced
could I tame it?
When my father tried to teach me to fire
I trembled and missed. My father’s frustration
fired words louder than the ammunitions
my failure his target.

2.
I was nine when one of the maids caught me
playing with a .45 calibre. I pointed the gun at her.
She screamed and raised her arms while I laughed
returning the gun back under the pillow.
Why was I laughing? she asked. My uncle aimed at her
young son and the devil pulled the trigger.
But really who was laughing, who raised whose hands
in surrender when impoverished mothers went on
serving generations of their child’s murderers?
What powers held us all?

3.
An empty dirt road at night I was eleven
when my uncle driving pulled aside,
walked across beams of dust and fired three shots.
I did not see anything, he told me - until the blind eye
and the silence muted his assassination a year later
and the killings now raised its arms in surrender
before the written word.


4.
My dying father who could not speak confessed
his own secrets with a pen. We sat in the garden
red and yellow hibiscus in full bloom.
On a plastic slate over a hard sheet of carbon, he admitted
killing five people. He was only seventeen the first time.
Four were men. The fifth was a pregnant prostitute.
whose ghost, to this day appears in a deserted road
in the village where her body was dumped.

5.
Six, Dad. Not five. But I did not correct him.
How could I add to his guilt-wracked miscalculation
all the books he read to me at night, the assurances
that the world is good, that man is kind
when his written confession weighed the pendulum
of my becoming with the killing of the unborn child?
How could I ask him why, when he raised his head
his eyes fixed, glazed like fish, not with thick tears but
with the paralyzed nerves of Lou Gehrig’s disease?
What did he see, behind the frosted glass of remembering
what story should I tell when finally he lifted the plastic slate
and erased everything?

6.
The words returned decades later
as I pondered the relationships between rear and front sights
in a shooting range where memories crouched
inside me like a beast ready to leap.
The .45 caliber recoils, I was warned
hits the fist upwards. The palm rest
the thumb cutout, the middle finger support
gripped a cold, solid history of killings in the family.
The nerves extended, the blood flowed.
I remember laughing, reminding myself to relax
to breathe, breathe deeply. I aimed at the heart
licked beads of perspiration on my upper lip
calculated the strength required to squeeze
the trigger, the recoil of stories.
You have to pull the trigger now, I reminded myself.
Or was it my father over my shoulder? Now.
Pull. The trigger. Now.


7.
It began when I felt something heavy in my right eye.
It bulged, grew and throbbed like a fat bloodsucking bug.
The ophthalmologist saw specks of dark foreign material
the bullet lint in the right cornea.
He applied a clear sticky solution to my right eye
asked me to squeeze it shut for a minute.
When I opened my eyes, a tiny needle blurred
the rest of my vision and marked my moment of reckoning
steady fingers deftly locked in a steely battle against reflexive blinks.
The advice was to fix my sight at anything, anywhere
except the needle. But the left eye was stubborn.
It too wanted to see.

8.
I am now writing this down with my right eye patched.
Fired ten shots and missed all.
I thought it would be enough to serve as my final payments.
I thought I could come out clean.
Before I went to see the doctor I watched movies
went out with friends, shopped, struggled to write
cleaned my desk, replenished my garden with new plants
read books – and it is amazing
it is amazing that all the while, I was looking at the world
so clearly with a bullet lint, with specks of gunpowder on one eye
and I did not even know it.
Tomorrow they will remove the bandage.
I wonder how my right eye will react to the sudden light
I wonder how it will look at the world and what it will see.

Eamon Cale crutches slowly over to Guin. "Ye should be resting yourself," he says softly.

Guinevere Fouroux stands back for a moment, watching the children and smiling to herself. She turns, debating following Elise outside, but looks back as Eamon approaches. She eyes the crutches for a moment, then lifts her eyes to his. "Should, maybe," she says quietly. "Probably won't." She opens her mouth, so many words there, but she glances around the crowded room and shakes her head. "I hardly know what to say," she whispers. "There's so much."

Eamon Cale lowers his gaze to her burned and freshly bandaged arm. Clean, he thinks. He'll never take pristine white for granted again. "I know," he says softly, echoing his words and her own when she'd appeared outside the prison window. "But ye should try. To rest. I'm going to do the same. There'll be Mass tomorrow. And time to talk when we've both had sleep." His attention shifts to the gun, now seated at her hip, and he nods toward it with the faintest smile. "No practice like the real thing, aye?"

Guinevere Fouroux's lips quirk, hearing the words again, though it makes her heart ache, the echo of the first ones overlapping. She catches his glance to her gun, and exhales sharply. "If there's ever any question about divine intervention... " She searches his face, smile fading. "I can try and find Rena and Masha, if you like." Still not the right words, but the best she can do.

Eamon Cale smiles, although it holds a trace of melancholy. He lifts a hand from his crutch and traces light fingertips over the butt of her gun. "Angels oft bear strange names," he says, and lifts his eyes to hers. Words spoken over another rescue, words he knows she'll understand. He searches her face for a moment more, the need to know that Masha and Rena are well warring with his need to see her go home to rest. "Aye, I want to know," he says softly. "But only if ye feel ye can. I'll try calling again as soon as I'm settled in the rectory, but if ye do, and ye find them, call me right away."

Guinevere Fouroux meets his eyes, expression softening. There's no name for how she feels right now, and everything's too tangled to think clearly even if there was. "I'll see if I can find them," she whispers. "I want to know they're all right, and I know you need to. I'll call if I do." She reaches out to touch his arm, the trace of ink, and her throat closes. He's real, he's here, and the nightmare, it's over. She hesitates a moment, then leans up on her toes, to whisper something simple in his ear.

Lazarus Lowenstark slings his feet over the bed, the Stitchers doing all they could do for him. "A sugar cookie will probably do...." He says, and walks past them, to his armor, and starts to load the pieces on.

Eamon Cale bends his head, eyes closing in silence as he listens to her whisper. It hurts his heart, and he thinks it always will, but there's a comfort there as well, strange as it seems. He shifts his weight to his uninjured foot, his crutch tucked beneath his arm, and lifts a hand to briefly cradle the back of Guin's head. He would touch his brow to hers, and remain there for a moment, understanding and gratitude and things unspoken in that simple touch. Then he lifts his head, meets her eyes, and gets his crutch steadied once more. No words needed, he starts toward the med-den door.