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Callaloo 23.4 (2000) 1195-1200



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March Marshal

Robert Stepto


The drive home from the East had been long and hard. During the first hours I found out that the guy riding with me, and supposedly sharing the driving with me, couldn't drive stick shift. During the last hours my car ran bad, so bad that I actually got out and kissed it when it finally limped to the curb outside my parents' house.

It was after midnight when I arrived and I tried to be quiet while unpacking the car and stowing my stuff on the front porch. I found my doorkey but it didn't work. I tried all my other keys, just in case, and they didn't work either. I hated ringing the doorbell that late at night, but after a few minutes of fretting I decided there was nothing else to do. So, I rang, and rang.

The door creaked open a crack but no lights went on and nobody was in sight. "Hello?" I made it sound more like a question. "Hello? It's Bobby?"

A head appeared from behind the door and I recognized my grandfather. My mother had said something about having her parents move in with us because they were getting so old, but I had forgotten about it. "Gramps, it's me, Bobby." I started toward the door but stopped short. Grandpa had a gun.

"Who? Who?" he called, pointing the gun at every shadow. I froze. I whispered, "Grandpa, Grandpa," hoping that with no sudden moves, no shouts, no loud noises, he might just hear "Grandpa, Grandpa" and not kill me. Suddenly, a light went on in the hall and my grandmother appeared.

"Ocie," she said, "Let me have that thing." He handed the gun over to her as readily as he would have passed his plate at the dinner table. "And you," she barked at me, "What are you doing ringing doorbells in the middle of the night?"

I started to say something about how my key didn't work, but I knew she wasn't looking for an explanation, certainly not right then. I scooped up my stuff and piled it in the hall; I could unpack in the morning. Grandma escorted Grandpa back upstairs. With one hand, she rubbed Grandpa's back a little, her other hand toted the gun.

For a while thereafter I often thought about the gun and about how Grandpa had almost blown me away. My mother adored her father, but the one thing she hated, even more than his so-called home improvement projects, was his insistence on having a gun in the house. He kept a gun, I was told, because he remembered the terror of the 1919 race riots in Chicago, but that did not wash with my mother. "Hell," she said, "That was almost fifty years ago."

She feared that with his increasing age and dementia Grandpa might do something horrific with the gun, like what had almost happened to me. She devoutly believed [End Page 1195] that no matter how well you thought you could hide a gun, children could find it and play with it and kill themselves. That part of her rant always made me small and silent, even when I was grown, because I had as a kid accidentally found Grandpa's gun in a shoebox way atop the canned goods in Grandma's pantry. Once or twice, I thought about telling Mom: "But I didn't play with the gun, I only looked at it." But then she'd know I'd found the gun and had never told her. Maybe then she'd start worrying about what else I'd been holding back from her.

What I couldn't understand, though, was how she let Grandpa bring his gun with him when he and Grandma moved in with us. I guess that in the midst of helping them sell their house, and choose which few sticks of furniture they were going to keep, the gun just slipped my mother's mind. Grandpa knew what he was keeping and packing...

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