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Talking River
Lewis-Clark State College
500 8th Avenue
Lewiston, ID 83501
Phone: 208-792-2716
E-mail: TalkingRiver
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Celebrating
10 Years
of Continuous Publication:
The following is an essay from the Winter 2002 issue.
Bette Lynch Husted
(essay about the front
cover ─ photograph courtesy of the author)
They look so innocent. They must have hired a photographer,
although I cannot imagine that. More likely one came by, hauling his
camera and tripod out of his wagon on an afternoon when they were
visiting Alice's folks on the lower bench and catching them in just
the right mood to pose for one of those postcard photos. They're
lined up in front of the old log house, with Great-Grandma and
Grandpa Scoles white-haired in the doorway. It's hard to imagine my
grandmother Alice this young-mid twenties?-and smirking like that,
like a kid herself. And Charlie is posing, one hand on his hip, his
mouth only pretending to be serious. It's a kind of joke. A parody:
the family in the American West. Charlie braces the .30-40 Krag on
the earth in front of him. Mildred, the oldest of his and Alice's
children, reaches just to her father's elbow, and the pistol she
wears in a holster hangs to her knee. Marie holds the familiar
little .22 rifle. They scowl fiercely at the camera. Gracie wears a
two-year-old's pout as she dangles what looks like a top-break Smith
and Wesson .44, and Alice, dressed in white, holds out the shotgun,
the .12 gauge "Long Tom" with Damascus barrels, so tall it reaches
almost to her shoulder. And there's Dad, propped in the baby
carriage, holding the Saturday Night Special of his childhood's era,
a little Bulldog .41 rimfire pistol about the size of a baby rattle.
His small head is bent over it, fascinated.
I found this picture on a rainy afternoon when I was eleven. When it
slid from between the cardboard-framed portraits of all those stern
black and white strangers that my parents kept stacked in Uncle
Joe's old army footlocker, I couldn't put it down. I knew this much
about guns: they weren't toys. Yet here they were, my elders,
playing. How did it feel to be one of those kids, holding those real
guns? Especially that big pistol. And that was another thing. I'd
not yet heard the word"handgun;' but I knew my dad didn't have much
use for them. The West wasn't as wild as the movies would have us
believe, he said. People didn't really wear holsters strapped to
their legs.
So what was my grandfather doing with three pistols?
And if Marie could hold the.22, I wondered, why couldn't P
It hung on the wall of the house I grew up in, just below the deer
rifle, Dad's Winchester.32.1 could not imagine shooting the.32. It
would break your shoulder, I thought. Only my father was strong
enough not to be knocked over just by the sound. But the.22 was
small, a boy-sized gun. The little rifle glowed in the stories he
told around our kitchen table after breakfast on long winter
mornings."The Old Man gave me that.22 for my birthday when I was
eight;" he said. "And one box of shells. `I'll give you a penny for
every squirrel tail,' he told me. The next box of shells would cost
49 cents, There were fifty shells"
How could it surprise me that my father was perfect? I had never
seen him miss. The.22 was real, too, sized for a boy's reach but in
the right hands even a hunting gun. Once, a few months after his
eighth birthday, he'd had to walk home, carrying his little rifle,
to ask for help. He was still too small to drag the deer across the
snowy east field. It had leaped across the road ahead of him and he
had shot it between the eyes. `After that," he laughed,"the Old Man
took away my shells and gave them out two or three at a time. I had
to bring in a squirrel tail for each one, too." |
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