Out of the Silence

There are a few precious memories of my mother that I carry too. Like the days before I was old enough to go to school and I walked around the neighborhood with Mom, and no one or nothing else was with us—no yelling daddy, no hickory-handled butcher knife, no nickel-plated, semiautomatic hand gun. We walked the streets of our old neighborhood on Bethel street, to the houses they were tearing down across the way so they could build some public housing. I stood fascinated while those life-sized Tonka trucks—those yellow bulldozers and backhoes—shoveled and rearranged broken rock and dirt. Who might I have become if that was all my young life had been made of—walks around the neighborhood with Mom and quiet moments tending the garden with Dad? What kind of man might I have grown into? Maybe I would have retired from the Air Force as a three-star general. Maybe I would have graduated Suma Cum Laude from Harvard. Maybe I would have married and had children, been able to go back to Knoxville for family holidays, or kept a job beyond my 38th birthday. That would have been something. What measure of a man’s life can you take when you can almost see who he might have been? Does a boy’s passion for picking plums count for something? Was his delight in the silver birds that cut through the sky above his childhood home as they left the nearby airport enough to say his life was worth it? I’ll never know what my life might have been without all that fussing and fighting, without the daily callouts by my father who seemed to believe I could never do anything right—because a couple of years after the plum tree and the walks around the neighborhood, a gun went off in my living room just two feet from the piano and from my mom and me and all that green furniture and Landy, balled up on the couch hyperventilating from trying not to cry. My father’s arm jerked with that shiny silver gun, his hands unmistakably gripping the pearl inlaid handle, and a bullet exploded through the hardwood floor one foot from my own feet, maybe two from my ranting and crying mother. In that moment, the world cracked open and my soul jumped half an inch. In the second that my father fired that gun, the bullet that released didn’t just shoot through the floor, it tore through me first, invisibly shredding my insides, fraying my brain, and reprogramming the way I would think and feel and speak (or not speak) from that day forward. An assault took place on my nervous system that would silently and insidiously rob me of emotional peace for the next thirty-three years of my life. And my voice? Well it flew out of me that day and disappeared, making like it might never come back. Here’s how it all went down.