Beneath the Weight of Sadness

by Gerald L. Dodge

  Carly

  Three months after Truman’s death

  There’s an old limestone quarry just north of Persia. After it was no longer quarried but before the country got strict about dumping, people would take their garbage out there and just let it tumble down into the huge pit where limestone had been taken out for many years. I learned that from my father. He’d take me out there with my great-grandfather’s army pistol from World War I, an old Colt .45, and he’d teach me how to shoot. My mother was appalled—“She’s only thirteen for God’s sake, Frank!”—but even sometimes she’d drive out there with us. There were always lots of cans and bottles to set up and fire at. My father would take the gun out of its velvet-lined, engraved, wooden case, like a miniature casket, and he’d take a box of shells and we’d go out and shoot. Lots of people did it, shot guns out there. The place was away from houses or farms and nestled in so rifle shots couldn’t carry and hurt someone. It always seemed like no one else was there when we were there, though.

  But the gun scared me. It was heavy and I could feel the power it had in those six small chambers. I saw what it did to old cans and bottles. And the recoil was fierce.

  My father would fire it a few times, hitting targets about half the time—you had to be pretty close to the target—and then he’d hand the gun to me, stock first.

  “You have to hold it with two hands, Carly. Spread your legs out and bend your knees. Shooting a pistol is artful in its way. Now, you cock the hammer back and then look down the short barrel at the sight at the end. Line that up to the target, and you squeeze the trigger. You never pull the trigger. You squeeze it.”

  I was scared of the weight, but I felt a kind of thrill from it, too. I didn’t want to think what it could’ve done to an animal or a person, but this pistol had probably been responsible for the deaths of a few soldiers. When I asked my father about that he said it was probably used on men at very close range. I didn’t like the thought of that. Holding a gun, the same kind that maybe sent those young boys in the square to their graves, was unnerving.

  We’d thought about who they were when they were alive. Thinking for them, Truman always said. But back then, also, whatever my dad thought was something we should do together, I was all for it. It was exciting learning to shoot the revolver and we nearly used a box of shells that first time. After that we’d go out every month or so and shoot bottles and talk about me or him or my mom. It was a way of bonding, I guess you could say.

  One time I suggested to Truman that we ride our bikes to the quarry. I told him I’d pack a picnic lunch and we could wander around on the paths. What I didn’t tell him was that I’d snuck the gun out of its case—it was locked but I’d discovered the key one day when I was snooping around in my parents’ bedroom—and I’d put it in my backpack, under our lunch. I’d put six shells from a box my father had in his desk drawer in my pocket. It was the summer we’d been in the attic together and I felt reckless and wanted to be reckless with Truman.

  The quarry was ten miles or so out of town. On the way there we often had to pull into the grass with our bikes as cars passed because the shoulder was so narrow. Truman was cautious that way. I rode my bike in front and whenever he heard a car coming behind us he’d yell for me to get off the shoulder. His caution was for me and I felt a warm feeling because of it. The day was hot. I was glad, as we rode along and sweated, that I’d packed a few bottles of water in some ice.

  When we got to the quarry I could tell Truman had never been there before and, like with anything Truman didn’t know about, he was fascinated.

  “It’s why you see those stone caves on the back roads. They’re called lime kilns,” Truman said. “There would be great fires inside and men would tend to them and the fires would heat the limestone until it formed into powder or could then be easily made into powder. I Googled it last night.” He looked down into the enormous hole in the earth. “I wonder how much of this quarry was dug by men and mules and horses and how much was blasted by dynamite?”

  There were a few sumac on the edge of one of the paths leading down into the pit and we took our bikes there and sat in the shade and drank water and ate sandwiches. I’d made tuna fish with mayonnaise and pickles mixed in and slices of hardboiled eggs, all on rye bread. It was Truman’s favorite sandwich when he came to our house and we raided in the kitchen. He said his mother’s tuna fish sandwiches had no character. The shade cooled us and I felt so close to Truman. It was always that way when we were alone. I still had this warm sensation from when he’d been so protective on the road. He could do daring things like jump into freezing water on a freezing day, but he wanted me safe.

  I got up from where we’d been lying in the grass and I told him to stay. I had something I wanted to show him. I walked down the path until I found a place where there were old bottles and cans. I made my shirt into a basket and walked up the path with four or five bottles. Shooting the bottles was more fun than the cans. It was more dramatic, the glass exploding from the impact.

  When I came back Truman looked at me with curiosity. He often wore that expression when he didn’t know what was going on. He was observant rather than vocal.

  “What are those for?” He stood and peered down as I let the bottles fall into the high grass.

  “You’ll see,” I said. I went to my backpack and removed the pistol and, before he could say anything, I took the bullets from my pocket and held them out to him to view. “This is what my father and I do when we come here. It’s really fun.”

  Truman didn’t say anything. He seemed too bewildered. I hit the catch and the cylinder opened and I began putting the shells into the chambers. When the revolver was fully loaded, I slid the cylinder until it caught.

  “I don’t want anything to do with that thing,” he finally said. But I could hear in his voice he was intrigued. I took a bottle and walked to a rock that was in the direction of the quarry chasm and placed it carefully on its highest point. I kept the gun raised in the air like my father had taught me.

  “Watch,” I said. “And then decide if you do or you don’t.”

  I walked back to where Truman was standing and got ready to fire, just as my father had instructed me. I felt a thrill doing this in front of Truman. He almost always had more to teach me than the other way around. I spread my feet apart and bent my knees. “You may want to put your hands over your ears,” I said with authority. I lowered the gun carefully with both my hands, cocked the hammer back, looked down the barrel rib and lined the sight up with the bottle. I squeezed the trigger and the gun and bottle exploded simultaneously as the gun jerked upward. The jerk was the most thrilling part of the act. I was powerless to prevent the recoil from taking the revolver upward, as if it were alive for that split second. I looked over with a smile and Truman had done what I’d told him. He removed his hands and looked at me as if I were crazy.

  “What the fuck, Carly!” It was odd to hear him swear.

  I smiled and set another bottle in the same place. Truman was shocked, which I don’t think I’d ever seen before. I took the barrel of the gun in my hand, still fairly hot, and extended the handle to Truman.

  “Your turn, Truman.”

  He looked at me with amazement and shook his head. “I have no interest in it, Carly. I have no idea what made you think I would want to shoot a gun.”

  I kept my arm outstretched toward him. “I’ll teach you. It’s fun.”

  He shook his head again, looking at the gun like I was offering him a diseased thing.

  “Try it, Truman. I want you to.”

  I didn’t think he would, but finally he put his hand out and took the gun from me. I didn’t want to appear too happy or excited so I went and stood behind him, took his hand in mine and raised the gun. “Cock the hammer back and then wrap your left hand around your right hand and slide your forefinger inside the trigger guard.” He did. “Now bring the barrel down so your right eye can run along the barrel and meet with the sight and line that up with
the bottle. Then spread your legs apart and bend your knees and put your finger on the trigger.” He did all that and then I stepped back from him. “Don’t pull the trigger, Truman. You have to squeeze the trigger just as you let out your…”

  The gun fired and the bottle exploded. He stood there for a long moment and then he did as I had done and raised the gun in the air and turned to me. He shook his head, beaming.

  “That was incredible,” he said. “That was really incredible, Carly.”

  “We have two more shots each,” I said. I walked over to him, the gun still raised in the air, and kissed him on the lips. “My turn.”

  Later that night, after I’d cleaned the pistol with the cleaning rod as my father had instructed me to do, I thought of how fascinated Truman had been with this new experience. He said he’d never understood people’s fascination with guns until that day. Now he knew, he said.

  “They’re incredible and scary. They’re beautiful and dangerous and alluring all at once.”

  At the time I thought he was right and that was just another example of how Truman could reduce complex emotions and ideas into something easy and beautiful. But the more I reflected on it, the more I thought he could’ve been talking about himself, at least for me. Truman was all those things and it only ever made me love him more.

  A few weeks later my father came into my room while I was listening to music. He asked me if I’d taken the gun out of the case and used it without his permission. I didn’t like lying to my father, but this time I did.

  “I thought there were more shells in that box. Are you sure you didn’t?”

  He never expected me to lie to him, as I normally didn’t, and so he accepted my denial. He went out of the room. I realized then I’d never considered he’d keep track of the amount of shells on hand. I had been careless and it was only because I was mostly honest with him that he didn’t question me beyond that.

  It is funny in a way now that I think of that moment five years later. I have to wonder if he’ll notice two shells missing, and, if he does, whether he’ll have the same faith in me this time as he did before, when I was just a girl.

  Amy

  Two months after Truman’s death

  He was dead and Ethan killed him. I didn’t know, of course, until they came and arrested Ethan, but as soon as they took him out of the house, handcuffed, I knew he’d done it. It only made sense. Why else would that boy be left on the bank near the Catatunk with two holes in his chest, to match the hole left in each of us? They came to search the house, went through every room, leaving everything turned inside out, and they were like little children when they found that gun in the filing cabinet in the basement. It was like those bazaars I used to attend with Truman at Halloween, people streaming in and out, noisy, excited, rude.

  Ethan denied the entire thing, and I told them in a separate interview that he had been with me. The one with the gapped teeth leaned across the table and said, “How do we know for sure you weren’t part of it?” He had that smirk on his face as if he’d asked a question that would nonplus me, make me break down and confess. I smirked right back. “How do you know for sure I was?” That stopped him dead in his tracks.

  But really, the whole thing was too chaotic and I was too full of jubilance to make much sense of those twenty or so hours. What I really thought as I sat with the police and then my lawyer and then the police was this: “Is there any wine in this joint? Or better yet, champagne? Dom Perignon?”

  Because really, that vile boy was dead and Ethan had been brave and beautiful enough to have done it. And of course they finally had to release him, because the gun they found—even though I never even knew he owned a gun or even wanted one, much less had it in the house, the very basement above which I walked—turned out not to be the gun that killed Tommy Beck.

  Ethan seemed rather reserved and somewhat bewildered—or was it bemused—by my celebratory attitude, or maybe he was just exhausted. He looked it, his face pale and doleful and strained, even with his eyes bloodshot and not looking anywhere in particular and certainly not looking into my own. He went straight to the bar and poured himself a whiskey and drank it down like they do in the movies at times, and then he poured another one and took a sip and then put the glass down and sat at one of the stools and stared out at the lawn and gardens and the trees he and our son had planted together.

  I didn’t say anything. I just watched his back, his sloping shoulders and his rather large head, shaped much like Truman’s is shaped except that Ethan has dark, graying hair and Truman’s is blond.

  We were silent for the longest time and then I heard him sigh, a long, sibilant sigh, and then he turned back to his bourbon and took another long drink.

  “I’m proud of what you’ve done, Ethan.” I think I shocked him. I don’t think he knew I was still standing there. “It was the right and only thing to do, killing that boy. It was evil that took Truman away from us and you’ve done what any father would have done. You’ve wiped out some of that evil, destroyed it for good. Now there’s a chance.”

  He looked at me and I saw how much he’d aged in the past weeks. His face was drawn and old looking.

  He shook his head and kept shaking it for the longest time. “I didn’t kill him, Amy. I just didn’t.”

  “Do you think I would ever go to them? Do you think I would ever say a word about this to anyone?”

  “It doesn’t matter what you would say or wouldn’t say, Amy. I didn’t do it. I went up to Wellsboro and I bought a gun and I had every intention of killing that boy. I did. And while I was sitting in that interrogation room with those cops I began to imagine that I did do it and, if I had, how ridiculous, how terrible that would’ve been. I had no real proof that he killed Truman.”

  “But he did do it. He did take Truman away.”

  “Now I know that, but when I had this hatred in my heart,” and he put one of his hands to his chest, “I didn’t know for certain he’d done this to our son. I was going to take it upon myself to kill a boy I wasn’t ever sure had done what I thought he’d done. That’s how crazy with anger and sadness I was feeling…am feeling.”

  “And your suspicions were right. And you killed him!” He began to say something and I put my hand out. “Don’t, Ethan! Don’t say a word! Not a single word. Don’t you dare retreat back into Old Ethe, where everyone has to like you and find you so damn charming and so damn amusing so that you can hide from everyone who you really are. You can no longer hide from me or your son. We know now. I know now. Don’t ruin this moment by making some, some shit-ass excuse that you were going to but then you didn’t and now you’re glad you didn’t because you were never certain.”

  He only began to laugh then, a slow roiling deep-in-the-chest laugh, but as it got louder it turned into sobbing and then I knew for sure he’d done it and I felt better again. I felt as if once again I’d been right about him. He stood and looked at me and then he wiped his tears with the back of his hand. He walked to me and then past me and then I watched him disappear toward the stairs and then I heard him going up them and then, because the house was so quiet, I heard him shut the door to one of the rooms and I knew he was going to turn down the covers in a bed, maybe our bed, and climb under them and take a long and deep sleep.

  That’s what people do when they are entirely exhausted. They turn down the covers and fall into a deep and healing sleep beneath the weight of sadness.

  About the Author

  Gerald Dodge teaches high school English in Central New Jersey. He lives near the Delaware River. Beneath the Weight of Sadness is his first published novel.

 

 

 
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