Eighteen Inches

 By Trevy Thomas

As published in a 2017 anthology of the Riverside Writers’ group, a chapter of the Virginia Writers’ Club

I knew there were guns in the house, but I never gave them much thought because they weren’t a part of our everyday life.  I’d never fired them and never saw my husband use them either, but he kept a shotgun in the corner near the kitchen door.  It was put there after we found our little dog, Chip, shaking on the porch, his back pressed against the kitchen door with the source of his fear evident across the yard: a coyote staring him down like a mid-morning snack.  Bill was too much of an animal lover to hunt and I knew it would be difficult for him to kill any creature, but he would protect our dogs if he had to and that is how the shotgun found its post. 

Six months later, Bill died suddenly from a brain aneurysm and I was living alone in an old farmhouse on twenty-seven wooded acres far from everyone and everything I knew.  I had resisted moving there at first.  When we met, I’d been living in the heart of a small tourist town with neighbors close enough to know what I was having for dinner.  But he needed space for his sawmill and wood storage, and the arrangement he’d made for the land would help us financially so I agreed to move.

Like many seemingly insignificant objects he owned, the shotgun had outlasted him.  It rested butt side down with its single eye taunting me every time I entered the kitchen.  Since Bill’s death, I’d become afraid of everything, including the gun.  If a strong competent man could die over the course of a weekend before he’d reached fifty, then anything could happen.  I didn’t even know if there were bullets in the gun.  If I picked it up to put it someplace where it would stop eyeing me, would I accidentally set it off?  I was too afraid to even move it out of the way. 

During the early days of my grief, a good friend took leave of her new job, her husband and her life and drove three hours to stay with me for a week.  Somewhere through the fog of pain and fear, I was grateful.  It was the middle of summer when Bill died, an especially hot one, but I couldn’t stand to be in the house.  The dark old farmhouse was filled with his missing presence and I felt squeezed by it.  I’d leave the air-conditioned rooms and sit on the small kitchen porch where he used to smoke.  By mid-afternoon the days were above ninety degrees, humid and barely tolerable.  Sweat dripped off me and I’d try going back into the cool, but the darkness inside the house felt heavier than the heat outdoors.  I stayed inside just long enough to pour another glass of cold wine, then return to the porch.  Wine was opened earlier every day.  I didn’t want to face the full force of my reality without at least a little numbing – a lot of numbing, actually, but it never really helped.

Help Arrives

Heather drove her little brown Fiat up the steep hill of my drive and parked near the barn – the barn filled with wood from Bill’s business, the business I didn’t know what to do with, the wood I couldn’t move, the house I didn’t want to be in.  Thankfully, she brought more wine. 

I don’t know how she tolerated me for a week.  She had a notebook and was walking through my house making notes of things I needed to do and the many problems that needed solving in an effort to help me with the absurd difficulties I now faced but it was too much for my state of mind.  I cut her off in the middle of some explanation and told her to just stop it.  I could only handle one sentence, one thought at a time.  But she stuck it out and we did solve a few problems together. 

Twice a day we walked the dogs down a logging road through the woods.  To get to the road we’d cut across grass, sometimes stepping over snakes along the way.  Heather was terrified of snakes and I could see she was trying not to scream, jump or run.  Snakes in the yard didn’t bother me; nothing in nature did.  At least they were signs of life around me.  Snakes outside were one thing; inside the house was another.

One morning, coffee in hand, I went out to the porch, closing the door behind me because of the air conditioning.  Heather was in the kitchen making herself breakfast.  I wasn’t eating much those days and couldn’t wait to get out of the house.  As soon as the door slammed behind me, I heard her scream.  I’m embarrassed to say it annoyed me.  Grief, anxiety and fear can make a person quite selfish. 

Snake

I found her standing on top of the kitchen table, clutching her shirt, eyes popping out of her head.  “What’s wrong?” I huffed.  She pointed to the kitchen floor near a cabinet and yelled, “SNAKE!!!”  Apparently, I had stepped over the snake on my way out to the porch as it was coming in.

The cabinet was freestanding with enough room between it and the wall for the snake to slither behind so that’s what it did, probably to escape the screaming.  I knew Heather wouldn’t be able to help me with this problem, and I was surprised to discover that I was too afraid to deal with it myself.  If I was going to live alone in the wilderness, I was going to have to find more courage. But at that moment, with Heather standing on my kitchen table, I just couldn’t do it.  There was no way either of us would be sleeping that night with a snake in the house so I had to find a solution fast. 

I did what I didn’t want to do – ask for help.  I called a friend of Bill’s who lived forty minutes away to come to the house and help us get the snake out.  All we had to do was keep it behind the cabinet until he got there so I stuffed a towel in front to keep it from sneaking out and we waited.  When it tried to peek around the corner, we yelled and it went back into hiding.

Help finally arrived.  At least as it pertained to the snake, I’d called the right person.  He put on gloves, pulled the cabinet away from the wall, picked up the snake and carried it out to the woods.  Problem solved.

Then we sat in the living room and he asked how I was doing, told me how sorry he was about Bill, asked how he could help.  I was grateful for the snake removal but had been in the house far too long by then and desperately wanted to get back outdoors.  I thanked him and we walked back to the kitchen.  Along the way, I spotted the gun, eyeing me as usual, and realized I might be able to tackle one more problem before he left.

 Mishap #1

I asked him if he knew about guns and could at least tell me if the shotgun was loaded.  With an air of authority, he lifted the gun and started going into a detailed explanation of how things worked, hinging it in two a bit clumsily.  I was uncomfortable with him operating it inside the house and even more concerned about him aiming it at Chip, my little dog, who was trapped between a wall and the eye of the shotgun.  Twice I asked him to put it down, to stop aiming it at the dog, but he didn’t seem to hear me.  Finally, I yelled for him to just stop, that I didn’t want to do this anymore.  He put the shotgun back in its same spot and left.  The dog was safe, the man was gone, but I still didn’t know if the gun was loaded.

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Months crept by.  One of the things that marked this painful time in my life was how surreal the passing of time became.  A minute ticked by like a long hour.  An hour took a whole day.  A day was a week; a week a month.  A month felt like a year.  I wondered if this was how being imprisoned would be.  I dreaded getting out of bed and facing the jobs ahead of me for the day, the things I was trying to do that I had no skill or preparation for, the things that were supposed to be Bill’s jobs. 

I’d progressed to the point of needing to call in help with some of the work and reached out to an old friend and former neighbor.  I’d set up a kind of early sale for some of the larger tools and pieces of equipment that I needed to get moved off a field we were leasing.  I had done so much alone but didn’t want to meet these strangers by myself and could use help moving wood into a trailer so I could haul it back to the barn.  I’d never hooked a trailer to the truck before and wasn’t sure I wanted to attempt that alone.

Help Arrives Again

Terry arrived after his long drive from a neighboring state.  He’d never been to visit me at this house.  He was self-employed and rarely traveled so I knew this was a lot to ask, but he did it.  I showed him the guest room, the barn, the leased property and the tasks at hand.  I could see it was probably all more than he was expecting.  He kept saying, “Damn”. 

On the list of things to tackle while I had his help was showing me how to use the gun, but men were coming for the sale and we had to get ready for that first.  The weather cooperated.  It was late fall, but dry and warm enough to dress lightly.  I drove Bill’s truck down the same path through the woods I used to walk the dogs and parked near the trailer.  We emptied it of the few things still inside and Terry hooked it to the trailer.  Then he drove it across the field to the freight container which was filled with wood I wanted to move and keep safe from the sale. 

We set to work moving large branches and pieces of tree trunk slowly into the trailer, fitting it in as best we could.  I was concerned about preserving this particular tree because I had documentation proving it had been planted by George Washington, so it was the most valuable of the woods.  Terry had set a large chunk of wood on the ground at the entrance to the trailer to make a kind of step so it would be easier to get in and out.  It was a small gesture but something I wouldn’t have thought of and was grateful for his capable help.

 Eventually two groups of men showed up and everyone introduced themselves.  I showed them tools for sale in the container and they started looking through it, discussing the items they could use while Terry and I went back to stacking wood.  Once they’d made their selections, we did some negotiating.  Terry stayed out of it, mostly, but piped in once or twice.  There were three extremely large and heavy slabs of wood that needed to be moved and I knew we couldn’t do it on our own but they were valuable and I wanted to save them.  I reduced the price of a few of the tools they wanted in exchange for their help moving these slabs. 

It was a long day, but we’d accomplished much.  Somehow, these things that had been hanging over me had gotten done.  Back at the house, I reached in the refrigerator for a beer.  Terry watched me drink it and when I’d set the bottle back on the table, he said, “Whatever kind of beer that is you’re drinking should be in a commercial right now.  This is the kind of beer a woman drinks after a long day of making deals out of the back of a trailer and hauling around heavy slabs of wood.”  I laughed.  Since I was more the type of woman who worried about chipping her nail polish than working with lumberjacks, it was a compliment to me and a nod to my success at plodding through the mysterious new world that widowhood had brought me.  

Terry was heading back home that evening, anxious to return to his town filled with friends who liked to meet him at the local bar.  He was hoping to get out of my place before dark.  There was only one job left for him and that was to check the shotgun and show me how to use it.  It had been sitting in its corner for five months now and I wanted this over with.

Mishap #2 

I pointed to it and he picked it up and carried it out to the kitchen porch.  The door was left open, as it often was in mild weather, so the dogs could run freely in and out of the house and so I could avoid feeling trapped as much as possible.  He looked at the gun with a bit of puzzlement, I thought.  This was a man who knew guns.  He had a whole collection of them in his house.  I felt confident this was within his abilities.

I stood beside him on the small porch, observing.  He seemed to be struggling with the gun a bit.  Whatever he was trying to do, the gun was not cooperating.  He pointed it downward as he was trying to open the chamber and appeared to be using a lot more force when it wouldn’t respond, which caused a greater struggle.  As he was dancing around the porch wrestling with the gun, he turned around so he was facing back towards the open kitchen door.  I didn’t understand what was going on, but while I watched, the gun seemed to just go off on its own.  At least I thought it did. 

There was a loud “boom” and then nothing. 

I wasn’t sure what had happened and neither was he.  We just stood there in silence for a while.  Then I kind of laughed.  I don’t know why.  Terry seemed to be in shock because he wasn’t saying anything.  I looked down and saw a mess on my kitchen floor, just inside the door near where we stood.  I didn’t know what it was but it looked like a crumbly sort of white pile.  Then I looked up above it and saw a hole in the kitchen ceiling, pieces of it falling down to the floor.  Slowly, I realized he’d shot the gun into my kitchen, not eighteen inches from me. 

I’m embarrassed to tell you the next part but in keeping with the facts as best I can recall them, I think I should.  I asked him if that shot could have killed me.  Of course it could have.  Maybe I was thinking of the BB gun my father used to aim at squirrels on the bird feeder.  Harmless guns.  “Yes,” he said.  Then he turned around and sat down.  He said, “Just wait.  I need a minute.”  I think he was trying to make sense of what had just happened, and the gravity of what could have been was beginning to settle on him.  I, on the other hand, didn’t seem to mind.  Although I’m the one who would’ve been shot, I felt nothing.  Just sat there calmly waiting for him to get his wits back about him. 

New Reality

I wondered later whether my misery over the new reality of my life – husband dead, unusual business now mine to deal with, financial uncertainties, life of solitude in the woods far from civilization – had truly made me ready to so easily leave it.   There were times I’d thought about putting my head in the gas oven, like Sylvia Plath, and calling it quits.  The only thing that kept me from going through with it was three pairs of canine eyes now looking to me for their every need.  Also sustaining were moments like those I’d had earlier that very day where I was busy working around people and had glimpses that life might be okay again someday.  Mostly, I think horror no longer surprised me.  If he could suddenly die, why not me?  It’s a part of the grief process, I think: a clear awareness we otherwise ignore of our temporary nature as humans.

Terry gathered himself together enough to leave and I made him take the gun with him.  He didn’t want to drive with it in the back of the truck but I’d had enough of that thing in my house.  Later he would bring me a replacement, something simple, and show me how to load and shoot it.  When he did, we’d stand in the yard far from the house and I would keep well away from the business end of the gun.

Eighteen Inches

When he returned in the summer with the new shotgun, my to-do list for him was considerably smaller so we drove into the nearest town to have lunch.  I parked and led him to the outer deck of a restaurant right on the river near the train station.  We sat at a little table by the bar, watching the river stream over rocks, pausing our conversation for the occasional train as it stopped to gather new passengers.  While we were drinking our beers, he brought up the porch shooting.  He told me how what happened had really messed with him.  I said, “I know what you mean.  Had I been eighteen inches closer, I would be dead now and you would be in jail.”  He nodded, but said it wouldn’t have made any sense for him to spend a whole day helping me just to turn around and shoot me.  I said that wouldn’t have kept him out of jail nor me alive.  I was glad for both of us that things hadn’t turned out that way, and my gladness seemed like a turning point.

_________________________________________________________________ 

I look back at the years spent alone there as though I were doing my time with grief.  I was in a beautiful, raw, natural jail and couldn’t leave it until l’d finished what I had to do.  Someone told me then that I should be careful because a day might come when I’d want to live again.  At the time, I couldn’t imagine it.  It seemed an unlikely pinhole of light at the end of a tunnel, one I wasn’t sure I could reach.  But they were right. 

The life I have today is so different from how I lived then that I could not have imagined it if I’d dared.  I am back to living in town with my new husband and our four dogs.  Time slips by too quickly again.  I worry about my health, crime or any other thing that might steal away however much life I’ve got left.  I don’t think I would laugh today if a gun went off next to my head. 

I’m just glad I held on long enough to get here.