4
The summer of 1974, when I was four, Dad shot an intruder breaking into our house at four in the morning. According to the ambered newspaper clipping I found in Dad’s papers, the intruder was a neighbor, a Vietnam veteran having a mental breakdown.
3
Dad told the sheriff that he woke when he heard the intruder trying to break in at the den window and he grabbed his .357 Magnum revolver. The intruder had a hammer and a flashlight. Dad ordered the intruder to stop three times: once at one window; then at an adjacent window which the intruder broke with the hammer, unlatched, and crawled through; and a third time after the man was in the house. Typing this took longer than the real events.
2
The intruder kept advancing. He made it into the second room, the kitchen, adjacent to the den. He shone his flashlight into Dad’s eyes. Dad shot the intruder in the upper leg two times. Dad shot the intruder twice because the intruder didn’t react to being shot the first time, he kept moving towards Dad.
The next day Dad dug the two bullets out of the kitchen floor. He made two lucite paperweights, each with a spent bullet and a cartridge case.
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Dad gave one paperweight to my grandfather, Mom’s dad.
The other one of the paperweights was always on Dad’s desk from that time forward. The paperweight is one reason I knew that Dad had protected us. Now it is mine, put away in one of the boxes of his things crammed into my upstairs closet.
0
Dad slept in the nude, thus he was wearing no clothing when he shot the intruder. “Honey, can you bring me some pants?” he called to Mom after the intruder was on the kitchen floor and Mom had let him know the sheriff was on the way.
My sister and I slept through the breaking glass, the gunshots, and the sheriff taking the intruder away to the veterans’ mental hospital; we heard nothing.
-1, the Greatest Negative Number
Another way to say subtract is “take away” and in the spring of 2016 it is time to take away Dad’s guns. Dad’s hallucinations are getting worse, a symptom of his dementia. He is increasingly paranoid that people are breaking into the house. He tells me that these intruders are jacking up the foundation a fraction of an inch each night. He shows me a crack in the ceiling as proof.
Another way to say subtract is “hold back” and Dad holds back information, letting my stepmom believe there is only one gun. He’s up to his old tricks, phrasing things vaguely. I’m onto him, and my sister knows there are more guns.
Another way to say subtract is “less than” and Dad tells me giving up his guns makes him feel denuded which I interpret as emasculated, or less than a man.
Another way to say subtract is “remove” and removing Dad’s guns takes multiple tries. Either Dad forgets that he’s agreed not to have his guns, or he pretends to give them up to get us off his case. We arrive at the solution when a neighbor offers to store Dad’s guns in his gun safe until Dad is ready to have them back.
After subtraction there is a number that remains and, though we don’t know it, when we take the guns, Dad will remain at home only six more months. Minus his guns, he defends the house one morning with a butcher knife, pacing the driveway to protect against intruders only he can see, refusing to put down the weapon when my stepmom asks. This time, when his wife calls the sheriff, it is Dad who is taken away.
Paula Burke lives and writes along the Salish Sea. She is at work on a memoir about old cars, family lingo, bad birthdays, and her father’s seven-year descent into dementia. Her work has been published in the Seattle Review of Books, Booth, and, now here in Hippocampus Magazine. Paula will always look at the dessert menu.
Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/isjamesalive
