by David Vann
My mother, of course, had predicted the entire series of inevitable plummets in the father’s postmarital life.
“Some things never learn,” she said. “If your father were a lemming, he would climb back up the cliff just to go over again.”
Perhaps we never were generous enough to the father. A father, after all, is a lot for a thing to be. That sounds bitter, I suppose, but I don’t mean it to be bitter; there were times when the father showed me most clearly what I would become, and that, certainly, is a kind of gift, if not always a blessing.
Currently the father is a small slab of granite planted near my mother’s cottage, in a field of wild grass and ice plant by the sea. Mother likes to have him near and claims their conversations have improved.
“I don’t have to be angry anymore,” she says. “I can feel sorry for him now and do the old-woman-rich-with-memories-and-longing routine. Though occasionally I give it a rest.”
The small slab of granite suits my own needs fairly well, also. I bring flowers and sit with him, just like the old times, except that now I don’t have to fix spaghetti. I listen to the self-shredding waves, squeak a finger of ice plant between my own, gaze into the higher blue, and sometimes, when among the upper currents I catch the hint of a hopeful, insistent flapping, I almost imagine the father has come finally to life.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
JOHN L’HEUREUX HELPED me most in shaping these stories, and also in shaping my life. Michelle Carter helped enormously, also. The truth is, I received more generous help from great writers than any young writer could hope for. Grace Paley and Adrienne Rich sponsored me for an early writing grant (run by Laura Selznick) when I was an undergrad at Stanford. In grad school at Cornell, Stephanie Vaughn and Robert Morgan tried to help me see how the stories might become a book. Mike Curtis at The Atlantic published my first story, “Ichthyology,” and Kim Witherspoon gave me early encouragement. When I returned to Stanford as a Wallace Stegner Fellow, Toby Wolff, who had long been my favorite writer, encouraged me also.
I’ve been lucky, in other words. I’m grateful to Gail Winston and many others at HarperCollins, grateful also to the folks at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and at UMass Press, for first putting this book into print. It’s especially nice that it’s a prize in Grace Paley’s name, since she was such a great teacher and inspiration. I still think of all she taught us, including that “Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”
I owe a debt, also, to a lot of writers I don’t know whose works inspired these stories. Marilynne Robinson and Elizabeth Bishop, most of all, but also Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy and others.
I want to thank David Forrer for his tireless work and constant good humor, Stewart O’Nan, Robert Olen Butler, and Noy Holland for their generous endorsements, and also thank the National Endowment for the Arts for a Creative Writing Fellowship in 2008. University of San Francisco, where I currently teach, has also been tremendously supportive.
Finally, I need to thank my family, because it was an uncomfortable topic I was writing about—my father’s suicide—and there’s exposure in these stories. They’re fictional, but based on a lot that’s true. My stepmother, Nettie Rose, was especially generous in helping me talk through everything for several years. She had faced a lot of other deaths in her life and seemed fearless to me then.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…
About the author
2 A Conversation with David Vann
About the book
4 My Father’s Guns
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More by David Vann
About the author
A Conversation with David Vann
What’s your earliest memory?
Trying to tie my shoes in Ketchikan, Alaska. An early sign that things come undone easily.
Who are your favorite writers?
I’m a sucker for landscape description, so I love Elizabeth Bishop’s poems, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
Why did you write this book?
After my father killed himself, my sister felt a drop on her cheek on a cloudless day and knew that it was his way of saying good-bye to her. My mother saw him vividly in a dream, again saying good-bye. But nothing happened for me. Just a void. So this book is my attempt to reach him again, to bring him back to life.
Why did you write about his suicide as fiction instead of nonfiction?
My father killed himself when I was thirteen, and for three years afterward, I told everyone he had died of cancer, because the way he killed himself felt too shameful. And I also didn’t quite believe his death. I lay awake at night and could see him running through the snow in Alaska, trying to come back to me. Everything about his death was mythical from the start, and Alaska is that way for me, also. As a kid in the rain forest of Ketchikan, I ran from imaginary wolves and bears, but we had real ones, too. I had this class once with Grace Paley in which she told us that every line in fiction has to be true. It has to be a distillation of experience, more true to a person’s life than any moment he or she has actually lived. So this book is as true an account as I could write of my father’s suicide and my own bereavement, and that was possible only through fiction.
“Everything about his death was mythical from the start, and Alaska is that way for me, also.”
About the book
My Father’s Guns
First published in Men’s Journal, July/August 2009, reprinted in Esquire UK, November 2009
MY FATHER gave me my first gun at age seven. It was a Sheridan Blue Streak pellet rifle, powerful enough to kill squirrels if I hit them in the right spot, behind the shoulder. The giving of the gun was a ritual, my father’s pride and pleasure as he showed me how to pump the gun, how to pull back the bolt. He even read a poem from Sturm, Ruger & Co. about a father and son, using it to teach me safety: never point a gun at anyone, never leave a gun loaded but always assume a gun is loaded, always keep the barrel pointed down. This was very soon after he and my mother had divorced, and we had only the weekends now. Roaming his ninety-acre ranch near Lakeport, California, one of those weekends, I didn’t realize the rifle was pumped and loaded, and it fired as I walked. Luckily the barrel was pointed at the ground. But my father turned around, the disappointment clear on his face, and my shame was nearly unbearable.
The next year, when I was eight, he gave me a twenty-gauge shotgun, for hunting dove and quail. That gun felt inevitable, as if it were a given that couldn’t be turned away from. As if we were put here to hunt and kill, and the only true form of a day was to head off with a gun and a dog, hike into the hills for ten or twelve hours, and return with meat and stories. That shotgun became an extension of my body, carried everywhere, the solid heft of it, cold metal, a sense of purpose and belonging. I gazed at it in the evenings, daydreamed of it during the week at school, looked forward to when I’d head out again.
When I was nine my father gave me a .30-30 Winchester lever-action carbine, the rifle used in all the Westerns, and he actually went down on one knee when he presented it to me, holding it in both hands, as if it were a ceremonial sword. “This is the rifle I learned on,” he said. “This is what we pass down through the family. The rifle I hunted with when I was a boy, the rifle I shot my first buck with, the rifle you’ll shoot your first buck with. It’s a good gun, an honest gun, with only a peep sight, no scope. You won’t be shooting long range, and you’ll need to hit the buck behind the shoulder.”
He moved back to Alaska then, where I had been born and spent my early childhood, and when I visited, a tourist now, we flew into a remote lake with a float plane, camped on a glacier, and slept with our rifles loaded, a shell in the chamber, beside our sleeping bags. “If a bear comes,” he told me, “the bullet from a .30-30 will only bounce off his skull, or bury in his chest and not do anything. You’ll have to hit him in the eye or in
the mouth if he roars.” There was no moon. We were the only humans for a couple hundred miles, and I lay awake imagining the bear attacking my father in the middle of the night while I tried to sight in on an eye in the darkness. This felt like the nature of our relationship: I saw him only during vacations now, and he would give me tasks that seemed impossible, including making up for lost time. We were supposed to cram half a year into a week.
Age seven, with his father and a buck his dad bagged on California’s White Ranch
I shot my first buck at eleven. A rainy weekend in September 1978, on the White Ranch, my family’s 640-acre hunting spread in northern California. A two-hour drive away from civilization, it was the entire side of a mountain, with high ridges, enormous glades, pine groves and springs, ponds and switchbacks, an old burned area, and even a “bear wallow.” Our entire male family history was stored in that place. As our Jeep pickups crawled along the fire roads, my father and uncle and grandfather would tell me the stories of past hunts. Places of triumph and shame, places where all who had come before were remembered.
My father flew down from Alaska every fall for this hunt. He was in his late thirties then, a dentist like his father, in years of despair leading toward his suicide. Grim-mouthed, hair receding, thin and strong, impatient. But he hadn’t always been like this. He’d hunted here since he was a boy, and he was known then for being lighthearted, a joker. Whenever he came back here, he could see each year recorded in the place, wonder at who he had become.
At eleven, though, I could think only of who I would become. Shooting my first buck was an initiation. California law said I wasn’t allowed to kill one until I was twelve, but family law said I was ready now.
I imagined sneaking up through pine trees or brush to make my first kill, but the weekend was rainy, so we hunted directly from the pickup. It felt unfair, even at eleven. The deer would be standing under the trees in the rain, flushed out from the brush. I stood in the back of the pickup with my father, holding on for the ruts and bumps. And when I saw the buck, hidden mostly by a stand of half a dozen thin trunks, I immediately felt pounding at my temples. “Buck fever,” we called it. Heart going like a hammer, no breath. The moment of killing something large, another mammal, something that can feel individual, that moment is not like any other. You could call it many things—brutal, wrong, irresistible, natural, unnatural—but what it felt like to me was straight out of Faulkner, the rush of blood and belonging, of love for my father. This was the largest moment of my life so far, the moment of being tested.
I saw two points on one side of the buck’s horns, making it legal to shoot. I levered a shell in the chamber and raised my rifle, but my father put his hand on my shoulder.
“You have time,” he told me. “Rest an elbow.”
So I knelt down in the bed, rested my left elbow on the side of the pickup, much more stable, and looked through the peep sight, lined it up with the deer’s neck. I couldn’t shoot the deer behind the shoulder, because its body was hidden by the trees. I had only the neck, long and slim. And the sight was wavering back and forth.
I exhaled and slowly squeezed. The rifle fired and the neck and head whipped down. I didn’t even notice the hard kick or the explosion. I could smell sulfur, and I was leaping over the side of the pickup and running toward the buck. My father let out a whoop that was only for killing bucks, and it was for me this time, and then my uncle did it, and my grandfather, and I was yelping myself as I ran over ferns and fallen wood and rock. I charged through the stand and then I saw it.
Its eyes were still open, large brown eyes. A hole in its neck, red blood against soft white and brown hide. I wanted to be excited still, I wanted to feel proud, I wanted to belong, but seeing the deer lying there dead before me in the ferns seemed only terribly sad. This was the other side of Faulkner, conscience against the pull of blood. My father was there the next moment, his arm around me, praising me, and so I had to hide what I felt, and I told the tale of how I had aimed for the neck, beginning the story, the first of what would become dozens of tellings. And I slit the deer with my Buck knife, a gift from my father, slit the length of its stomach, but not deep, not puncturing innards. It seemed a monstrous task. I had both hands up to my elbows in the blood and entrails—not the overpowering foul bile of a deer that’s been gut shot but foul nonetheless—ripping out the heart and liver, which I would have to eat to finish the kill, though luckily they could be fried up with a few onions first, not eaten raw. I pulled out everything, scraped out blood, and cut off testicles, then my father helped me drag it to the truck. He was grinning, impossibly happy and proud, all his despair gone, all his impatience. This was his moment even more than mine.
The next day, in the lower glades—wide expanses of dry yellow grass on an open hillside, fringed by sugar pines—I saw another buck. It was in short brush off to the side, a three-pointer this time, bigger. I aimed for the neck again, but hit it in the spine, in the middle of its back. It fell down instantly. Its head was still up, looking around at us, but it couldn’t move the rest of its body. So my father told me to walk up from behind and finish it off execution-style, one shot to the head from five feet away.
I remember that scene clearly in all its detail. The big buck and its beautiful horns, its gray-brown hide, the late-afternoon light casting long shadows. After all the rain, the air was clear and cool, distances compressed, even in close, as if through a viewfinder. I remember staring at the back of his head, the gray hide between his antlers, the individual hairs, white-tipped.
“Be careful not to hit the horns,” my father said.
I walked up very close behind that deer, leaned forward with my rifle raised, the barrel only a few feet from the back of his head, and he was waiting for it, terrified but unable to move. I could smell him. He’d turn his head around far enough to see me with a big brown eye, then turn away again to look at my father. I sighted in and pulled the trigger.
The next year I began missing deer, closing my eyes when I shot. We were on an outcropping of rocks over the big burn, an area consumed by fire years before, with only shorter growth now. A buck leapt out from a draw and bounded across the hillside opposite us. My father hunted with a .300 Magnum, a gun he’d bought for bears in Alaska. It was an outrageous caliber, sounded like artillery, and would tear the entire shoulder off a deer.
My dad was an excellent shot, but this deer was far away and moving fast and erratically, dodging bushes and rocks. I was firing, too, but only pointing the gun in the general direction, closing my eyes, and pulling the trigger. I opened my eyes in time to see one of my bullets lift a puff of dirt about fifty feet from the buck, and my father saw this, too. He paused, looked over at me, then fired again.
That was the last time we hunted, and we never talked about what had happened.
I turned thirteen that fall, after the hunt, and I saw very little of my father. At Christmas, he was having troubles I didn’t understand, was crying himself to sleep at night. He wrote a strange letter to me about regret and the worthlessness of making money. At the beginning of March, he asked whether I would come live with him in Fairbanks, Alaska, for the next school year, eighth grade. I wanted to spend time with him, but I was afraid of his despair. I was afraid, also, of the kids I knew in Alaska, who were already doing drugs at thirteen. I wanted badly to say yes, but I could feel a terrible momentum to what my life would become in Alaska. So I said no.
Two weeks later, my father called my stepmother in California, where she’d moved after their divorce. He was alone in Fairbanks in his new house, with no furniture, the ides of March, cold, sitting at a folding card table in the kitchen at the end of a day. He had broken up this second marriage the same way he had the first, by cheating with other women. And now my stepmother was moving on. She’d found another man and was thinking of marrying him. My father had other problems I would learn about later, including the IRS going after him for tax dodges in South American countries, failed investments in gold and
a hardware store, unbearable sinus headaches that painkillers couldn’t reach, in addition to all the guilt and despair and loneliness, and he told my stepmother, “I love you but I’m not going to live without you.” She was at work in an office and couldn’t hear well. She had to duck behind the door with the phone and ask him to repeat what he had said. So he had to say again, “I love you but I’m not going to live without you.” Then he put his .44 Magnum handgun to his head, a caliber bought, like the .300 Magnum, for grizzlies, capable of bringing a bear down at close range, and he pulled the trigger. She heard the dripping sounds as pieces of his head came off the ceiling and landed on the card table.
After my father’s suicide, I inherited all his guns. Everything except the pistol. My uncle wanted to get rid of that, sold it right away. But I was given my father’s .300 Magnum rifle, and though I had stopped hunting, I began using that rifle.
I learned to break it down into several parts that I could fit into my jacket. Late at night, when my mother and sister were sleeping, I rode my bike through our suburban neighborhood into the hills. I’d ditch my bike, find a spot hidden in trees, and reassemble the rifle. I sat in the braced sitting position, elbows on my knees, that my father had taught me, calmed my breath, and eased slowly back on the trigger. The recoil was so powerful it literally knocked me flat. But nothing was more beautiful to me than the blue-white explosion of a streetlight seen through crosshairs. The sound of it—the pop that was almost a roar, then silence, then glass rain—came only after each fragment and shard had sailed off or twisted glittering in the air like mist.