All my life, I’ve been a solider. I can remember my eleventh birthday; no birthday cake, no balloons, no friends. Just my mother, sitting beside my bed, smelling like fire and blood, a fresh bruise creeping up the side of her narrow, drawn face, an old sandalwood gripped pistol in one hand. She touched my hair, a rare gesture of affection so startling it scared me, and told me I had hair like my father. This was not meant as a compliment, not meant to show endearment towards me. I knew who my father was.
“Like coal, like nighttime.” I remembered her whisper, her callused, ragged nailed fingers against my forehead, and I had turned my head to hide the tears of shame and hate. “You are not your father.” she said a moment later, as though she was just realizing. “You don’t have to be your father.” she took her hand away, and it was both a relief and another slight. She looked at the gun in her hand. “This was my father’s.” she told me. “He was a great man.” she studied me with her pale gray eyes, which I’d inherited, and asked, “Do you know what makes a man great, Deacon?”
“No, ma’am.” I whispered, scared and fascinated by her. My mother, the warrior, the freedom fighter, the murderer. I’d heard her named all those things.
“Fear.” she said. “And the strength to go on in the face of it. Do you understand?”
I thought I did. I thought I knew what fear felt like; hadn’t I always been afraid? Afraid not of monsters under my bed or failing a math test, because I’d never taken a math test and I‘d never slept in a real bed before. No, not afraid of those things, not afraid of child’s things, but afraid of real grown up things. Afraid of getting shot in the stomach, because I’d seen the way a gut shot kills, and I could imagine only death I’d like less; fire. Terrified of fire, because I’d watched the children I’d been raised with, all seven of them, as they pounding on glass that melted against their fists from the flames. I saw the way their hair caught, the way they seemed to wither like crops during a drought. Afraid of being caught asleep, so I never slept well, never let myself, horrified that I would wake one night to the barrel of a rifle a moment before it flashed and splattered my brains all over my flat, scratchy pillow. They never minded killing children. But afraid, more than anything, of failing her. Of letting her down. Of showing her weakness.
“Yes, ma’am.” I told her softly, clutching the blankets in both hands until my knuckles were white.
She sighed and looked away from me. “You are eleven today.” she told me. “Eleven years I’ve carried you. I will carry you no more.” she turned her eyes back to me and held out the pistol. “Your life is no longer my concern. You are not yet a man, but in this world, you cannot afford to be a child. It’s time to put that behind you.”
I took the gun, even though I didn’t want to, even though it scared me, and the weight of it was amazing. Her words didn’t hurt me, like I thought that might, didn’t scare me. They made me angry. When had I been a child? The towns we passed through, the cities we sometimes saw, were full of boys my age, going to school, riding bikes, playing at war in their fenced in backyards with their cute purebred puppies and their sweet, smiling mothers.
I had a dog, a shaggy haired mutt with half of his left ear gone and the fur around his mouth permanently stained a rusty brown. He didn’t have a name, and knew only one trick; kill. I had a mother, but she rarely smiled and was never sweet. I’d never ridden a bike, but I could disassemble, clean, reassemble and load a . I’d never gone to school, but I’d had plenty of teachers. Not science but tactics, not math but survival.
I said nothing. There was nothing to say. I took the gun, and she stared at me, waiting for something that I couldn’t even begin to understand. Then she stood and disappeared out the tent flap, and I was alone. I realized then, laying there with the cold seeping through my sleeping bag, the pistol laying on my chest, that I’d always been that way.
Six weeks later, my mother killed herself. It didn’t hurt at all.
