I've been thinking about this idea a lot lately, that withholding information constitutes a lie, and I hate it. I hate that I do it and I really wish I had someone to blame for it. I wish that someone had taught me how so that I could hold them responsible, or that there was someone who was supposed to tell me not to do it to so that I could be mad at them for falling down on the job. I kinda want to be mad at my family, and to some degree I am, but I don't think I can actually hold them accountable for decisions I made on my own. It certainly wouldn't hold up in a court of law, anyway. All I can really say is that I grew up with the idea that the best way to protect yourself from getting in trouble is to hold out from telling the truth as long as you can, and there are a lot of ways in which I can see myself still operating under that assumption.
I used to go deer hunting with my grandfather when I was a kid. On one trip, when I was about thirteen, it had been misting all morning long and when we got back to the cabin, my grandfather asked me to oil the rifles to prevent them from rusting. I was excited to be trusted with everybody's guns and, in my excitement, managed to drop the one that my grandfather and I used. (Thankfully, I was at least smart enough to unload them all first.) I froze. I did the thing where I said, "Oh shit," and then clapped my hand over my mouth because I was thirteen and not allowed to say those words. "What do I do? What if it's broken? What if my grandfather writes me out of the will? What if he just kills me and buries me out here? How am I gonna fix this? How could I have been so careless?" The thoughts ran through my mind with such rapid succession, I'm surprised my brain didn't overheat and shut down. I checked the gun itself for any nicks and scratches and then the scope to make sure I hadn't cracked the lens or anything. I saw a couple small scuffs that were barely noticeable and might have already been there (except that my grandfather took immaculate care of his guns, so there's no way, in hindsight, that they were) and convinced myself that the gun was okay and nothing bad had happened. I simply finished oiling it and put it delicately back in its case.
The problem, though, is that high-powered rifles with high-powered scopes are fairly delicate things. The reason they make big, durable cases with soft, foamy liners for them is because the slightest jarring can discombobulate the scope's accuracy, thus making the entire contraption, essentially, useless. And I hadn't just dinged it a little. I full-on dropped it. On concrete. I mean, it clattered and everything, like I was a Nazi soldier being taken captive as a prisoner of war. Like I said, I inspected it and made sure it wasn't damaged, but I knew there was no way it would shoot right after that.
But I didn't say anything about it, either.
Nobody saw me do it. Nobody heard it drop. I put it back in its case and walked away clean and resolved to never breathe a word about it to anybody.
Until.
It was the end of the hunting season and we only had one more trip before putting everything in storage until next year when my grandfather, as he always did, would take the guns to a professional and have the scopes calibrated, thus washing my sins away. I had sweated it out through two previous trips and prayed desperately that God would make all the deer invisible or something so that we wouldn't have a reason to shoot the gun and find out it was defective. We were right down to the last outing of the last night and it was almost too dark to see and I guess I must have stopped praying for a minute or something, because we drove past the biggest deer I think I've ever seen. It looked like a moose. Terror struck my when my grandfather stopped the truck and told me to get the gun. If he had asked if I wanted to take a shot, that would've been different. I could've said "no" and given a bunch of excuses because it was late and if it ran, we'd have to find it, and then we'd have to clean it and it would be a mess, etc. Being told to get the gun was different. This was a trophy animal and, as a hunter, I was expected to want to kill it. I would have gotten the award for biggest deer killed this season and people would talk about this kill for seasons to come. There was no option to this. I had to shoot the gun.
I fidgeted around, mostly from wrecked nerves more than excitement, and aimed slowly, hoping the deer might suddenly spook and bolt off into the distance for no apparent reason. I closed my eyes and put my finger on the trigger, praying that God would either miraculously guide the bullet into a kill-shot or make the deer run so far away that I wouldn't have to take a second shot and I could just blame my lousy shooting and move on.
KABOOM!!!
Nothing happened. I mean, literally nothing. The deer looked up from whatever brush he was nibbling on and stared in our direction like we had just asked for directions to the nearest gas station. "Reload! Reload!" My grandfather was poking me in the shoulder. I ejected the empty cartridge and loaded another round.
KABOOM!!!
Still nothing. I was more angry at the stupid deer for not running away at the sound of the gunshot than I was at myself for using a gun I knew was messed up. There were six rounds in the gun and I used them all. Each time, the deer would just raise his head and look around sleepily, like a drunk person looking for the bathroom, and then go back to eating. After the last shot, he trotted off, probably to taunt some other poor thirteen year-old with a broken gun.
The whole ride back to the cabin, I got to answer the half-a-million questions my grandfather had. Was I aiming in the right place? Did I remember to breathe out, aim, and then shoot? Did I jerk the trigger or just press lightly, increasing pressure until it gave? Yes, Poopa. Yes, Poopa. No, Poopa... Every question was salt in the wound. I felt like those guys you see in movies, handcuffed to the chair they're sitting in, one lonely light bulb swinging just overhead, some hard-nosed cop sitting on the table in front of them, flinging down files and demanding the truth. "I just can't imagine what went wrong, then... Something must be wrong with that gun."
I couldn't take it anymore. I cracked. I cried as I told him what had happened, when it happened, how ashamed I was, how I didn't want him to be disappointed or think that I had been careless or unsafe with the guns... I don't remember exactly what I said, really. I just remember feeling the truth welling up inside me, like a balloon inside my chest, needing to be popped, begging to be let out.
I also don't remember how he responded or what he said about it. I wish I did, because I feel like it was probably something important; something significant that I could carry with me for the rest of my life. All I remember him saying is that he loved me and that we wouldn't have to talk about it with anybody else: I had told him the truth and that was all that mattered.
It's funny, I haven't really thought in-depth about this in years, maybe even since it happened. That thing about not remembering what he said, though... I think it's because I felt so guilty. I was so wrapped up in my own pain and fear and so concerned for my own well-being that I wasn't really paying attention to anything else. Looking back, it's a feeling I had a lot as a kid, and probably one of the reasons I don't have a very clear memory of my childhood; of people and places and things that got said.
I wish this were an isolated incident in my life. I wish a rifle scope were the only thing I'd broken. I wish I had learned a lesson that night to always tell the truth and live with a clean conscience and trust other people to love me and forgive me and not beat me up or think less of me. But it's not and it wasn't and I didn't. I have predicated my life on the idea that to be honest is to be vulnerable, and the last thing anybody should ever want to be is vulnerable.
But I'm learning, too, that lying leaves you broken, and I don't want that either. There are a lot of ways in which I can see this anecdote as a metaphor for my life as a whole; a lot of ways in which the things I want to turn a blind eye toward keep coming back up in my life to show themselves defective. But what am I supposed to do now? Who do I tell? Whose gun is it?
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