My Grandmother Diddie suffered a rapid decline in the Fall of 2000 at the age of 92. It was clear that it was serious, and, about month into the decline, an e-mail from my mother told me that the end was near. I immediately undertook to depart the next evening for Los Angeles down the I-5. I got a copy of Treasure Island on tape, stopped once for gas and a Western Bacon Cheeseburger at Carl’s Junior, and made it in 7 hours. I spent a four-day weekend with her. On the next weekend, she was dead.
She died in her sleep on the next Saturday of some sort of mass on her liver and abdomen. I got a chance to spend some time with her, as did all of her grandchildren except for Emily, the youngest among us, who somehow managed not to hear the urgency of the situation. Not everybody gets the chance to say goodbye like Diddie did. Not everybody gets such an orderly, if painful, death as she.
I tried to make myself useful around the house. I did a little bit of cleaning. Probably the time to have done this would have been over the visits of the last five years. I cleaned finger grease from light switches. I poured boiling water and bleach into the toilet to get it white again. I spent most of my time when she wasn’t asleep poring through her family history materials which she had fantastically well organised, and which make my mouth water.
In the course of going through old letters photos and notes, I found a hinged shelf below underneath the notebooks. I cleared it and opened the hidden door. No great shakes, just a combination lock-box with my great-grandfather Creely’s name. It was filled with ammunition. This is the beginning of the story of the guns I found.
The bullets in the box were of about ten or fifteen different calibres. There were a few rounds of .30-06. Three different types of thirty-eights. A box of .410 shot s hells. Some fat little .45’s or .44’s. Little tied-up bags of .22 shorts. It was all quite old, and I decided that it should be taken to be destroyed as soon as I got permission to do so. A local gun shop was gracious enough to accept the lot, no questions asked. Now, I knew that about all of my grandpa’s guns had been sold off back in the Eighties. Of the guns that I knew of associated with this household, there was only some type of .38 and a .22 short rifle that took any of these calibres. Let’s start with those.
We are gonna have to take a few steps backward. About a year ago, I started getting into genealogical research. Diddie was my main source. I kept asking her questions until the end. Good thing, too. One time I was looking for Diddie’s mother’s grave. I was trying to find her under the surname of Diddie’s father, John Jacob Wellendorf. No luck. I called Diddie about the trouble I was having. She laughed. Well, of course, she was buried under the name of her second husband, Paul Edwards!
This was certainly the first I had heard of Ma, my Great grandmother, having remarried. This took me back to some bedrock knowledge about Diddie’s youth. The .22 rifle I mentioned above was the gun her father taught her to shoot with. So, I asked her, was it John or Paul who taught her to shoot with the .22? She laughed. Good heavens no! Paul Edwards, that was the .38!
Apparently she used to go plinking, at least that is the general impression I get talking to her children, with her stepfather, too—with the pistol. The anecdote neatly ties her experience in her youth of two father figures to two different guns.
The .22 was standing in the closet where I thought it was, I sneaked a peak at it as i did the cleaning. Later in the weekend, I would remove it, oil it, and put it back. I had been wondering where the .38 was, but didn’t really feel very comfortable nosing around for it. Finding the ammo made me more curious.
I think I had legitimate business in the linen closet when I found the first gun. If you are groping around for a towel, finding a shootin’ iron wrapped in plastic shopping bags feels very different from what you expect. I picked it up and put it away unexamined. I assumed that this was the .38. It felt like a large revolver of some sort. At this point, I decided to mention to Diddie the ammo box I had found. She took it upon herself to mention another gun in her underwear drawer. This turned out to be a chromed .32, a cheap ugly gun that she termed a “Saturday Night Special.” With one gun out, I asked what the wrapped revolver in the linen closet was. She asked me to show it to her. What fell out of the bag was a Civil War Navy Colt .44 cap-and-ball black powder revolver. Impressive. Diddie told me that this was another heirloom, from Frank Cerini. She said that it was to pass to Cerini Bess, her daughter, or, if Cerini wanted, to a Cerini-surnamed relative. OK. Where was the .38, I asked tactfully? Safely locked away at the bank.
I thought that was all. I wrote up an inventory of the four weapons, where they were, that I had stored them in the box which had held ammo, that I had stored them unloaded, where they should go when Diddie passed away, as I understood it. I was then rather taken aback when I found another pistol in the linen closet. Lying there among the picture frames Diddie asked me to get down was a blued-steel revolver with the shiny primers of 6 live rounds winking at me from the loaded cylinder. I was rather taken aback.
It’s always a bit of an item to find a loaded, unfamiliar gun. It’s sort of a race between entropy and curiosity. Can I find out how to get the action open before I accidentally let the hammer fall on a round? Can I remember to point the barrel where people aren’t? Is there really any such place in a city?
I got it unloaded. It is a .32, but a different length of cartridge than the Saturday Night Special. It has no front sight. I guess it’s for pointing at close range.
It is now 7 years since I wrote this and left it without a concluding paragraph. I want to end this, but I also want to add a few things. For one, the loaded .32 came with a form-fitting holster. This is not the kind to clip to a belt or hang off a hip. In keeping with the intimate nature of the sighting system, the holster is made to fit in the pocket of, I imagine, a suitcoat. I think somehow I garnered that my grandfather wore it when making deposits from his small bookstore. One one hand, it seems very noir. On the other hand it seems slightly desperate. How bid could the deposits from their shop be? Big enough, I suppose, for them to be vitally dependant on them.
The silver .32 had a brief denounment. We all felt that it was an inaesthetic instrument. It passed to my uncle Kit, who has since himself died [Even here I will not use the euphemism that is the first verb in this sentence!]. Whereas I offloaded the unstable antique ammo on a local gunshop which I hope had it blown up in some quarry, my uncle offered up the cheap gun to the local constabulary to be melted down. He was nonplussed that they seemed to take the offer in stride. I know he wasn't expecting a certificate of appreciation, and I know that the cops certainly have a schema for accepting weaponised detritus, but the lacadaisical manner in which his gift was accepted was somewhat off-putting.
Now the guns have other homes in the family. Most serve as commemorations of our family's history. Mine, the .22, was fired for the first time since Diddie's death this last week-- 11 years later. It may not have been fired for 40 years before her death. Diddie's other pistols may not be fired for a long time. We'll see.
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