A man’s man

Instead of a workshop, my grandfather had a metal shed. It wasn’t an ordinary outbuilding, though. It was a deluxe model.

Aluminum construction, painted wooden floor, raised above the earth on concrete blocks, it measured eight feet wide by twenty-four feet long. Wired for electricity and complete with two light fixtures and multiple electrical outlets, the thing was built to last.

In fact, it still sits on my family property surrounded by cotton fields and swaying pines.

He didn’t tinker and build, he tinkered and grew things. A practical, pragmatic man, he planted vegetables year round; never a flower or ornamental shrub to be found. There would always be a small crop to tend. If there weren’t potatoes in the earth, there’d be tomatoes or cabbages above it.

One of my fondest, if macabre, memories was our hunt for rat shot. As a ten year old, I had no idea what rat shot was, nor why anyone would want to shoot rats. Presumably, one trapped them as opposed to shooting them, given potential bullet holes in walls and floors as the result of missing a scrambling little target.

One afternoon, he growled “Get in the truck. We’re going to find rat shot.”

Never one to turn down a trip to Wal Mart, off I went.

As he hunted high and low on the shelves in Sporting Goods, I was off perusing the GI Joes. $2.44 each. I always managed to scrounge together three bucks for a trip to town, but when Papa took me, it was his treat.

Respective prizes clutched in our hands, we mounted up and returned home.

“Why do you want to shoot rats, Papa? Won’t it put holes in the wall? Do you even have rats? Why not just get a cat?”

He laughed, which was a rare treat. He was badly out of practice, gruff; it was almost a cough.

The man had a winning grin, though, when he chose to feel.

“Rabbits in the garden. They’re eating the cabbage,” he explained. “You’re going to hold the light. I’m gonna put rat shot in their ass, run them off. They won’t be back.” He laughed again, but this time, mirth had become wrath. In retrospect, that cheerless chuckle was a little more comfortable for him. It was a better fit for his forlorn moods and far-off gazes.

The ratshot shells were filled with pellets about the same size as large pieces of ground pepper from a grinder. These were housed in a .22 casing, which are about an inch long and as big around as the headphone jack on a smartphone. This tiny little example of modern munitions has effective range of maybe 10 yards. Beyond that, they spread out over too great an area, and the velocity of the pellets is too small for the pellets to do any real damage.

In short, Papa wasn’t going to be hitting any rabbits, since he’d be shooting at them from 30 yards away.

The night crept along, and we left Lawrence Welk playing on the old Sears television. As instructed, I carried the light and he weilded his old revolver.

Covetous, beady little rabbity eyes shone devil-red in the righteous glow of our halogen spotter.

Thunder rolled and hares fled, and lo, the cabbages were saved.

Three weeks later, Papa’s pride forced him to try to hide the fact that he found lead shot in his stir-fry, but everyone at the table shared a knowing smile.

____

His metal shed contained all the tools of his gardening trade. Rakes, shovels, hoes, fertilizer and a fancy motorized tiller were all lined up soldier-straight and parade-ground neat. Cubby shelves filled one aluminum wall, and each cubby was filled with a different assortment of seeds, almanacs, or mysterious odds and ends which baffled me but were certainly cataloged by the master of the house.

Prominent just inside the door, tucked back in the shade, there stood a chair. On the floor next to that seat, there was a small white plastic bucket half filled with dirt. Remnants of Carter Hall pipe tobacco littered the sandy soil. Beside the bucket, or sometimes on a clean spot inside it, sat a disposable Bic lighter and an old pocket knife he used to scrape out his pipe’s bowl.

The chair itself was simple. Light blue, steel, folding.

Opposite his chair, an old oscillating fan sagged beneath its own weight, so hot and humid did it get in that aluminum shed. It still ran and turned, but it was a struggle after years in South Georgia summers. That fan struggled, nearly defeated.

Not him, though.

A child of the Great Depression and a Pacific Theater veteran, the jungles of the Philippines and the heat of home weren’t so different.

He never had air conditioning in his house until Carter was in the oval office.

He was a man’s man, stoic and unmoved even by Mother Nature. He was defiant, implacable, wrathful and wooden.

So it was something, then, when he bought a second folding chair for his only grandson.

I’d quietly sit in that shed with him, shaded from the sun and upwind from pipesmoke, both of us using that poor fan’s breeze not to stay cool so much as to stay free from the gnats.

So it was something, then, when I became less interested in things he left unsaid in what passed for stories he’d tell. When I became less interested in the comfortable silences. When I stopped sitting in the shade of that aluminum shed as I got older.

So it was something, then, when he folded that second chair and propped it against a metal wall, behind that oscillating fan, out of the way and off to the side.

So it was something, then, when that chair was never unfolded again.

Now his own man’s man, stoic and unmoving, his grandson finds himself undone by the memory of pipe smoke and the sight of a simple folding chair.

So it is something, then, that I’m greedy for just one more summer afternoon in comfortable silence with the only father figure I ever really knew.