By John Cheesebrow

1. Weapons

We were never close. It was lost on me why my grandfather chose to beckon me to his side three weeks before his death to slide me a shoebox with a gun inside. He smirked when I flipped back the cardboard and saw it there, agnostic gray and vibrating with power. A nurse swished past his room and I covered the gun until the hallway was calm again. It was a Colt Model 1911, standard issue in 1944, with U.S. ARMY PROPERTY stamped into the side. The government had waived its claim on the piece amidst the champagne belch of world victory, ceding this pistol and all the others to the vacant-eyed men who bore them. It had lain dormant in a series of basements and closets until that moment, his death at hand. A time for revealing things long hidden. A time to feel known. 

I worked the slide and revealed a bullet casing. The thing was loaded. The magazine when I dropped it out was stacked full, rounds manufactured by diligent women pouring their hate and hope along with the gunpowder. The fingerprints tarnishing the brass were the signature of a young man pressing them into service like eight tiny prayers. I hesitated, then unloaded the pistol, hoping the old man would note my coolness at the task. I pictured a stray full-metal-jacket round caroming through countless layers of nursing home sheetrock. My father looked upon the proceedings over the back of a kitchen chair, amused, unsure. I slid the shoebox back into Grandpa’s closet, where it remained until the day it sat unrecognized and unclaimed on an uncle’s kitchen table. My father figured it might as well go with me, since I was probably the only soul who’d touched it since 1945. 

That was twenty years ago. It’s difficult to explain why that particular object still transfixes and haunts me, or why the first time I held it was the first time I felt rooted in my bloodline. The gun’s presence among my people was evidence of something, of that I felt sure. I just didn’t know what.

***

I returned to college from his funeral with a shoebox under my arm.

My roommates looked on with adolescent awe when I drew the pistol from its box. They knew me well enough to recognize my phony nonchalance, but no one pointed it out. Who wouldn’t want to feel the weight of such a weapon, to ask of it the unanswerable question and imagine sighting it against gray French skies? And so we did. And so I did often in the warmth of my bedside lamp, aware of the gun’s danger and of my wild stupidity in keeping it under my bed. Clearly, a .45 was as verboten in a dormitory as it was in a nursing home.

We’d have been the same age, then. Nineteen or so. Him: drafted. Me: on a nice scholarship. Him: the Army Medical Corps. Me: foundering between majors, industrious but adrift. He peered over a landing craft at the cratered shores of Normandy. I gazed through tea steam at a Toshiba laptop and took a risk conflating Plato’s rhetoric with the speeches of The Lorax.

That autumn in 1944, he’d be captured in the ruins of an ancient spruce forest and made to walk deeper into a crumbling Germany. During the march, an American fighter pilot, confused about his target, would approach low from the rear to strafe the procession and mangle several of my grandfather’s friends, mere strides away. He recorded the incident on scrap paper in his Stalag bunk.

That autumn in 2008, feeling impotent and aimless from my studies, I took up hunting and shot a buck fawn with a scoped rifle. Later, we fried venison tenderloin over the glowing coil of a dorm stove. The dark meat smelled like the memory of the buck’s blood, and in it I sensed my connection to the dirt and water of the Earth. Hunting made me feel concrete and vital and practical. I went on to take a job at the campus woodworking shop. There, I learned to differentiate wood by its grain and there I began to question my understanding of myself.

Always, the pistol called to me from its box. It lured me from my books and begged to be held and featured in my dreams. Why did I feel, of all things, envy for my grandfather, a man who returned irreparable from war? I began to know in part what I’d later know fully: I longed not for conquest nor violence, but for purpose. I longed to be crushed.

Someone with my last name could save the world. The proof lay cold and oiled in my palm.

2. Coffins

I can recall little about my grandfather, beyond his occupation in a paper mill and the rarity but brilliance of his smile. He didn’t care for the way he felt when Hogan’s Heroes came on, nor did he care for gunfire or fireworks or sitting in places where a sniper might have the advantage. He forgot my name once, when I greeted him at a band concert, and he asked my father, “Which one is this, again?” But he was there.

The most vivid memory I have and the one I can’t shake is one of a sound, the sound I heard him make through the closed double doors of a funeral home, when he was allowed a moment alone with my grandmother in her open casket. The glossy wood so substantial, the woman reduced to so little. I was in fourth grade then, and death was new. When I first heard him wail, it seemed to me an animal sound or one of great bodily pain. Of course, it was both. Even as a child, I sensed both loss and regret in him, though I didn’t understand the regret. Of course, it was both.

I pondered and feared whether someday I would entwine so much of my heart with another’s that I’d wail at her parting. Whether such depths were known only to those whose sufferings had carved out the space.

3. Trophies

The pistol haunted several more closets and under-bed shadows over the twenty-some years I’d been its steward, though it now resided in a state of maintenance and security. No more shoeboxes.

It was a thick summer day when my parents’ car came popping up the gravel, my children rushing out to greet them. When my father straightened from his trunk carrying a plastic tote, I somehow knew what it was without being told. It was the box, the one that the family all knew about, the one with the intriguing things nobody quite wanted. Being both fastidious and sentimental, it seemed to be understood that I was the right kin to hold it.

At the kitchen table, my son and daughter looked over my shoulder into the bin as we catalogued each item. A bayonet, sharpened. Brass knuckles, tarnished. A WWI American doughboy helmet still bearing the sweat stains of my great-grandfather in its leather. A German helmet with a bullet hole on either side, one smaller and indented, one larger and jagged—clearly an entry and exit—with blood stains under the band. A brass placard of Hitler lifted from a shamed household by Grandpa and a drunken parade of liberated men. A Nazi war medal, the pride of some corpse that had survived the 1942 winter campaign in Russia, but whose luck had run out anyway. A woolen hat with a swastika patch that gave me goosebumps when I touched it. A homemade medic’s armband; Grandpa kept his job, even while a prisoner of war. Inexplicably: souvenir clogs from Holland and a very small cannon. My father remembered him discharging it on occasion, a habit at odds with his hatred for the sound of gunfire. A manila folder full of pin-ups that were of particular interest to my son. A rusty revolver, gangster style, unloaded. Another revolver, six-barreled, of Civil War vintage. No one knew where it came from.

The relatives that presumed my fascination with the items were correct in their reasoning. I was lost in the box. Here were the few heirlooms of my family line, trophies of war taken spitefully and without regard from the rot of an evil empire. Here were trinkets pried from the vanquished, spoils of combat without monetary value but teeming with significance. Each item seemed to chant in wordless chorus: I was there.

My father let me know there were a few other boxes coming later. One was full of letters and photos. In another was the skull.

***

My uncle would be all too glad to rid his attic of it, just as soon as we could arrange the transfer. Stories swirled around it, though none could be confirmed. One said that my great-grandfather, in the calm days following Armistice Day, had spied the skull gleaming in the branches of a tree overlooking a French hedgerow. He simply climbed up and pried it loose like a prime apple from an upper limb. A lesser story claimed the specimen was from the university medical school, and another cast the skull in light of a flea market purchase. This latter origin was not only the least exciting, but also the most dubious in terms of potential hauntings. My wife was unenthusiastic about the whole thing. You never do know what you’ll marry into.

***

The box of war trinkets sat on the garage floor like an obstacle to everyday life. I was the only one willing to touch it, my wife and children keeping their distance out of reverence or aversion or both. Of the three of them, my son was the one most apt to pause and linger over the items whenever he got the chance, showing in his eyes that he was drawn the same way I was. Perhaps he wondered, with so many years ahead—where would his life bring him? To which faraway places, and against which mortal enemy—perhaps an enemy created not of his own feud but of the machinations of politicians and the turning gears of Earth’s violence—and would he himself triumph and return scathed but alive, bearing trinkets of his own? Five generations removed from the man who climbed a tree for a stranger’s skull, but still the same old world. The same bloodline.

Poised over the box in the garage, I watched my son wonder and wondered to myself whether my life would speak through its artifacts to my children’s children. My restless state during my college years had proved to portend a restlessness that would persist in me. Since those days, I had been desperate to fill my own box with something—anything—that would make someone proud to bear my name. 

At forty, I had my own bin. Each item within was storied, at least to me. My rookie firefighter helmet, appropriately soot-marked. My journeyman’s fire helmet, expired of its service decade, forever smelling of the smoke from countless ruined homes. A blackened brick, pilfered from the pavement on an icy gray morning after a nightlong fire in a historic downtown building, which, when it collapsed, sent a cascade of bricks and mortar that slid and parted around us on the street below. A handmade knife hammered from scrap steel and hilted with an ironwood branch that was a gift from a friend-turned-brother, one who died tragically young and still occupied a remote place in my heart. Though my son carried the dead man’s name, he’d never met him. The knife would mean little to him and even less to his son. I knew that the things I kept as trophies of a meaningful life, like all the buck antlers on my wall, couldn’t hold a candle to those of my forefathers. My trinkets looked more like trash.

4. Ink

The plastic bin was the heaviest yet, and I grunted when I took it from my father’s hands. I could see through its transparent sides the neat bundles of Grandpa’s letters by the hundreds. I opened the lid and uncorked the deep smell of very old books. Besides the letters: envelopes filled with photographs, some of posed schoolchildren and with cursive names and dates on the back, some mere black-and-white candid shots of people walking, people smoking and fussing over Christmas gifts—people known and unknown. My father and I flipped through the stacks and I watched him squint and search his mind to identify everyone. I felt a reverence in his remembering and nodded along.

Letters from a world war were not as I expected. The closest thing to love letters written to my grandfather were from a woman who was not my grandmother. Even these were not earnest expressions of longing, but notes of trivial updates and minor arguments bearing a sharp edge of hurt. He had letters from his brother, a fellow soldier, which included dirty jokes and curse words I didn’t know people used back then. Clearly, my grandfather felt no need to cleanse history or control the narrative.

I thought back to the day I threw out my pile of leatherbound journals. I’d paged through them one quiet morning and panicked over the immaturity of my reflections, over my naive ramblings. My shame had become unbearable when several love letters tumbled out from where I’d stuck them, replete with glittery-gel-pen swoops and hearts and exclamation points, missives from sweet-enough girls on whom I had tried out love. In my insecurity, I trashed any record of my life that didn’t shine a favorable light, and in so doing, I lied to my children. I denied them the comfort of knowing that I’d been to the wastelands traveled by all the young and had made it through. That I’d been even dumber, once upon a time. I can only pray they don’t mistake their first love for their last one.

***

My favorite photo from the fourth box was the most inexplicable and alarming one: my great-grandfather, a giant and exceedingly homely creature, posed with a joyful smoldering expression amidst a line of five middle-aged men, all wearing tight pink ballerina’s leotards. As frightening as the image was to behold, no one could look at it without laughing. To me, the magnificence was rooted in its untold backstory. The same man who’d placed a brain-stained German helmet and a tree-borne skull into his war duffel came back to his life and moved on. He presided over an art school. He drew cartoon Christmas cards. He dressed up as a ballerina and made people smile. He survived and brought joy to the world that had tried to take him out. 

Joy was harder to find for his son, my grandfather, whose pre-war photos showed a beaming smile and sparkling eyes in every shot. Later photos showed a far more grim and bent figure, the sparkle replaced with weariness. Even posing with the bouncing brood of my father and his siblings, my grandfather appeared faded, distant. I glanced over at the other box, the one with the swastika’d accessories and brass knuckles, and thought about how the spirit of those things had lain moldering in his heart like shrapnel. Even so, like his father before him, my grandfather had survived and moved on. He’d raised five children and had kept hundreds of their portraits as evidence of his pride in doing so. I questioned now if the box of war trinkets meant something different to him than I’d first thought—not trophies of triumph but relics of suffering, and reminders that he’d survived, once, and could do so again. 

***

I’ve stacked my grandfather’s boxes against my own. Trophies and relics, side by side, mine the less interesting by far. I can’t attain the valor of my forebears. These are different times. But I may yet be the someone someone needs, and I’m far from a blight on the bloodline. Grandpa’s photo bin sits beneath one of ours, many layers of smiling children with their birthday cakes, digital color clarity at the top, and blurry black-and-whites at the bottom, like the archaeology of a people told in the strata of dirt. The story of a life is told better in snapshots than in trinkets.

***

The pistol lies dormant again, preserved. I am only its steward until the day I pass it on. Another of my people will hold it, and ask of it the unanswerable question, and perhaps it will alter their trajectory as it did mine. A box of consequence begetting others like it.

My truest legacy is the same as my father’s and his father’s and his father’s. My truest achievement is the same: that somebody in this pale world loves me enough to shine their light on me. The evidence is right there in all those photos.

5. Bones

To this day, I have not received the skull. I’m not sure if I want to. Perhaps when I do, I will drag my finger over its seams, just one time, and then maybe I will bury it. I suppose no one’s discarded head should be a trophy. It might be a good reason to travel to Europe and return him to the soil of his people. When I’m there, I could walk the sands of Normandy, smell the spruces of the Ardennes, and try to imagine what it was like. I could show my children that someone with our last name could save the world, and that bones don’t stay in boxes forever.

~~~

John Cheesebrow is a Minnesota writer of short memoir and long fiction, with recent work published in South 85 Journal, The Good Men Project, and Medium. Beyond writing, he is a career firefighter, avid outdoorsman, and youth coach.