My paternal grandfather was always known in the family as “Perry,” and for much of his life, was a petroleum engineer working the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana or Texas coasts.
He was gone a lot.
My grandmother was home alone, and the subject of having a gun came up.
Perry had a Browning .22 rifle and a shotgun he left at home, but Grandma apparently wanted a handgun.
He didn’t think this was a good idea, but, according to him, she insisted.
My brother and I knew about the revolver because, as prepubes, we would stay at her house for a week or two each summer, and snoopy little brats that we were, quickly found the gun in her bedside drawer.
We had BB guns, and had learned how to shoot — rifles, shotguns, .22 pistols, so we knew the safety rules.
This was a big clunky thing of blue steel and walnut, a Colt Police Positive, in .38 Special. (We thought at the time that Perry had brought it home from the war, but he had been too young for WW1, being born around 1903, and, we also learned later, an essential worker in WW2, so he never served in the military.)
Revolver was loaded with six wadcutters so old the brass was green.
I was no expert, but the firing pin looked odd to me.
Later, when I was older, I asked Perry about this, and he laughed. He had filled the pin down, he said, so that the gun would not fire.
Really? Why?
Well, he never expected Ruth would ever have need of it. And sometimes he would finish a job on the rigs and wind up driving home in the wee hours, and he was worried that she might hear him come in and shoot him.
Gun sat in the drawer for thirty-some years, he said, and so far as he knew, she had never touched it.
He laughed, and young and foolish as I was, so did I.
Later, I was horrified.
What if Grandma ever had needed it?
Aside from Perry’s perfidy, the lesson I learned about guns was simple: Never assume it will go bang if you haven’t tested it yourself.
The loudest sound in the world is “click,” when you are expecting “bang.”
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