Uncle Robert Smalls

Robert Smalls used this incident for the rest of his life to try to get money from the Federal Government. And his political enemies used it to deny him money from the Federal Government. Was he a Navy Captain? He surely had all the duties of a Navy Captain for the rest of the war. Was he entitled to a Navy Captain's pension? As a civilian captain of a U.S. Army ship, no, his opponents argued. When he was a U.S. Congressman, and even in the years after his service in Congress, Smalls put forth much effort trying to get money out of the U.S. Government. Was this because he was a venal, vain man, or was it because he was just trying to get his fair share of what was due him?

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I know venal. I know vain. I know trying to get my fair share.

You do, too.

I've already mentioned my bankruptcy and my brief sojourn in a mental hospital, but I haven't really gone there with you. Perhaps I should go there with you now.

When I went broke, my wife left. She left on the occasion of our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. She walked out as I was planning a weekend trip to a friend's lake house to celebrate. We didn't have money to do anything else.

Why did she stop loving me? Maybe the question should be, why did I think she had stopped loving me? She was facing a mess, a man who had defined himself in terms that were meaningless and empty. Now he was faced with the reality of that pitiful waste of his life. And she had spent her life with him. I don't wonder, now, why she ran.

At the time I saw none of this. I was frantic. I was irrational. My wife fled to her sister's house out of town. Like a stalker, I called and emailed. She told me to stop trying to communicate with her.

She made me promise to stop contacting her. I was left alone.

In the night, in the long, dark, solitary night that followed, it became clear to me. I needed to kill myself.

It became crystal clear. I needed to pull down the attic door. I needed to go upstairs and take my Browning 12-gauge from its leather case. I needed to climb back down the attic stairs. I needed to go into one of my daughters' bedrooms, where I kept a couple of boxes of ammunition from an old dove hunt.

I needed to take the ammunition and the gun and walk out to the front yard. I needed to slide a shell into the chamber. I needed to put the muzzle of the twelve gauge in my mouth and blow the top of my head off.

It would blow off just like the top of my sister's head. My corpse would look just like the corpse Grace found when she discovered her mother's suicide- its head exploded like a huge jelly donut- a grotesque face draped on one side.

I needed to do this in the front yard, so my neighbors would see and hear it. They would then call the police. The police would retrieve the body and hide the hideous mess long before my wife or any of my daughters could get there. This would relieve my loved ones of further suffering. This would end the decades of misery. This was the thing to do. It was the only thing to do.

I prayed fervently. I prayed the hardest and longest and most heated and most sincere prayer of all my life. I begged. Please help me, Jesus! Please help me! I prayed and prayed and cried and begged and talked to Jesus.

This brought silence.

He did not answer.

There was silence.

He would not come.

I got out of bed. I walked into the hallway.

I stood underneath the attic door.

I reached up and grabbed the pull cord.

I stood there, for the longest time. I stood there, shaking and crying.

I prayed and prayed.

There was no answer. None that I could hear.

I pulled down the attic door.

I unfolded the attic stairs. It was hard for me to move. My limbs felt like lead.

I climbed the attic stairs.

I pulled the string to turn on the light.

Six feet in front of me, on the plywood floor, lay my shotgun. It was in a leather case I had since college. The case was old and torn.

I unzipped the end of the case and pulled the stock of the gun toward me. It was made of oiled walnut. It was scratched with age. The grip was checked with a fine, familiar pattern. I held it in my palm. The barrel and muzzle were still in the case.

I had bought this gun at a pawnshop when I was a kid. It was a Belgium-made, Browning 12-gauge. I had hunted with it my whole life.

I smelled gun oil.

I felt the checked grip and the cold trigger. I was reminded of many, many mornings duck hunting in an old rice field on the Combahee River.

We stood loin-deep in the cold, dark water, hidden in the reeds. We heard mallards quacking above us in the dawn fog, but we could not see them. I quacked back to them. I talked to them in their magical, quacking language, and they quacked to me.

And I could hear their wings whistling in the fog, as the ducks tucked their wings into that beautiful arc which carries them down from the heavens. I could hear their arced wings whistling until the birds appeared in front of us, twisting and bobbing to settle into the decoys.

After a long time- after a long, long time- for some reason, for some reason I don't understand, I let go of my gun. I set it down, still halfway inserted in its case. I climbed back down the attic stairs.

I left the stairs unfolded and the attic door open.

I walked to the other end of the house. There I sat at the computer and Googled, “How not to commit suicide.”

The web page that appeared counseled procrastination. Procrastination was the key, it said. Just keep putting it off minute by minute. Put it off until you can be with someone else.

It was around four in the morning. I knew my neighbor across the street would wake up around six o'clock to prepare for work.

I sat at the window in the computer room and watched the blacked out windows across the street. I watched until six o'clock, when the first light went on at my neighbor's house.

Then I crossed the street in my pajamas and bare feet. I rang my neighbor's doorbell. And I told him what was going on.

Later that day, I was hospitalized. The doctors diagnosed me with General Anxiety Disorder. I am too afraid.