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My Grandfather's Guns
I remember the day I found them. I was 15. I was looking for a vest in the top of my grandmother’s closet. A brown leather vest that belonged to my grandfather when he was alive. I did find the vest, I did put it on.
I was curious what else could my grandfather left in the top of the closet. I pulled a chair and stood on it so I could look up there.
That’s when I saw the four of them. I didn’t entirely believed what I saw, so I grabbed one.
A cold, stiff, dead piece of Death.
I had a vest around my chest, and with my right I was holding Death’s left; finding myself in an accidental spaghetti western costume.
It was loaded. Not everyone gets to feel the weight of a loaded one. It’s not just the lead what weights. There’s the whole bang-bang, good-bye thing that weights. There’s every possible gone-wrong that waits. Death had a heavy hand.
But this one was heavier.
My grandfather was a good man. He only studied until second year of elementary school and dropped out to maintain his 10 brothers. He became the richest man in his town with the jewelry business, but he never forgot his humbleness. He never forgot home, he never forgot his family.
He spent many years making money until he felt he it was enough to look for a woman and satisfy all her whims.
Instead of the whimsical woman he was ready for, he found a simple lady who satisfied his heart.
My grandmother softened the hard man he had become. He didn’t believed in church, but he went to make her happy. He didn’t like to dance, but he followed her because she asked. He had a heavy storm inside, which only ceased by her side.
But this one was heavier.
It was not only the weight of the lead.
I wasn’t just holing Death’s hand. I was holding an untold story. The top of that closet was not the place to just put things, it was the kind of place you hide them.
It was the weight of a secret.
Why would Death hold a jeweler’s hands?
My grandfather passed away when I was two years old, I didn’t know him like everybody else.
But holding that cold and wasted piece of metal, I realized I might know a part of my grandfather nobody else did.
The guns are still there.
