IF HONEST CONFESSION IS GOOD FOR THE SOUL, perhaps I can do some good for myself by describing something I did (not everything, not all, dear reader) when I was eight or nine years old.  My family lived in a small Arkansas town that had an unpaved county road and railroad tracks running through it, a once-upon-a-time-but-no-longer prosperous lumber mill, a Baptist church, a two-room school house on our side of the tracks and a little one-room school house for “colored people” on the other side.  Even before the age of ten I had learned from my Mother that the main thing wrong with that idyllic village and with the whole Southern part of our country was the segregation of “our kind of peope” from the “other” kind.  Mother insisted that people were people, and that was all we needed to know about it.  It wasn’t until later that I understood the significance of having a mother who understood that all people are the same and wanted her children to understand it.  

If my Mother were living today, I’d go for a special visit to learn what she thought about guns.  She didn’t own guns.  My father did, and he bought a BB gun for me for Christmas when I was eight.  He also took me ‘possum hunting, which was a matter of meeting up with a few of his friends in the woods late at night, all of them bringing along their ‘coon dogs.  I figured out without his having to explain it to me that it wasn’t a real hunt because they didn’t bring guns.  They liked to hear the dogs barking off in the woods when they had found and treed an animal.  The men never left the little clearing in the woods where they parked their trucks and cars.  Of course, I didn’t understand when I was a child all the nuances of those meeting of men in the woods, but clearly the objective was not to bring home food for the family. 

My father didn’t give me any instructions about the use of the BB gun beyond saying that I should never under any circumstances point it at anybody even when I thought there weren’t any BBs in it.  He set me up in the back yard with some tin cans on posts for target shooting.  

Now for the honest confession.  I remember as if it were last week the day I went for a walk with my gun down by the railroad tracks.  A once-a-day thrill in those days was watching and listening to the steam engine train as it went by on its daily run.  I heard the train coming a good way off so I got off to the side of the tracks even before the train came around the bend into my sight and waited for the thrill of smoke and steam and a wave from the men in the cab of the train. I glanced up into a tree on the other side of the tracks and saw a blue bird perched there as if it were also waiting to see the train go by.  On impulse, I raised my BB gun, aimed, and fired.  The bird tumbled to the ground, and I scrambled across the tracks well ahead of the train and found the limp, blue body in the grass.  I dropped the gun and picked it up the little bundle of feathers.  The little fist-sized bird was still warm, and there was red blood seeping through the blue feathers. Horrified, I didn’t see the train go by.  I remember it only as something approaching in the distance from where I had committed a terrible sin. Holding the dead blue bird and crying, I turned away from the tracks so the men driving the train wouldn’t see what I had done. I buried the bird in soft, damp earth and went down to a creek to wash the blood off my hands.  I was unable to clear away from my mind the awful reality of having killed something for no reason at all except that it was there, alive and perched within my sight in the oak tree. I went home and shoved the BB gun far under my bed.  I didn’t take it out again. I don’t remember what happened to that BB gun.  I didn’t tell anybody what I had done.