Staring at the gun, I felt my grandfather closer than ever. I had good reason to push his ghost away—and I worked at it the hardest when I was around my daughter. I couldn’t relax knowing he lived within me. We called him “Shot” behind his back. He called me “Bullethead” to my face. He liked to shoot bottles and deer. He went off like a shot. He was shot. It rhymed with his real name, and maybe reducing him to triteness felt like containing Shot in a box. His father’s father had established the farm, a homestead specializing in nothing and in doing everything ground down to nubs in a world of modern machinery and specialization. One hundred acres become fifty in a generation. As if Shot’s anger kept choking the land. Shot’s brand of stupid, which felt so unnecessary. My father wasn’t stupid, but he let Shot make unwise decisions.

What made things worse: we were surrounded by normal farm families, doing normal, understandable farm things. Not given over to stupid schemes, like the time we tried to grow boutique crops for hipsters because some rep convinced Shot to “give it a shot.” Or the idea we could lead tours of the farm and charge cash money. Or … so many things.

Even though Father was a grown man, Shot set the schedule forever and a day. Chickens, cows, crop rotations. Because he never passed all the knowledge down. Weak men know they’re poor in virtue and take their self-knowledge as evidence others will plot against them. So they want to be the only ones who know things.

Shot drowned a chicken in a water trough more than once. For crimes unknown. Always some excuse. The inchoate argument that led him to the act forgotten in the memory of the dead eye and waterlogged feathers. The stink that rose soon after.

He sure liked to hunt, Shot did, and to get really drunk doing so. If you think that’s a stereotype, you don’t know the area, because that was kind of universal. There were places you didn’t go because of drunk poachers, and you never ever thought about reporting it to the police.

When I went limp and he had to drag me, my father stopped him. But I’d already stopped him with the tactic. When I grew big and tall, muscle suited to me, Shot liked to joke that Father must’ve “done it with a cow, Bullethead.” That was his level. Slapping, hitting, and mental abuse. Shot’s idea of a good time.