I was a young kid, seven or so, when I shot at a robin on the housing project lawn with my bow and arrow. To this day, over 50 years later, every time I see a robin, I remember this story.
As a kid I loved Indians. It started with some illustrated books in the school library. One book about the Iroquoi tribes became especially totemic for me. There were earth-toned renderings of the insides of longhouses, with sleeping platforms of poles lashed together with sinew and piled with robes of animal skins, with the space and the dusky‑skinned people and the implements of their lives ‑ the beaded moccasins, the deerskin leggings, the obsidian knives, the stout bows and hide quivers of feathered arrows ‑ lit only, but magically, by firelight. I began to live in a fantasy world. I wanted to wear those skins, carry those weapons, live in a space as richly textured, as warm, as right as the interiors of those longhouses. I wanted to be one of those people.
I saved the cardboard cards out of Nabisco Shredded Wheat boxes, the ones that separated the layers of biscuits. Each card had instructions from the comic-book character Straight Arrow on how to make some kind of Indian artifact: how to lash on a flint arrowhead, or how to carve a spearhead out of wood and harden it in fire.
I made my own bow out of a seasoned branch and some heavy string, and it worked pretty well. Arrows were a different matter. I searched every tree in my life ‑ there weren't many, there in the project - but couldn't come up with a single stick straight enough to fly at all true.
I saved my allowance and collected pop and beer bottles till finally I could afford a store‑bought arrow. I shot and shot. I got to where I could hit with some regularity a pretty small target, if it wasn't too far away.
One day I took my bow and arrow outside and started for the end of our building, to shoot in the sagebrush out along the railroad tracks. I saw a robin hopping on the grass in our yard. It was hopping away from me with its head down, absorbed with whatever it was trying to catch to eat. I stalked it from behind. It never saw me. I got close enough, aimed, let fly. The robin screamed, a sound I had never heard a robin make, and ran clumsily along the grass, dragging the arrow which had entered its ass, right under the tail. It screamed and ran, wobbling desperately until the arrow dropped out on the grass. The robin hopped and finally flew weakly out of sight. My heart pounded; I felt blood pulsing in my throat and head. I didn't understand what had happened. I didn't understand why I had shot at the robin ‑ people didn't eat robins ‑ or why I had hit it, or why it didn't die, or what I would have done if it had died.
Mom had kicked our dad – second of her five husbands – out of the house, and she and my younger brother and I had moved to Southern Oregon. There, still a boy, I became a Christian. That lasted twelve years or so, until one day in a burning village…
Finding Jesus, and Eb Hogue's Knife
We were living in a little rented house on Conklin Avenue in Grants Pass. Darrell and I met a kid named Eugene Wright, who was my age and lived a few houses up the street. He'd come around trying to sell Cloverine Brand Salve, some all‑purpose ointment that magazine ads said you could sell door to door and make a lot of money. It came in tins the size of a snuff can. He didn't sell many.
Something had happened to Eugene's parents; there was some reason they couldn't raise him. He lived with his grandparents, the Hogues. He was an only child, a chubby kid who wasn't very strong. He'd been labeled a sissy, and took a lot of shit from other kids. He was very religious.
He and I became friends for a while. He didn't do much that I liked, like playing football or baseball, but he did read books, so we had that in common. He talked a lot about Jesus. I got bored with that, but everybody said it was the truth so I figured it must be so. He worked at converting Darrell and me. I remembered a time in Pasco when I'd asked, "Mom, is there a real God 'n' Jesus?" She'd just said, "Yes, dear," as if I'd asked if the sky were blue. I wanted more of an answer, but none came.
Mom had been praying a lot more lately. It was pretty much in the air we breathed. In the small towns we'd always lived in, whenever somebody was born or died or got married, the seriousness of the occasion meant that it was a religious one. Heads would bow, some old man would pray out loud, and you had to be still.
Eugene kept after us to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as our personal savior. He warned that we'd go to Hell if we didn't, and we knew he was right because everybody else said the same thing. The difference was that most people only said that if you asked them, and Eugene said it without being asked. Darrell and I shrugged and said, Well, guess we better do it, sure don't want to go to Hell. (Back then, you always capitalized nouns like heaven and hell and any pronoun or adjective that referred to God or Jesus.)
So one time when Eugene was talking about Jesus we asked him how you went about doing this.
"It's easy," he said. We'd need a special place, one that was sort of secret and private. We were at his house. He led us out back to a shed that had a partial attic and we all climbed up there and knelt down, which we'd have had to do anyway because there wasn't space under the roof to stand. This was perfect, Eugene said, because Jesus didn't care where you accepted Him as long as you did it, and He could see everywhere, so you didn't have to be in church. (Pretty good, seeing through walls. Wish I could do that.... I imagined myself walking down Conklin Avenue watching women bathe.) Darrell and I hoped Eugene was right; we didn't want to go around thinking we were saved and then end up in Hell because we'd gone about it wrong.
So we knelt on the boards in that shed's attic and Eugene Wright asked us if we accepted Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, and we said we did, and we all bowed our heads and Eugene said a prayer and that was that. We were Christians. Eugene was excited. Lots of preachers don't do that good, he said, getting two in one week.
Some time later Ebenezer Hogue, Eugene's grandfather, put a .22 rifle to his head and killed himself in their living room. Eugene and his grandmother couldn't bear to stay in that house, so they moved a short distance away. Mom rented their house. She let us see the bloodstain on the wooden floor once, then put a rug over it and we moved in. It was the best house we'd ever lived in, with a back yard big enough for a vegetable garden. We’d learned in school that Indians had taught the Pilgrims to plant corn and beans in the same hills so the beans climbed the cornstalks. I planted ours the same way, and sure enough I didn't have to put in poles for the beans.
Eugene gave me a hunting knife that had been his grandfather's. He didn't want to keep it because it saddened him, and he wasn't a hunter anyway. It was pretty old, with a small brass hilt. It had had a handle of two pieces of some early plastic, one riveted to either side of the tang. One side had fallen off. It had a crude sheath that Eb had made. He'd told Eugene it was the Indian kind. (The old man had told Eugene about seeing real wild Indians as a boy. When Eugene retold the story to me, I was so thrilled I could see a file of dusky figures, moving among the trees like a warm breeze, disappearing over a ridge.) The sheath had leather covering the blade but also wrapping around most of the handle. That way you didn't need a keeper strap, which brush could unsnap anyway when you walked through it, plucking out the knife without your even knowing it. Plus you didn't have to unsnap anything to draw the knife; you just grabbed the top of the handle and pulled it out. The hunting knife I carry to this day has a sheath I made the same way.
It wasn't a pretty knife, but it was mine. I didn't like that it was missing part of the handle until one day when I was throwing it in the front yard. Most hunting knives are heavier on the handle end, making it harder to control how they turn in the air, thus harder to stick. Having half its handle missing gave Eb's knife a nice balance.
I practiced. There was a tree in our front yard that was big enough that I could hit it every time, and its bark was soft and even, so the knife would stick easily when I could make it hit point first. I became a kid zen knife‑thrower. I would spend hours a day standing back from that tree, throwing the knife, retrieving it from the tree or wherever it had bounced to, walking back, throwing it again.
It was a matter of grip, release, and distance. It worked best to grip the knife by the blade and throw it overhand so the knife made a half turn and arrived at the tree point first. Once I saw the principle involved, I chose a favorite grip, the one with most of the blade in my hand, and settled in at the distance from the tree where that grip would give me a nice half turn and stick in the bark. I threw and retrieved and threw and retrieved. After a few days I could stick it almost every time at my chosen distance. I began to throw harder, and that changed things for a while but when I found the right combination it became even more consistent. Then I chose a spot in the bark for a smaller target, and before long I could throw the knife hard, stick it most of the time, and often very near that spot. Then I no longer seemed to be throwing the knife; it just flowed out of me as I let it go.
