Lucius Patenaude
Squeeze.
Papa growled this when I jerked the trigger. Something I was tempted to do when my young arms had tired from the rifle’s weight and the crosshairs were waltzing further and further from the target.
Squeeze.
Exhale and smoothly pull the trigger. This steadies the gun. Jerk the trigger and you are guaranteed to pull your aim to the left or right.
My grandfather loved shooting guns, collecting guns, and making his own ammo. He enjoyed beer, cinema from the 70s and 80s, and a rare steak. He was also a respected orthopedic surgeon and a cattle rancher in retirement.
His gun safe was a secret bunker. Hidden behind shallow cabinets which held the billiard cues. A button concealed in the bookshelf disengaged the magnets and the cabinets swung out as double doors. I’d gaze up at the walls lined with his collection of carefully maintained firearms as Papa crafted .45 ACP rounds for his collection of 1911 pistols and breathe in the scents of oil, leather, lead, and gunpowder.
These weapons rarely saw violence. There were pieces that had witnessed much. Perpetrated much. Rifles and pistols that served in world wars, Vietnam, Korea. Omens of history. But most only shot paper targets or bottles. That was the extent of their destruction. The only opportunity for them to take life was deer season.
I anticipated the day when I was old enough to hunt with the men. I had spectated many times. Rising before the sun, bundling up warmly, eating an oatmeal cream pie as a snack before breakfast, walking out between the trees to the blind where we’d sit, shivering, waiting for dawn.
I had to content myself with bottles until then. Papa would line them up on the altar (a stout tree stump). I was given a BB gun first then a .22 long rifle. And the calibers grew as I grew. I graduated from the altar to the tank. A pond whose bottom cradled decades of shattered beer bottles. Empties (this referred either to the brass of spent rounds or empty bottles, the latter in this case) would be flung into the tank where they would impact with a pa-LUNK and right themselves with only their necks peeking above the surface at 30 to 40 yards. They looked no bigger than match heads.
Squeeze.
It was cold at the blind (a simple pile of logs) and we sat on the dew. I wore sneakers with double socks, long underwear under jeans, several shirts covered by a leather bomber jacket, gloves, and a beanie for my ears. Mist drifted through the clearing as color bled into the monochrome landscape before us. My dad nudged me. A buck had exited the tree line across from us. Maybe 50 yards away. I brought up my rifle. I breathed deep and slow to calm my racing heart. An out-of-control beat caused me to miss the morning before. As well as an
unbidden thought. A question I’d never thought to ask in all my years of yearning to be the hunter.
I eased out my breath and squeezed. The buck sprang into the air with a kick--turned with a flash of white and disappeared. It was difficult to tell from our vantage if it had dropped to the ground or fled back into the trees. We waited for the sun to climb higher before leaving the blind to check. And there it was flopped on the grass. Eight points on his antlers. A small puncture just behind the shoulder. An exit wound in the abdomen covered in bloody foam.
We heard the growl of my great uncle's truck and the purr of Papa‘s mule (a compact utility vehicle). Soon my grandfather, great uncle, father, and uncle were all congratulating me for shooting my first deer. Then they set about teaching me how to field dress it.
They instructed me to cut open its abdomen, anus to sternum, taking care not to pierce any of the entrails. This would spoil the meat. Then cut through the sternum and pull the ribs back to access the chest cavity. Now cut the esophagus as close to the skull as possible. Grasp the esophagus and pull. Pull and pull--your knife following along severing the fascia that holds the organs to the spine--and you pull from the neck to the hind and all that viscera comes out in one heap on the dewy grass and the deer lies shucked.
My uncle collected the liver for dinner that evening. He'd slice it thin, bread it in flour and Zatarain‘s, fry the slices in butter, and serve them in tortillas. He also retrieved the heart and showed it to me. There was a clotted rent where my bullet passed.
I looked at my handiwork. Crimson palms. Entrails steaming. Dear dissected. Soft fur stained. Glassy eyes gazing at heaven. And I thought about the question that came before I squeezed the trigger. Do I want to kill?
Now I knew the answer. No.
I learned my handshake from Papa. A firm squeeze that said, I see you. I acknowledge your personhood. And imparted a sense of confidence and warmth. You’d receive a variation of that squeeze if you were lucky enough to be holding his hand at the end of grace. Papa also said, Let me give you a squeeze, when he wanted a hug. He’d wrap you up tight. Until it just began to hurt. But you felt the whole of him. Like he was trying to press his heart into yours. There was also the squeeze chute. But that was only for calves when it was time for their ear tags and vaccinations. Rarely, when you were being ornery, he’d drop his big calloused hand on your shoulder and squeeze with so much force it would take your breath away.
My sister and I received a phone call during our last semester in college. Papa had suffered a stroke from a thrown clot and we needed to come say goodbye. We were three hours away. By the time we got to the hospital, he was unconscious and his breath came in unsteady wheezes. Mom told me to speak to him. I held his hand. I told him I loved him. That it was okay to go. My tears painted me a liar.
The only response was a squeeze.
A couple years before, at Christmas, Papa plunked a leather bag on my lap and said, I think you’ll put this to better use than I can. Inside was a Leica R3 film camera and a whole set of lenses.
I was well-versed in digital video and photography by that time. But I had never tried film photography. I bought a four-pack of Fujifilm Superia 400 at Walmart. Twenty-four exposures each. My first roll was filled with blurry, poorly framed exposures. But I was hooked. The imperfection. The mystery of the end result. The physical ritual. Advancing the film. Turning the aperture ring. Pressing the release and hearing the SLAP of the mirror.
Papa died in the winter when I was halfway through my first roll of black-and-white film. I shot slowly then. Sometimes weeks or months between frames. I finished the roll in the summer while at the lake with my sister and some friends. I disengaged the advancing mechanism, wound the exposed film back into its canister, and popped open the back of the camera. And there was all the film, unspooled, soaking up light as it saw fit fading all my framed memories
to flashes of white.
Memories of Papa.
I’ve never felt so much despair and shame and anger since that moment. My friends could not console me. My sister had to leave the room. Was it a mechanical error? A blunder of inexperience? The cause made no difference. The last photos of Papa were lost. I lost them.
I put away Papa’s camera for a long time. Too afraid to duplicate that mistake. Unwilling to relive that failure when I looked at it.
These emotions eventually dulled enough for me to start shooting on his camera again. I became comfortable with the interplay between iso, aperture, and shutter speed. Unlike digital, iso is a static factor in film photography. Once you load a roll of film of a particular iso speed into the camera you’re married to it.
The only variables you control to make a proper exposure are aperture and shutter speed. And when the scene is dark and your aperture is as wide as it will go all that’s left is to make the shutter speed slower and slower. 1/60th of a second. 1/30. 1/15. 1/8. All to sip just a little more light.
But the slower the shutter the more likely you are to introduce motion blur to the image through the unsteadiness of your hands. Jerk the release button and you are guaranteed a smeared ghost of a photo. Instead, it is best to steady yourself, exhale slowly, and squeeze.
Lucius Patenaude is a writer/photographer born in Texas, raised in Thailand, and currently based in Nashville, Tennessee.