Range Is Hot; Single Shooter

Alternate title: The story of the tea kettle.

I feel that I owe the other attendees of the Third Annual Northeast Bloggershoot an explanation. At one point in the later part of the afternoon, after we'd just finished resetting targets and such, I requested that a single shooter take the field before anyone else. It was my best friend, commenter SCI-FI, and he had but one wish: There was a totem he wanted to destroy.

I selected my 1911 and the Winchester 1300 12 gauge shotgun. I figured that .45 ACP and 12 gauge #7½ shot were a pretty good combination for exorcising demons; if it's good enough for Owen Pitt, well, it's good enough for my best friend and his tea kettle. As he emptied the .45 into it (breaking it in the process, t'hee), I could see from the look on his face that this wasn't me blasting a keyboard into bits being silly. This wasn't a child's plaything, long forgotten, put on the backstop as an amusing, incongruous target. When he transitioned to the shotgun, I knew there was more to the story.

He was kind enough to share:

The Tea Kettle story.

JayG had told me that we could bring items to shoot at the range. I only had one. I'd planned to destroy this thing many years ago, and knew I wanted it to do it as brutally and as thoroughly as possible.

I had brought one item: a tea kettle.

It's an $8 tea kettle, probably of the WalMart variety.

When I show it to JayG, he stares at it momentarily, but does not make any comment. Such is the measure of the man - our host is holding shotgun shells, with a loaded .45 on his hip, but he stares at the kettle as if he were facing a live grenade with the pin half out. Imminently polite and respectful, he just says, "OK."

The kettle was last used just over six years ago: June 19, 2004. Wife B put the kettle on for tea while cleaning the house and her car. It was a late-pregnancy "nesting" urge, as she was 9 months along with our second daughter. As often happens, one thing led to another as she cleaned the car, and Wife B forgot about the kettle. It boiled away, and the metal heated, and the plastic whistle melted. The kitchen was thick with the stink of scorched metal and plastic when she grabbed an oven mitt, grabbed the handle, and tossed the superheated kettle out into the back yard.

JayG offers up his arsenal to me, and I pick the .45 and the shotgun. How many rounds for the shotgun? Uh, all of them? I take 8 shells and the shotgun; JayG carries the .45. Yet another sign of a good friend - he not only loans you guns, he carries extra guns for you. We go with the crowd to hang stuff on DoubleTrouble's backstop. JayG hangs the scorched kettle up high amidst the toys, books, and frying pan, while I hold the shotgun and a full load of 8 shells.

The day after the kettle burnout was the day Wife B and I found ourselves involuntarily thrown through the Looking Glass -- without our baby. Sweet P died, a full-term stillbirth, on June 20, 2004. Plenty of doctors and nurses stopped by to offer their condolences, but none of them had an answer. None of them knew why she died. When you're sitting in the hospital, wondering why your baby can't come home, you claw for answers like a suffocating man claws for oxygen. Was there a medication problem, a stress problem, did the kettle give off toxic fumes, was it a cord accident, did I not pray enough, and on and on and on. In the end, we go home empty-handed: No baby. And no answer why she died.

JayG blows the whistle. "Range is hot; single shooter!" He gives me first whack at shooting, a free shot at that kettle, that G*dd*amned tea kettle, before everyone else starts blasting at the objects on the backstop. We load the shotgun, and he hands me the .45.

In the days and weeks and years that followed the death of Sweet P, we never got an answer. There was never a name put to her killer, never a reason, never a cause. In the absence of an answer, you cling to whatever you can physically grasp and throttle. The first time I mowed the lawn after Sweet P died, I found that kettle, sitting where Wife B had thrown it.

Did that G*dd*amned tea kettle kill my daughter? Not likely. But it has become the stalking-horse, the stand-in for whatever really did kill her.

Have I lost my mind? Probably. I certainly lost a piece of my heart.

I open up with JayG's guns, swearing 12-letter epithets as loudly as the guns make thunder.

The gun-pr0n fantasy version of this involves me emptying every gun at the Bloggershoot, one by one, culminating in DoubleTrouble's cannon, until that G*dd*amned tea kettle is annihilated. I want it vaporized. But in reality, there's far too much of it left.

Afterwards, I collect the remains of the kettle and carry it back to my car. I hope no one asks if I'm crying.

-SCI-FI

SCI-FI is the closest thing on this mudball planet I have to a brother. Sweet P was my niece, and not a day goes by that I don't think of her and what her loss has meant to SCI-FI and his family. SCI-FI is a good man; a damn good man who would - quite literally - give you the shirt off his back. I would embarrass him greatly to share some of the stories of his generosity and compassion; I'll leave it simply that when the annals of good men are written, if his name isn't on the first page, then the manuscript is flawed.

In the hours and days after his life was turned upside down, I tried to be there for SCI-FI as best I could. I have long wished for a quarter of SCI-FI's talent with words, both written and spoken; it would have given me something to do, a task where I could feel less useless and helpless. I found myself wishing there were someone responsible for this so I could exact retribution for such a terrible wrongness; in this case, however, there is no Moriarty to blame for the heinous act. There is only the horrible emptiness, and the accompanying questions.

If helping SCI-FI blast a tea kettle into component tea kettle molecules will help him - and me, by extension - then I'll load the shotgun until the barrel melts.

That is all.