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The Matter of the Spanish Officer’s Sword

Michael Gigandet

    “Never point a sword at someone unless you’re going to stab them with it.” Martin laughed and presented the sword to his son like it was a serving platter. A joke might make this weekly visit less tense. “This is yours now.”
    “You planning on dying anytime soon dad?” his son asked.
    “I just want to make sure you get this.”
    The scabbard was bent at the tip, and the tassel dangling from the hilt was a sickly brown-yellow now, the red having long faded. Most of the threads were missing.
    “I wouldn’t know what to do with that old thing,” his son said still not reaching for it.
    “Old thing? How many people own a sword from the Spanish American War?” Martin remembered his excitement when his father had given him the sword which a long dead great uncle brought home from the Philippines.
    “Nancy might kill me with it if I clutter the house anymore.”
    Martin couldn’t understand why people didn’t value artifacts and places like arrowheads and battlefields. How many times had he walked the battlefields at Stones River and Franklin where his teenage greatgreatgrandfathers once stood in a hailstorm of violence and imagined their fear and excitement? Some Spanish officer had paraded with this sword, maybe charged with it, and his uncle had taken it.
    “Maybe I’ll keep it here in my old bedroom.” His son propped the sword against a hallway bookshelf.
    They continued their walk through the house. His children never visited long, always walking through the house like they were looking to buy the place.
    “I’m glad you came to visit me,” Martin said in the driveway. “Maybe next time we can have coffee.” He watched his son text his report to his sisters. How can he look so much like me and be so much like his mother...ancestryless? The past held no wonder for her. Was I gone so much?
    “That would be great dad,” his son said, slammed the car door, aimed a wave in Martin’s direction and drove away.
    Martin picked up the sword and carried it to his son’s bedroom. The bookshelves, the closet, nothing felt right.
    Eventually, every family repudiates itself. A year after his wife died, the children still hadn’t come for her keepsakes which he set aside for them after months of study.
    Martin drew the sword from its scabbard. The blade was discolored in rusty splotches. If I fell on this sword like Roman generals did, would they keep the sword then?
    He lashed out, parried and thrust until he slashed a souvenir pillow his son had brought home from a school trip to Mexico. The pillow erupted into a geyser of feathers like the inside of a snow globe.
    Everything meaningful that proves I lived will end up on a dusty shelf in an antique store. Is that my sentence? Is accepting that my penance?
    While feathers rained around him, Martin aimed and slashed the pillow again.

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