THE VALOR OF OLD MEN

by Dimitri C. Michalakis

I remember my father telling me the story of how he wrote an essay in school when he was a kid back on Chios, on a story he got from his father, who got it from his uncle, who got it from a choriano, about the old man who grabbed a rusty old rifle to stand up against the Turks that were supposed to invade his village.

“The old man had fought way back against the Turks,” my dad told me, while he cleaned some chicken for dinner, and my father was very fastidious about skinning the chicken, so it took up the whole story. “And now the old man heard the Turks were about to invade the village. Only not when I’m here! he said.”

So the old man found his old Kariofili, with the long barrel, and the scrolled decorations on it, and he cleaned it up, and scraped off the rust, and blew in the barrel, and took out some spider webs and spiders, and then he went looking for powder, and steel balls, and rags to wrap around the balls, and then his katsouniki to shove them all in, but all he had were the rags, so he shoved in rocks.

“And there I stood, he told the people later,” my dad continued the story, “and now I was ready!” My dad put the chicken skin on a paper towel. “Only, Barba, they told him, you were only one man. And how did you know your gun would fire? How did I know my gun would fire? the old man told them. I knew my toufeki was going to blow up, because it was so old, only the Turks would think it was a cannon with the boom, and all the palikaria of Chios had shown up to fight them, so they would think about it and not show their heads, until our own palikaria showed up with their own rifles and cannons and the mahi would start!”

So, my dad said, putting the chicken in the oven, the old man was ready– but the Turks never came. But the old man was still considered a palikari for showing his fighting spirit, and after the alarm about the Turks subsided, the choriani treated the old man to a whole skin of wine, and that night he went to sleep drunk, but happy and valorous.

“And then he never stopped talking about the time he took his toufeki and held back the Turks,” my dad said, washing chicken skin off his fingers, “and how it made the whole Turkish army think twice about invading Chios again when even the old men fought like leontaria.”

The name of the story was Tou Toufekiou o Agralos and my father won the prize for it in school that Independence Day, celebrated that year up in the mountains of Chios, where the old man lay buried with his rifle and forgotten, until my dad honored him.