Francisco Uribe
5th GRADE HISTORY
I’ve got my history notes spread over the kitchen table, just like I do with my baseball cards.
Why did Aaron Burr shoot Alexander Hamilton?
I don’t know, but that’s the very last question that I gotta answer.
I’ve been doing my homework for what feels like an hour now, and I still can’t find the reason for why he did it.
On the alarm clock radio, Rosanne Cash sings about runaway trains and long-distance phone calls. I go ahead and read the question again. Sometimes, if you look real close, you might find part of the answer hiding inside the problem.
“Alexander Hamilton shot into the air to show he did not want to kill Aaron Burr. Nevertheless, Aaron Burr still decided to shoot Alexander Hamilton. Why? Fill in your answer here: _______________________________________.”
The moment Pa strolls in, I stop reading. He says nothing as he walks right past me. I’m surprised by how heavy his footsteps sound, so I look down at the floor. Each step leaves a soggy footprint, and tiny bits of freshly mowed green and yellow grass cling to the scuffed black leather of his boots.
My Pa has these little cuts on his fingers, just nicks and scratches really. Right after he washes away the dashes of blood, he fills the coffee pot with water from the sink. He then reaches for his favorite cup, the one made out of stainless steel. He’s lucky Ma never threw it away, like she did with most of his clothes and his Popular Mechanics magazines.
Now that he's back, Pa’s having trouble finding the can of coffee. Ma no longer keeps it in the freezer. She used to, but not no more, not since she saw that thing on the news that said putting coffee grounds in cold places will ruin the taste.
When Pa starts going through each cabinet, I wanna tell him exactly where to look. But already, his jaw looks so hard and swollen. He slams one of the cabinets, and my body flinches. He keeps going, and I shake with each thud. He grunts, mutters, and sighs.
Not one peep comes out of my mouth.
I hunch over, and the tip of my nose almost touches my homework. Again, I reread the last question, quietly and to myself. But the more I stare at the words, the less sense they make.
There’s just no easy answer for why Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton. So far, all I’ve been able to find are their biographies.
Burr was born on February 6, and I wanna tell Pa about it because that’s his birthday too. But Pa’s gripping the kitchen counter so hard that his knuckles turn white. The muscles in his forearms rise and wiggle under his skin.
Suddenly, Ma’s voice pierces through. She’s upstairs cleaning and singing, “This land is your land, this land is my land. From California, to the New York Island.”
Pa takes deep, heavy breaths, and the knots in his arms come undone. Maybe Ma’s right. She says she can really tell that Pa’s weekly meetings have been doing him alotta good. But more than those meetings, she says that he’s finally got a job he likes. It pays well, and he doesn’t come home all tired and in a bad mood like he used to.
He’s a real handyman now, fixing other people’s broken appliances. He even gets to drive around town in a funny-looking van. I say funny-looking because painted on the sides is a cartoon bear dressed as a repairman. When my Pa works, he dresses just like the bear, wearing dark blue coveralls and a red baseball cap. But today, all he's got on are his blue jeans and a white T-shirt.
My Pa keeps rubbing the same spot below his ear, and his skin turns red. It’s almost as if he’s trying to give himself a really bad Indian burn.
I try not to take my eyes off my notes while wiping my sweaty palms on my pants, leaving behind tiny lines of sweat stains. Though, this time, I’m not really reading, just pretending.
Pa clears his throat, spits something thick and yellow into the sink.
Over the radio, the Judds ask Why Not Me.
For a few seconds, I stop searching for an answer to my problem, and instead, I take another peek at Pa. When he brushes his shiny black hair with his fingertips, his arms grow bigger, and the vein on his bicep sticks out like a stretched-out earthworm.
I push up my T-shirt sleeve and curl my arm because I wanna see if my veins do the same thing, but they don’t, and I begin to wonder what I’ll have to do to get my muscles to look like his.
There’s this picture of Burr shooting Hamilton in my history book. Aaron Burr is standing tall with his arm out, smoke drifting from his pistol. Alexander Hamilton’s body is twisted kinda funny, his hat floating in the air as if it'd been tossed like a frisbee.
Pa picks up his empty cup, then puts it back down. Again, he looks through the freezer. When he’s done poking around, he stares in my direction. I glance at the pantry behind me, and Pa walks right on over. He quickly finds the can of Yuban coffee. He stands there, holding the can. His face turns, and as soon as his eyes meet mine, my face gets all hot. I can’t help it.
I wanna finish what I’m doing so that I can leave, but the picture in my book doesn’t tell me anything at all as to why Burr fired his gun at Hamilton.
Right after Pa pours the water into the coffee maker, he puts the coffee can in the freezer. The coffee maker begins to gurgle as it sucks up all the water. The gurgling stops, and about a minute later, the water begins to drip. Pa fills his cup, sips the freshly-brewed coffee, then spits it right back into the cup. "Damn. Freezing," he mutters to himself.
Cold coffee must not taste very good. Or else, he’d be able to drink it. But he can’t, so he walks up to the coffee maker, grabs the half-filled pot, and sets it down near the edge of the counter. He then examines the coffee maker, only to find out that the machine can brew, but it can’t make the water hot. So then he pulls something that looks like a little black bottle out of his front pocket and pours whatever’s in it into his cup.
When he turns around, we look at each other. His eyes get tight, squinting as if reading a sign from across the room. He's not paying any attention to what his hands are doing or where things are. He’s attempting to put his cup down, trying to place it right next to the glass pot of coffee. But his knuckles accidentally push the pot, and it slips off the counter.
I bite down and squeeze my eyes shut.
Crash!
Slowly, I open my eyes.
Little pieces of glass are all over the floor, and a dark puddle spreads right up to where I’m sitting. The whole kitchen smells like an ashtray, but also sweeter and smokier.
Ma shouts, "What’s that noise? What just happened?"
Pa and I don’t say anything. We’re just staring at each other. Across his forehead run three deep lines, which look like they could’ve been drawn with a thick black crayon. We glance at the mess. Pa then calmly takes one long and slow sip without tilting his head. His eyes peek over the bottom edge of his cup. Not for one second does he stop looking at me.
All the noises sound kinda muffled, so I try swallowing, like I’ve learned to do to clear my ears, but nothing changes.
My lip jumps, and I blurt out, "Ma, everything’s okay! Nothing happened!"
Pa nods, and with his nose still inside the cup, he seconds that. "Yup, everything’s fine. Just a spill, Annie. It's all fine." His voice echoes, sounding hollow as he speaks. I let out a big breath and ease back into my chair. I give him a smile, and right after that, he takes one more drink, tosses the rest of the coffee into the sink, and says, "The kid wasn't looking. He knocked the damn pot over. . . The whole thing broke."
My shoulders shoot up. A shiver travels up my body. No matter how hard I try, I can’t hold on to a single thought. Nothing makes sense, and I feel weightless, like one strong breath from Pa can knock me back.
Ma rushes in. "Jesus Christ," she says. "What did you just do?" She's blaming me. "Well, what do you have to say for yourself?"
My body and my surprised face are trying to send her a message. “I didn’t do it. How could I? I’ve been sitting here this whole time.” But it might as well have been Morse code, because she doesn’t get it. So I open my mouth, but before I can actually say anything, Pa interrupts, "Like I said, Annie, the kid wasn’t looking and he knocked the damn thing over."
Ma looks at Pa. She bites her fingernails. Her mouth opens, then closes. She faces the shattered glass, slumps a little, and sighs. "Fine," she says. "Just . . . don’t make any more trouble. . . And clean this whole mess, okay?” As she walks out, she asks Pa if he can “please take a break” and join her in the living room. “You’ve been working too hard,” she says.
Waylon Jennings’ I’ve Always Been Crazy comes on the radio, and Pa turns the volume up. He’s slowly making his way out of the kitchen but stops short when he gets real close to where I’m sitting. "Maybe next time, you’ll speak up," he tells me, putting a hand on my shoulder and squeezing softly. He doesn’t look at me once. Only when he winks does he finally turn my way.
Seeing him standing so tall and strong, I get embarrassed because I can’t stop my lips from curling up.
When he’s finally out of sight, I wipe my mouth and slide out of my chair. I pick up all the broken pieces of glass and then soak up the puddle of coffee with paper towels. I finish by sweeping and mopping.
Ma and Pa are in the living room. They're watching A&E, and the man on the television says his name is Roger Mudd. He then goes on to thank the viewers for tuning in.
I put away the broom, mop, and bucket.
Ma starts laughing pretty hard. A sharp and brittle noise. Pa sure can be funny and charming when he wants to be. But the laughter seems out of place, so I grab the can of coffee that Pa had put in the freezer, and I open the pantry door and shove the can all the way to the back, where it belongs.
By the time I get everything put away, I’m very tired and ready to go to my room. I wanna be far away from everyone, close the blinds, keep the lights off, and read my X-Men comics. But I still have homework due tomorrow. So I grab my pencil, tap the eraser on my chin, and I think. And I think.
“What could be the ‘damn’ reason?” I ask myself.
My body jolts when, on page one hundred and eighty-seven, I finally come across the only paragraph that talks about the “damn” duel. I read fast, then slow: The final confrontation between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr took place on July 11, 1804, in Weehawken, New Jersey. According to several accounts, Hamilton intentionally fired his pistol into the air. But Burr took careful aim and shot Hamilton, who later died from his wounds.
That’s all it says.
I scrub my eyesockets with the tips of my fingers, then raise my hands up to my head and grip a chunk of my hair.
Another song comes on the radio. Folsom Prison Blues. Johnny Cash begins to sing a tune about being stuck in jail.
I read the paragraph again and again, but no matter how many times I mouth the words, the answer just isn’t there. Not even a clue.
My head scrambles for something to write down on the blank line. But nothing comes to mind.
Johnny Cash gets to the part where he mentions that if he was freed from prison, he’d board a train and move it down the line. Far away from Folsom, that’s where he wants to stay. Towards the end of the song, his voice gets caught somewhere between a smile and a frown. And a few seconds of static and silence pass by before the next song comes on. In that moment, I scribble, "Aaron Burr shot a man in Jersey just to watch him die."
I breathe out the warm, heavy air I've been holding in, and I close my textbook with my paper sandwiched inside.
Why did Aaron Burr shoot Alexander Hamilton?
I don’t know, but that’s the very last question that I gotta answer.
I’ve been doing my homework for what feels like an hour now, and I still can’t find the reason for why he did it.
On the alarm clock radio, Rosanne Cash sings about runaway trains and long-distance phone calls. I go ahead and read the question again. Sometimes, if you look real close, you might find part of the answer hiding inside the problem.
“Alexander Hamilton shot into the air to show he did not want to kill Aaron Burr. Nevertheless, Aaron Burr still decided to shoot Alexander Hamilton. Why? Fill in your answer here: _______________________________________.”
The moment Pa strolls in, I stop reading. He says nothing as he walks right past me. I’m surprised by how heavy his footsteps sound, so I look down at the floor. Each step leaves a soggy footprint, and tiny bits of freshly mowed green and yellow grass cling to the scuffed black leather of his boots.
My Pa has these little cuts on his fingers, just nicks and scratches really. Right after he washes away the dashes of blood, he fills the coffee pot with water from the sink. He then reaches for his favorite cup, the one made out of stainless steel. He’s lucky Ma never threw it away, like she did with most of his clothes and his Popular Mechanics magazines.
Now that he's back, Pa’s having trouble finding the can of coffee. Ma no longer keeps it in the freezer. She used to, but not no more, not since she saw that thing on the news that said putting coffee grounds in cold places will ruin the taste.
When Pa starts going through each cabinet, I wanna tell him exactly where to look. But already, his jaw looks so hard and swollen. He slams one of the cabinets, and my body flinches. He keeps going, and I shake with each thud. He grunts, mutters, and sighs.
Not one peep comes out of my mouth.
I hunch over, and the tip of my nose almost touches my homework. Again, I reread the last question, quietly and to myself. But the more I stare at the words, the less sense they make.
There’s just no easy answer for why Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton. So far, all I’ve been able to find are their biographies.
Burr was born on February 6, and I wanna tell Pa about it because that’s his birthday too. But Pa’s gripping the kitchen counter so hard that his knuckles turn white. The muscles in his forearms rise and wiggle under his skin.
Suddenly, Ma’s voice pierces through. She’s upstairs cleaning and singing, “This land is your land, this land is my land. From California, to the New York Island.”
Pa takes deep, heavy breaths, and the knots in his arms come undone. Maybe Ma’s right. She says she can really tell that Pa’s weekly meetings have been doing him alotta good. But more than those meetings, she says that he’s finally got a job he likes. It pays well, and he doesn’t come home all tired and in a bad mood like he used to.
He’s a real handyman now, fixing other people’s broken appliances. He even gets to drive around town in a funny-looking van. I say funny-looking because painted on the sides is a cartoon bear dressed as a repairman. When my Pa works, he dresses just like the bear, wearing dark blue coveralls and a red baseball cap. But today, all he's got on are his blue jeans and a white T-shirt.
My Pa keeps rubbing the same spot below his ear, and his skin turns red. It’s almost as if he’s trying to give himself a really bad Indian burn.
I try not to take my eyes off my notes while wiping my sweaty palms on my pants, leaving behind tiny lines of sweat stains. Though, this time, I’m not really reading, just pretending.
Pa clears his throat, spits something thick and yellow into the sink.
Over the radio, the Judds ask Why Not Me.
For a few seconds, I stop searching for an answer to my problem, and instead, I take another peek at Pa. When he brushes his shiny black hair with his fingertips, his arms grow bigger, and the vein on his bicep sticks out like a stretched-out earthworm.
I push up my T-shirt sleeve and curl my arm because I wanna see if my veins do the same thing, but they don’t, and I begin to wonder what I’ll have to do to get my muscles to look like his.
There’s this picture of Burr shooting Hamilton in my history book. Aaron Burr is standing tall with his arm out, smoke drifting from his pistol. Alexander Hamilton’s body is twisted kinda funny, his hat floating in the air as if it'd been tossed like a frisbee.
Pa picks up his empty cup, then puts it back down. Again, he looks through the freezer. When he’s done poking around, he stares in my direction. I glance at the pantry behind me, and Pa walks right on over. He quickly finds the can of Yuban coffee. He stands there, holding the can. His face turns, and as soon as his eyes meet mine, my face gets all hot. I can’t help it.
I wanna finish what I’m doing so that I can leave, but the picture in my book doesn’t tell me anything at all as to why Burr fired his gun at Hamilton.
Right after Pa pours the water into the coffee maker, he puts the coffee can in the freezer. The coffee maker begins to gurgle as it sucks up all the water. The gurgling stops, and about a minute later, the water begins to drip. Pa fills his cup, sips the freshly-brewed coffee, then spits it right back into the cup. "Damn. Freezing," he mutters to himself.
Cold coffee must not taste very good. Or else, he’d be able to drink it. But he can’t, so he walks up to the coffee maker, grabs the half-filled pot, and sets it down near the edge of the counter. He then examines the coffee maker, only to find out that the machine can brew, but it can’t make the water hot. So then he pulls something that looks like a little black bottle out of his front pocket and pours whatever’s in it into his cup.
When he turns around, we look at each other. His eyes get tight, squinting as if reading a sign from across the room. He's not paying any attention to what his hands are doing or where things are. He’s attempting to put his cup down, trying to place it right next to the glass pot of coffee. But his knuckles accidentally push the pot, and it slips off the counter.
I bite down and squeeze my eyes shut.
Crash!
Slowly, I open my eyes.
Little pieces of glass are all over the floor, and a dark puddle spreads right up to where I’m sitting. The whole kitchen smells like an ashtray, but also sweeter and smokier.
Ma shouts, "What’s that noise? What just happened?"
Pa and I don’t say anything. We’re just staring at each other. Across his forehead run three deep lines, which look like they could’ve been drawn with a thick black crayon. We glance at the mess. Pa then calmly takes one long and slow sip without tilting his head. His eyes peek over the bottom edge of his cup. Not for one second does he stop looking at me.
All the noises sound kinda muffled, so I try swallowing, like I’ve learned to do to clear my ears, but nothing changes.
My lip jumps, and I blurt out, "Ma, everything’s okay! Nothing happened!"
Pa nods, and with his nose still inside the cup, he seconds that. "Yup, everything’s fine. Just a spill, Annie. It's all fine." His voice echoes, sounding hollow as he speaks. I let out a big breath and ease back into my chair. I give him a smile, and right after that, he takes one more drink, tosses the rest of the coffee into the sink, and says, "The kid wasn't looking. He knocked the damn pot over. . . The whole thing broke."
My shoulders shoot up. A shiver travels up my body. No matter how hard I try, I can’t hold on to a single thought. Nothing makes sense, and I feel weightless, like one strong breath from Pa can knock me back.
Ma rushes in. "Jesus Christ," she says. "What did you just do?" She's blaming me. "Well, what do you have to say for yourself?"
My body and my surprised face are trying to send her a message. “I didn’t do it. How could I? I’ve been sitting here this whole time.” But it might as well have been Morse code, because she doesn’t get it. So I open my mouth, but before I can actually say anything, Pa interrupts, "Like I said, Annie, the kid wasn’t looking and he knocked the damn thing over."
Ma looks at Pa. She bites her fingernails. Her mouth opens, then closes. She faces the shattered glass, slumps a little, and sighs. "Fine," she says. "Just . . . don’t make any more trouble. . . And clean this whole mess, okay?” As she walks out, she asks Pa if he can “please take a break” and join her in the living room. “You’ve been working too hard,” she says.
Waylon Jennings’ I’ve Always Been Crazy comes on the radio, and Pa turns the volume up. He’s slowly making his way out of the kitchen but stops short when he gets real close to where I’m sitting. "Maybe next time, you’ll speak up," he tells me, putting a hand on my shoulder and squeezing softly. He doesn’t look at me once. Only when he winks does he finally turn my way.
Seeing him standing so tall and strong, I get embarrassed because I can’t stop my lips from curling up.
When he’s finally out of sight, I wipe my mouth and slide out of my chair. I pick up all the broken pieces of glass and then soak up the puddle of coffee with paper towels. I finish by sweeping and mopping.
Ma and Pa are in the living room. They're watching A&E, and the man on the television says his name is Roger Mudd. He then goes on to thank the viewers for tuning in.
I put away the broom, mop, and bucket.
Ma starts laughing pretty hard. A sharp and brittle noise. Pa sure can be funny and charming when he wants to be. But the laughter seems out of place, so I grab the can of coffee that Pa had put in the freezer, and I open the pantry door and shove the can all the way to the back, where it belongs.
By the time I get everything put away, I’m very tired and ready to go to my room. I wanna be far away from everyone, close the blinds, keep the lights off, and read my X-Men comics. But I still have homework due tomorrow. So I grab my pencil, tap the eraser on my chin, and I think. And I think.
“What could be the ‘damn’ reason?” I ask myself.
My body jolts when, on page one hundred and eighty-seven, I finally come across the only paragraph that talks about the “damn” duel. I read fast, then slow: The final confrontation between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr took place on July 11, 1804, in Weehawken, New Jersey. According to several accounts, Hamilton intentionally fired his pistol into the air. But Burr took careful aim and shot Hamilton, who later died from his wounds.
That’s all it says.
I scrub my eyesockets with the tips of my fingers, then raise my hands up to my head and grip a chunk of my hair.
Another song comes on the radio. Folsom Prison Blues. Johnny Cash begins to sing a tune about being stuck in jail.
I read the paragraph again and again, but no matter how many times I mouth the words, the answer just isn’t there. Not even a clue.
My head scrambles for something to write down on the blank line. But nothing comes to mind.
Johnny Cash gets to the part where he mentions that if he was freed from prison, he’d board a train and move it down the line. Far away from Folsom, that’s where he wants to stay. Towards the end of the song, his voice gets caught somewhere between a smile and a frown. And a few seconds of static and silence pass by before the next song comes on. In that moment, I scribble, "Aaron Burr shot a man in Jersey just to watch him die."
I breathe out the warm, heavy air I've been holding in, and I close my textbook with my paper sandwiched inside.
--
Francisco Manuel Uribe is a writer based in Long Beach, California. He is a 2018 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow and a 2023 Periplus Fellow. His work has appeared in BULL Fiction, Coolest American Stories, Reed Magazine, Huizache, Crab Orchard Review, [PANK], and Aquifer: The Florida Review Online. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the John Steinbeck Award in Fiction.
Francisco Manuel Uribe is a writer based in Long Beach, California. He is a 2018 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow and a 2023 Periplus Fellow. His work has appeared in BULL Fiction, Coolest American Stories, Reed Magazine, Huizache, Crab Orchard Review, [PANK], and Aquifer: The Florida Review Online. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the John Steinbeck Award in Fiction.