We dismantled his tool shed and sold everything at a yard sale. His whole working life went fast after a bit of dickering, hemming, hawing, and jawing. Hammers, screwdrivers, socket wrenches, pliers, hacksaws, hand saws, tin snips, drill bits, awls, pipe wrenches, hatchets, putty knives, sawhorses, sandpaper, rope, twine, nuts, bolts, screws, tool belts, extension ladders, levels, electrical tape, and enough W-D 40 to lube the whole town. There were nails by the thousands. You could build a hundred houses with them, tenpenny at a time.
Drill press. The first shift is for men who have put their time in, pieces of them hanging from the rafters. The third shift is for pale undercooked meat, men who will evict the sun to eat a square meal. Miles of handiwork, skeletons complete, hum off the assembly line as the dandies in double-breasted suits sleep, fat as sheep. The HR honchos dream of disability rates for wrecked shoulders and missing thumbs. They get their hands dirty at air-conditioned lunches and swim in sand traps on the back nine at the club.
Men like him needed to work. The kitchen was dim when they were not useful, a pipe without a sink. The cat hid. The dog was unclear what to do—give comfort, fetch, or play dead. The kids, too, the tension thick. Minutes became molasses in the frigid, condensing air. We scrimped. We measured everything in pennies and dimes. We loathed the mailman, the grubby envelopes malevolent and full of who we owed—and we paid our bills. The TV offered no quarter. Our whole world was out of work in livid, living color.
Shovel. Busted back, the sacroiliac radiated pain to the knees. Lift with your legs, lift with your legs, he would admonish, digging deep as was his genetic disposition. He never did take his own advice. He never uncovered himself and jumped into the prehistoric hole he made. And slept, a dinosaur donating bones for a softening, modern museum.
The kitchen was our surgical tent, and we supped inaudibly in a bloody pasture. The amputation was not precise or clean. Gangrene would become tomorrow’s concern. Until then, then, but today there was a little money to be made under the table—on your knees, toiling, does mean flat on your back. We spat on charity.
Grindstone. Sparks and shrapnel. He didn’t wear eye protection. Even after catching a sliver of steel on the factory floor. Right behind the iris, near the eye wash station. He was a pirate, our buccaneer, for a few weeks. He never sailed the Caribbean, but he did make it downstairs for dawn coffee and to change the bandage. Oh, Captain, my Captain.
The doctor never took the metal shard from his left eye, my Father.
He gazed around a corner for the rest of his life. Much of his generation, too.
I think of the forest of pine boards that were spared because those men got old.