Hand Shoe Elegy

Year 0

He dies during lockdown, on his way over to feed the cattle of a sick neighbor. The funeral was rushed and ill-considered, like a battlefield amputation. Two months later, when gatherings are greenlighted again, we decide to hold a memorial service.

When we can’t find a decent photo of my notoriously camera-shy father, the event co-ordinator suggests we “highlight a personal item, something to focus on, maybe a favorite mug? His pipe?” Her hair is perfectly coiffed; her suit is immaculate. I become aware that I haven’t slept in two days and I have mud on my jeans. She sets my teeth on edge.

“His cap,” Mom says, and she pulls it from her bag. She places the old, stained John Deere cap on the table.

My brother, Stu, mumbles something about, no, he’s not a Deere man, more of a Deutz guy, because that’s what he switched to when they didn’t honor the warranty. “He was just getting his final wear out of that cap,” he says. Dad’s thrift was legendary.

“Or maybe stuck in autopilot,” my sister, Louise, says. Dad was also a legendary creature of habit. We stifle the laugh; it’s been two months but it still feels too early. Our eyes dart guiltily toward Mom. Stu is my elder by six years and worked the oilfields around Fort Mac for two years before coming home to work side by side with Dad while I was coddled by the high school.

“How ‘bout his work boots?” Stu says. “They barely have a scratch on them.” Mom visibly winces. The symbol seems a little low to me because the boots are as liable to be caked with cow-dung as with the rich soil he farmed. Feet of clay, I think but do not speak. When you are second son, you learn when to stay quiet.

Louise says, “His work shirt,” and I think: closer. She happens to be wearing one of his shirts; in fact, she had put one on over her turtleneck when she’d first arrived at the farmhouse after hearing the news and wears it daily. She takes it off and places it on the big high-gloss table. The event co-ordinator reverently moves the hat and shirt to the center for us to contemplate. Dad’s plaid shirts were the nearest he got to a uniform. Louise and I love those shirts and before the month is over and I move away to attend university, we will quarrel over dividing them up. There is a hierarchy of plaid; ask anyone who’s into plaid.

Ultimately we go for Mom’s second suggestion, his work gloves. They still smell smoky from the crash, but miraculously were barely singed. Seeing them on the table solidifies the decision. The shirt is floppy and frayed but the work gloves sit there like a sculpture, left curling into the right or maybe it’s the right curling over the left.

The gloves are oversized, slightly stained, somewhat worn, suede. Suede gives the best grip, Dad always claimed. There’s a cozy knit liner inside these gloves. “Tough on the outside but warm on the inside,” Louise says, and all of us exhale like yeah, she’s nailed it. The gloves it will be.  

Year 1

I pretty much lose my first year. I couldn’t concentrate. My life with him, like a large glass bowl, was dropped on a stone floor that night. The area around the point of impact contains shards, big and small:

·      Our last chat, a reminder to put tools away.

·      Another chat about how respecting others means replacing the empty toilet paper roll.  

·      The joy on his face at seeing a plate of roast beef.

·      The tick-tick of picking his teeth afterward.

·      How he said, “right as rain.”

·      How he said, “other fish in the sea” when he caught me crying in the toolshed.

Mom says, “He wanted you to go to university. Doesn’t have to be Voc. Ag.—Stu’s got that covered. You’re good at history.”

I try to explain why I’m failing. In the middle, I choke, imagining what Dad would say: sounds like B.S. to me.

Mom says, “Pull up your socks.” She says it to both Louise and me. Louise is now in her final year of high school. Apparently we both have those old saggy no-account elephant-knee socks that won’t stay up.

It is winter and we arrange to visit the crash site and the cemetery, both covered by snow doilies that obscure and normalize at the same time. We marvel again that the gloves and work boots were thrown free of the crash. The half-ton was a blackened hull, a complete write-off.

Dad was convinced he would go peacefully in his sleep like his father and grandfather before him. I think he went about his farming life feeling impervious to risk. I’ve seen him scoot up barn roofs I would not touch, and sometimes he got in a cattle pen with a bull. Perhaps he didn’t think twice about taking the turn-off to the coulee too fast.

We argue over the headstone. What to say. How much to say.

Year 1.5

I lose my full-time student status.

I learn the German word for glove is handschuh. Hand shoe.

Mom calls to say she ran into the event co-ordinator while waiting in line-up at the credit union. “Susan moved here all the way from Newfoundland. She said she learned her chops while working on the memorial for the Ocean Ranger.”

I google “ocean ranger” while she’s talking and read about the big oil rig ship that sank. So many men lost, I think. So many families…

“She really knows her stuff,” Mom concludes.

I remember something Dad said once. “When you really know someone, it’s nigh impossible to hate them.”

Year 2

I move off-campus and find a job working with plants. I buy work gloves to hold a shovel, not just for snow, but for spring planting. Putting them on, I feel a surge of energy. A tingling in my fingertips.

The guys I work with are conversation-averse. Friday night is drink-up time. Ron, who does delivery, tells me about the scar on his scalp. “It’s from an I.E.D. I did not find in time.” He tells me how he left his truck to take a piss beside a dead goat and the next thing was darkness and silence. “I woke up to the IV pole clanking against my bed railing.” He smiles as if remembering a lost love. “I figure I got a taste of sudden death. It’s not so bad.”

I feel a stillness settle within me.

Year 2.5

My family and I visit the crash site again. The trajectory is starting to blur; the rut carved by his tires as they left the road is starting to crumble and soften. The burned-out patch of earth bears shoots of fireweed.

Louise has faint white lines on her right hand. “Window,” she says.

We argue over the headstone again. Stu says dates but no epitaph.

Year 3

I get laid off in winter months. I can’t binge-watch. I detest crash scene in movies and TV. Video games nauseate me

The shards are still there, and one pierces me from time to time.

·      The cap-gun he gave me because he was giving Stu one.

·      The photo of his dad he kept in the Farm Accounts book.

·      The infinite patience he had for untangling yarn. And Christmas tree lights. And fishing lines.

·      He never took me fishing. Or taught me knitting.

The shards become poems.

Year 4

One night Ron calls me up “for a drink like old times” and, lacking proper winter mitts, I wear my work gloves which look pretty much like the gloves at that memorial: used, authentic, a little the worse for wear. On the way home, “three sheets to the wind” (as Dad would say), I lose my gloves.

The shards return but this time I can’t deal with them.

I return home for non-Christmas, which is to say the four of us—Mom, Stu, Louise, and I—gather on the 25^th but do not celebrate. Christmas was his favorite time.

He’d tell us how, as a kid, every year at Christmas he got an orange. We all share that story. Again. How he said, “an… orange!” like it was a missing verse of Revelations.

“God, I got so sick of the Christmas orange story,” Mom says, and we laugh.

Then we weep.

That night I barge into the washroom, forgetting the lock is wonky. Louise is there, naked from the waist up, shaving her armpits in the sink. There are bruises all over her left arm and torso.  “I fell downstairs,” she says.

Year 4.5

I invite myself to Louise’s apartment. She’s between boyfriends.

“You skipped a step,” I say. “You never had that argument, you know, the TV sit-com dad being pissed off about every dickhead his princess brings home.”

She snorts. “Yeah. Well. It ain’t gonna happen.”

On the way out, I break her fence. By accident. The next day I come to tap in a replacement slat. We recall how Dad insisted on proper repairs. “No band-aids.”

I invite myself over the next day and off we go to the lumber store for proper supplies. While waiting in line, she admits she is making bad choices. “None of them is Dad-worthy,” she says.

Year 5.0

I arrive at Louise’s to pick her up and drive her home for non-Christmas. “Something for you,” I say, handing her a violet-and-yellow-striped gift.

She opens it. A pair of work gloves. Same suede parts. Same knit liner.

“Go ahead, try them on,” I say. “You wouldn’t believe how handy work gloves are.”

“I can’t take these. They are too—too—I didn’t get you anything.”

“That’s exactly right,” I say. “Merry non-Christmas.”

Year 5.5

In early spring Stu calls. “I need you here for seeding. Oh, and maybe harvest.”

“What took you so long?” I say.

To hedge my bets, I don’t give up my apartment; I just sub-let it. Louise comes over to help me pack my stuff up for storage. She finds my box of Dad-stuff, almost like she had it GPS-tagged all along. Dog-eared files, crumpled receipts. Anything with his handwriting. At first I pretend it’s just random junk, old papers and books and photos.

She sees his shaving kit, the fancy Dopp kit we kids jointly gave him one Christmas, and which he used exactly once. He was an electric shaver kind of guy. Not one to mess with straight-edge blades, lathering agents and a badger-hair brush.

“Time to let it go,” she says and I nod.

Then she discovers the envelope of old poems. Before I can stop her, she’s into them. Damn. I feel outed.

She huddles and reads. I join her on the floor beside the box.

She is crying.

I put my arm around her shoulder. She half-turns, puts her arm around me and we sit there in silence like two empty gloves, left curling into the right or maybe it’s the right curling over the left.

THE END