His heads juts forward, his chin tilts down to avoid a head-bump on the top of the doorframe – a habit, he once explained, that began when he was 14 and already 6’4” and towering over his diminutive mother, his younger sisters and even his Dad whom he only called Bill, who was then wracked with a lung disease that would soon take his life. Once when I was fourteen and on our only visit to his hometown, he drove me past his childhood house—a tall redbrick Victorian structure built on the side of a steep ravine. He pointed to a small garret window on the third floor and said, Bill’s window. My parents didn’t talk, and I felt great sadness.
He steps into the room—a single long stride, his torso tilting forward, his shoulders rounding. I sense his knees softening to adjust his height as he cocks his head to one side, his gray sea-blue eyes holding mine. His lips move, my name sounds, soft as a cloud and resounding as a whisper inside me. And then, dear girly, fills the air and stops my breath. My arm shoots up, hand stretched wide, fingers straining to catch the wide mitt of his hand to burrow inside the warmth of its sticky moisture, to press my nose to his skin and breathe in the sweet scent of his Player’s tobacco. An ear-to-ear grin stretches my face.
The light dissolves. An inky darkness descends. He disappears.
A river of tears bubbles up and begin to flow, released at last from the granite of my covert sorrow. I cup my hand over my nose, inhale, feast on the fragrance of his tobacco, alive again on my skin, firing me anew.
A memory arises: I’m eight years old in Dad’s wood-working room, sitting cross-legged under his high drafting table, a place where he says I must remain to be out of the way and be safe. I’m waiting for the action to begin. I survey his large table saw, admire the glint shine of the steel circular blades that hang, each on their own hook on the wall above. I note the broom in the corner, its deep brown bristles coloured with a barely visible film of sawdust. I like to push the broom over the wide cement floor after Dad’s switched off his power tools and stored his day’s work in their precisely proper places.
Dad stands leather-aproned, goggle-eyed beside his new blue lathe. I scan the pile of wooden shapes that have grown beside it ever since it arrived. I see candlesticks without candles, lamp stands without bulbs, table legs without tops. This puzzles me. What will become of them?