Читать книгу Every Little Scrap and Wonder - Carla Funk - Страница 11

My Father’s World

IN THE SATURDAY morning hours, before the yard filled up with the smokestack exhaust and engine rumble of Peter-bilts and Kenworths, before all the loggers returned from their shifts and before my dad was home to shoo me back toward the house, I headed across the yard pocked with fallen leaves and pine cones, dodging the small puddles potholed in the gravel driveway, and snuck into the side door of the shop. I stepped over the threshold and into darkness. Friday night’s woodstove fire had gone to ashes, and the concrete floor beneath me had cooled in the night. The building’s only light shone from a strip of windows in the bay doors. Gone were the usual hiss of the air compressor, the tire gun’s jolt, and the flying sparks from the welder’s torch. Tools, chains, hoses, and cords dangled from hooks. Machines whose names I didn’t know lay propped against the walls. The only sound was the hum of the refrigerator and the scuff of my footsteps echoing.

At the far end of the shop, a staircase led to a small balcony. When I climbed the steps, I felt the same thrill as when I wandered alone inside the empty church on cleaning days. While my mother vacuumed and dusted the basement of the church, I would tiptoe through the sanctuary, snooping behind the pulpit, turning the pages of the preacher’s huge black Bible, reaching my hand into the velvet offering bags passed around each Sunday by the ushers, feeling for lost coins. In my dad’s shop, on the balcony overlooking the work bays, I opened and closed the tiny plastic drawers that lined the shelves. Nuts, bolts, screws, washers—the cold silver in my hands felt like money. I sorted them into small piles and clinked them together in my palm, dreaming myself rich, but on edge, listening for a logging truck heading up the driveway and my dad returning home.

We called it the shop, though no goods or services were for sale there. If anything was bought or sold at the shop, it was done by swap or dicker, as in “I’ll give you fifty bucks for that wheel rim” or “How about a case of beer for a hunk of moose?” When we moved to the five acres off Kenney Dam Road, the first thing my dad built was his shop. He was tired of renting space in someone else’s truck garage and wanted to buy a second logging truck—to be not just a log-hauler, but a company owner with a crew that drove for him.

The shop was big enough to hold two logging trucks with their empty trailers loaded on the backs. The double-bay doors raised and lowered on a pulley system, the metal chains jangling a silver echo off the concrete floor every time someone yanked them up to open. By my dad’s command, the chains were off-limits to me.

“You’re not strong enough,” he said. In a child’s grip, the chains could easily slip and the door come slamming down.

“It could crush you,” said my dad.

The threat alone became a magnet that drew me to the chains. When my dad wasn’t watching, I slipped them out from behind their holding hook on the wall and pulled just enough to let in a crack of light. As I lowered the door, I held the chains taut, careful to anchor myself to make sure it didn’t thud when it shut. I could feel the weight of it. It could crush you. I pictured myself splayed across the threshold, the door slicing down, cleaving my torso in two, guts spilled on concrete.

This was my father’s world—big rigs, horsepower, air horns, oil drums, tire guns, ratchets, rad hoses, woodsmoke, whisky, country crooners, raunchy laughter, and ashtrays brimming with ash and smouldering cigarettes. The shop was a world of men in coveralls, in grease-stained work pants and snap-front shirts, in steel-toed boots, and in ballcaps crested with logos for Aro Automotive and Pine Country Inn. My dad had his own line of ballcaps printed, royal blue with a white crest, and in bright block letters: Dave Funk Trucking, Ltd. He handed out his hats like handshakes or high-fives, eager to impress, to draw a new fan to his social crew. In his world, goodwill toward men was a freely given ballcap bearing his name. When he passed a man in town sporting one of his company hats, he nodded and lifted two fingers from the steering wheel in a kind of peace-salute hello and gesture of approval.

Old Alec with one glass eyeball. Doukhobor Joe. The Jakes, all three of them with dark-tinted glasses and puffy sideburns. They were members of the crowd that congregated at the shop, coming and going with their loud trucks. They borrowed my dad’s tools to do what monkey-wrenching needed to be done before the next shift in the bush, and after the work was finished, they hung around to pass a bottle of whisky or share a case of beer. Falcon, the pock-marked, lanky trucker, whose fear of snakes led my brother and me to chase him around the shop with a plastic cobra until he scrambled into his cab and refused to come out, even after we put the toy away. Clem, slit-eyed and always smiling, rosy-cheeked, with a kind, red-lipsticked wife who wouldn’t leave her house. Pack-sack Lewis, who lived in a travel trailer on the far side of the driveway and taught my brother how to trap squirrels, then skin them and stretch their tiny hides on homemade tanning frames built from twine and sticks. Sparky, who didn’t drive truck but knew all the loggers, who came for the free booze and always offered to finish off whatever bottles my dad had stashed away.

The shop crew loved their rye and Cokes, their rum and Pepsis, their Pilsner and Molson and O’Keefe Extra Old Stock. The squat white fridge in the corner by the woodstove displayed rows of labels peeled from Royal Reserve whisky bottles and stuck on the door. I counted the black squares with the red maple leaf and A PROUD CANADIAN lettering over and over, never getting the same number twice.

Between the woodstove and the fridge, half a dozen blocks of wood formed a ring, with the biggest block at the centre. These were the makeshift barstools and card table where the men played “Stop the Bus.” Three quarters to play, three cards to a hand. Collect the same suit, and the first player whose cards add up to thirty-one stops the bus. Loser pays a quarter. I didn’t understand all the rules, what it meant to “knock” and “pay the driver,” but I loved to watch the empty ashtray fill with quarters, to see a cussing man kicked off the bus and out of the game while the other men laughed at him and raised their bottles in a mock toast.

I watched my dad’s mood for signs that he might let me in. If I offered to clean the shop bathroom and scrub the sink of its black grease and the toilet of its spatter and scum, if I leaned on his shoulder, if I sweetened in his presence, then he might let me hold his hand of cards and throw down a jack of spades, draw an ace, then knock on the wood to signal the final round.

“Rugrat,” he said. “You little potlicker, come here.”

I didn’t care what name he called me, only that his voice was soft when he said it, not the voice that hardened to get outta here and a hand waved toward the door. Not you’re in the way or go home and help your mother.

He let me perch on his knee so that he could see the cards I held and tell me when to draw and what to throw away. When I said I was thirsty, he passed me his bottle for a sip. The other men talked above me, puffed their cigarettes, laughed, slammed down their hearts and diamonds, paid their quarters to the pot. When the final round ended, and all the men had lost their money, and I was the only one left on the bus, my dad picked up the ashtray and dumped the coins into my hand.

“Better take that home before you lose it,” he said, and nodded toward the house.

The bay doors hung half-cocked on their chains, and in the dusk, light from the shop rolled the warped shadows of trucks and trailers into the yard. I walked from the shop to the house with the quarters jingling in my coat pocket and the bitter, yeasty taste of beer still on my tongue. My breath in the night air whitened like a puff from a cigarette, like smoke from my father’s mouth. Up ahead, past the garden’s black soil tilled over after harvest, against a backdrop of wind-stripped birch and poplar, framed in the light of the kitchen window, my small, aproned mother stood, stirring and slicing, cooking to a Hagood Hardy piano solo wavering on an 8-track. How long until your father comes home, she would ask me. I never knew the answer. Pretty soon, he always said, pretty soon.

Between the shop and the house, I followed the groove he’d worn in the gravel, morning and midday and evening, as ritual as prayer before meals and sleep. As a boy, he must have followed a path his own father walked before him, to the barns, the woodshed, and the fields, carrying back to the house the buckets full of milk or an armload of kindling. When I reached into my pocket, the coins slid coolly through my fingers, proof of where I’d been, where I’d come from. Behind me, voices crackled and hooted, the talk and laughter of men hunkered on old stumps around a woodstove’s fire, their sound drifting out into the falling night. Among them, my dad, calling for one more game of cards, one more round of drinks.