“All music is what awakes from you,” says Whitman in Leaves of Grass, “when you are reminded by the instruments.”
I sing the body electric.
This is the refrain that I’ve been hearing of late. Since my mother died, my 86-year-old father has been on a cleaning binge. “I’ve got something I want to show you,” he says and takes out a plastic portfolio with panoramic photographs from a disposable camera. He points out the gargantuan foundation he dug, the ramp he had to build to get his seventy-ton excavator out—there’s a whole children’s picture book about how Mike Mulligan’s steam shovel got stuck in a dig, but not my father’s—and himself in a hardhat standing next to tracks half his height.
“That’s amazing,” I say, even though I’ve seen the album dozens of times.
I don’t tell him about Whitman’s ode to the human body. He wouldn’t understand. Not the words, anyway.
Whitman’s reverence for workers, for the eternal meanings of their work:
Yes.
*
“I miss the feel of that power in my hands,” my father says, craning his neck to see a trailer hauling a gigantic Caterpillar on the road to a doctor appointment. His purplish hands clench with longing, and I wince. We have done the repair work on “us.” Still, I don’t miss the feel of that power in his hands. The bucket on that excavator could hold ten or fifteen eight-year-olds, the age I was when he chased me into corners. I peed my pants. Every time.
I wonder: Did he not know his own power back then, a man in his prime, his arms hardened by hoisting his own body weight in and out of that machine every morning, his muscles tensed for eight-hour stretches? I was a mere gnat he batted away.
When the car stops, I jog to the passenger side, hold open the door, and support his arm so he doesn’t fall. Because he’s fallen, a lot. He doesn’t tell anyone, but I know because of the bruises.
*
Bruises are first purple, then bluish green, then yellow. I do not sing a body bruised, especially the body of a child. Or an old man. My father is dotted with bruises from everyday knocks and nicks, their color a time stamp. Purple: last night’s. Red: two days ago. Yellow: last week’s. Then there are the cuts, the raw skin. Pulling any bandage adhesive takes skin and leaves tiny beads of blood, as does the scrape of a zipper or belt buckle. His translucent skin slides easily, like the surface of an overripe peach, over veins and the ivory of his joints. His once muscular legs have lost their sinew to edema and his feet are webbed with deep blue veins, the toenails rough with lichens. Time doesn’t care who did what to whom; bodies are its food.
Not only his but mine, too.
*
My father was three months shy of 25 when I was born. My mother too. Babies, both of them. In photographs of their 1961 wedding, she is a newly pregnant Gina Lollobrigida. He is a smooth-skinned youth with slicked thinning hair and wears a bowtie. Her waist is cinched by a belt; I wonder what that did to me. Nothing, probably; I was a limbless bean. Years later, when I was pregnant, I popped instantly and had to wear a tent dress to my own wedding, but she dieted to conceal me. By their accounts, they pulled off their shotgun coup. They didn’t, of course: married in October, parents the next May. Even I knew when I was old enough to do the math. Babies take almost ten months to cook.
*
When they married, he drove a truck. Each day he sat in line at a job waiting for the diggers, as my son would later call them, to load the truck bed with the fill and rock. A hot truck without air conditioning; an AM/FM radio; and a paper-wrapped sandwich in a tin box on the leather seat. When the truck bed was full, he trundled away to a landfill and got in a second line to dump the load, then trundled back to the job site and took his place in the first line. Every day, many times a day. For this monotony he earned 75 dollars a week.
I was learning to pull myself up in a playpen when he took a second job. Parents don’t use playpens anymore, but I remember them from the three sisters that followed: the vinyl matting dotted with toys, the wooden slats, the baby inside wailing to be picked up. My parents didn’t have a dryer, so like every other mother in blue collar suburbia, my mother plopped me down and pinned up the wash. He came home from Boston, where he often worked, hastily ate his dinner, and left for a second job. Greasing the undersides of garbage trucks at night enabled him to make the rent. That and the books of Green Stamps my mother collected.
But greasing garbage trucks.
I cannot sing a body exploited, its hands brown with grease, rolled recumbent under a filthy truck. The sulfurous smell of rot, the eyes red with worry and fatigue.
I cannot sing the shame. Mine, for the smooth body sacrificed…for me.
*
He was a Nova Scotia fisherman’s son. His father lost a thumb when an anchor rope pulled it off and died a few years later from pneumonia-scarred lungs. He was forty-five, my father sixteen. I visit Nova Scotia each summer. The field across from my cottage is furrowed with rows of beans and corn. Each morning a car pulls up and a family gets out: father, mother, brother, sister; children. They cover their heads with scarves and hats and start down the rows to weed. At noon they break for lunch. At five o’clock they are there still, bent like the women in Millet’s 1857 painting, The Gleaners. I didn’t imagine I would see gleaning here, in the verdant Annapolis hills, in 2023.
How do they do it, day after day, with children? No playpens, no respite from sun or rain? How does a body glean or grease or hew or scrub? Or fight the sea’s drag on traps? Or breathe in aerosolized salt or bug stuff, or solvents or exhaust? For years?
At dusk the gleaners assemble by the car, their children plopped in the long grass. The little ones have chocolate-drop eyes. They flirt with me, and I wave bye-bye.
Once I had chocolate-drop eyes. My father was too tired, most days, to pick me up.
*
Daddy is big and so is his new machine. I am small. I listen after dinner at the basement door. He goes down there to “make calls.” He sits at a castoff desk to type out invoices on a 1915 typewriter. It takes a long time. Daddy didn’t finish high school, Mama says. He left Nova Scotia because his father died. He needed work. I hear him talking in his “man voice.” Loud and important but nicer than usual. He is asking people to pay him. Willie Consalvo owes him three thousand bucks. It takes weeks and weeks to get paid for digging. I don’t know why. It’s going to be winter soon, and in winter he doesn’t dig. The frozen ground is too hard. He has four kids and a mortgage, he says, and Christmas is coming.
I know when we go out for dinner not to pick something fancy. I don’t have to ask, I just know.
For my birthday I want a new bicycle like Sue Tower across the street. Daddy takes me to get one, a two-wheeler to learn on. It is purple and I love it even though it is used. At night I leave it on the sidewalk in front of the house. “You have to take care of your toys,” Daddy says, “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” One morning I wake up and I can’t find my bicycle. I cry because somebody stole it. Two days go by, all the kids on the street riding bikes except me. Then Daddy comes home and lifts my bicycle out of his pickup truck. He took it to work to teach me a lesson.
I’m so happy to see my purple bike.
*
His first machine was a red Dynahoe 160, small compared to the yellow CATs he now gazes at with longing. There was no heat or air conditioning, no opening of its windows, no tinted glass to mute the glare. He fixed a sticker of Tweetie Bird to the boom. When or why, I don’t know.
One day in 1978, I skipped high school to go to Harvard Square. I rounded a corner to face a red machine chomping at the earth. My heart thumped as I searched for Tweetie. I forgot that I was truant and jumped up and down, arms flapping like a windmill, until I caught my father’s eye. He halted the machine, pushed up his goggles, and jogged over; the eyes under the hardhat were rimmed like a raccoon’s with dust and sunburn. But he was beaming with pride. How’d you know it was me? he asked through the chain link perimeter fence. Because of the red, I said. You don’t see many red machines, do you? he laughed. His teeth flashed white as he waved goodbye, and I got my second and third surprises of the morning: he hadn’t noticed that I wasn’t in school, and I felt the ice-cold tears before I realized I was crying.
A little red digger industriously setting down the walkway for Harvard College’s elite feet, overlooked and unremarkable, except possibly for Tweetie.
Later he worked on machines so high, he needed a ladder to reach the cab. But not this one. With this one, in winter, he occasionally heaped the snow in front of our house into enviable mounds. Our snow caves and sledding hills were legendary. One day he stood on a toboggan and skied down the slope he had made. No one else’s dad did that.
I don’t know where that machine is now or whether Tweetie toughed it out.
Dad did. And so did I.
*
Before he retired, he was working on excavators as tall as a house that moved on tracks as high as a man and maneuvered buckets as big as a car. He had a forever sunburn and forever grease etching his palms. He seemed forever angry, too, at the traffic and the grind and the not enough. Money or quiet or respect. The day he hauled the last boxes from my childhood home, I helped. He had renovated that house from the ground up: new floors, plaster, plumbing, windows. He papered and painted and sanded down one side of the house and repainted it each year. Planted cherry trees and hedges and cut out scrub. Built a trellis for tea roses and laid a flagstone walk. A House Beautiful house bought with the earnings first from the red machine and later, from monsters that he operated but didn’t own. He was the boss’s “captain,” he bragged. Together they visited trade shows, priced machinery, and moved mountains to build cities. The Nova Scotia boy commanded singular power.
He checked the keys in his pocket and headed for the door.
“Don’t you want a minute to say goodbye?” I said. “To the house.”
He scowled.
“I can’t wait to get the hell out of here.”
I stood alone in the empty kitchen and glanced at its too familiar corners, and I cried.
*
Each time we pass machines, I have to stop the car or at least slow down. After my mother died, I took him to a seafood place they liked for a traditional dinner of smelts and beer and a baked potato. On the way out, I spotted two excavators dredging the marina from a float. “Shit!” said my father. “If I had known they were working, I would’ve skipped the smelts.” He stood in bracing winter wind for an hour, watching the machines. The buckets dove into the bitter brine and emerged like brontosauri with muck and weeds dripping from their jaws. They filled a waiting barge that got hitched to a tugboat that hauled the muck over rough icy water. “Jeezus H. Christ,” my father said. “I hope they know what they’re doing.” When I helped him into the car, his nose dripped and his hands were blue from the cold, but his eyes were bright.
“We can come back,” I said, and we did. Twice. Then I went to Nova Scotia for a month. The next time we returned, the marina was finished. Full of slick excursion boats that belonged, in his words, to “high rollers.”
“I’ve seen enough,” he said after five minutes.
*
“I don’t want a party,” he groused when I proposed a family gathering for his 86th birthday. “I can’t stand all the racket.”
I got it. But I kept thinking about the feeling of power in my hands.
In a photograph of the last big excavator he had operated, the company name was painted on the boom. I looked it up online, found his former boss’s email address, and wrote to him. My father had lost my mother and was experiencing early dementia, I said, but he had a birthday coming up. Could we visit a construction site?
“Bobby” wrote back almost immediately: “I would love to see Smitty! I will come and get him myself!”
A couple days later, my phone rang.
“What did you do,” my father said slowly, as if I had wrecked the family car. Then he laughed with wicked glee.
Bobby had telephoned him.
“I’m polishing my hardhat,” my father said. “I hope he has one for you, too.”
*
Few things make my father happier than machines. He likes playing slots at the casino where he has seen Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. And he loves tending to birds, having exhausted considerable effort battling the squirrels that once sucked his feeders dry. That was until I got him a prized rodent-proof feeder, a set of binoculars, and a hanging birdbath. I help him fetch twenty-pound bags of specialty birdseed and sort out the sticks and refuse so it won’t clog the feeder’s ports. Each visit to his house begins with the requisite trip to the deck to check the winged diners at the feeder. My sisters schedule him for weekends away, but he frets that the feeders won’t get refilled.
“If they’re empty too long,” he says, “the birds won’t come back.”
I don’t believe him but I understand. There is comfort in the predictability of his shrinking world. He presses rewind-play on Ray Charles, Patsy Cline, and Willie Nelson, CDs I bought him. I get frequent bright and early call, only to hear a blast of music. No greeting, just Patsy crooning “Crazy” or the joyful jangle of Ray and a swell of bluesy women.
“I love this song,” my father shouted once after a minute of “Hit the Road Jack.” “It makes me so happy, I want to run down the street naked.”
“Great,” I said. “Just make sure you wear shoes.”
One day I picked up to “When a Man Loves a Woman.”
“Do you know who this is?” my father shouted.
“Percy Sledge,” I shouted back. “You have good taste in music.”
“This song really gets me going,” he said. “I used to play it in the truck on my way to work. I’m playing it for your mother.”
He had found the forgotten CD in his car. That meant he had been driving—which he wasn’t supposed to do—or possibly even cruising with tunes. I didn’t ask. He listened to the newest addition to his playlist repeatedly for several days, the same way I listened to favorite eight-track tapes as a kid: Linda Ronstadt, Johnnie Cash, and Aretha. I furtively played them in the basement with my ear to the speaker until my father opened the door and shouted down the stairs, “Turn off that goddamned racket!” There was too much “us”—too much noise, chaos, and talk—when we were kids. In his spare three-story condo, the music echoes with the resonance of a concert hall. Once in a while he even breaks into the twist while sugaring his cornflakes or tea.
Because of my father, I fell in love with outlaw country. I have my own favorites. Waylon Jennings and the Highwaymen sing of dam building “across the river deep and wide, where steel and water did collide.” A tender ode to tough men that Whitman could have written. I play it repeatedly, like the teenager I once was.
They buried me in that great tomb that knows no sound
But I am still around
I”ll always be around, and around and around
*
On the appointed day of our visit to Bobby, my father was apprehensive.
“What are we gonna do when we get there?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
I knew the problem. It had been fifteen years since he saw his former boss, and he was nervous. He had on a pressed plaid shirt, blue suspenders, and the dressy jeans I bought him. He handed me the photograph album to show Bobby, and I stuffed it in my bag.
“You two will have plenty to talk about,” I reassured him, “even without pictures.”
When I pulled up to the perimeter fence. I texted Bobby. Where should we go?
My phone rang.
“Come in the gate and park,” he said.
Inside, a stately man in a hardhat and yellow vest waved us to a parking spot. My beaming father nearly jumped out of the car and the two men hugged. Bobby took my father’s hand and led him, gently, to a hungry CAT excavator hovering over a small pile of rocks.
“Aren’t you gonna get in?” Bobby asked.
“What, now?” my father replied and a smile broke across his face.
Bobby hoisted my father into the cab as carefully as if he were lifting porcelain. Within a minute the machine rumbled to life. Then Bobby hopped down and gave a wave.
“He knows what to do,” he said to me and the two guys watching. “He can’t forget.”
A plume of exhaust spurted out like the breath of a waking dragon. The boom rose, the bucket swung up, and the teeth sank down to break off a chunk of macadam. The bucket curled under to scoop up the rock, then the boom lifted, swung slowly around, and uncurled to gracefully drop it in a new pile. My father sat ramrod straight, frowning with intense concentration. His little red machine was a Lego toy compared to the CAT, but somehow, he seemed suddenly to be twice his normal size.
The machine squeaked and clanked as he rolled twenty feet to a dirt pile that needed flattening. A neat miniature American flag flew off the back of the housing, the entire tableau like the coming-to-life of a kid’s picture book about a steam shovel or “the little train that could.”
“Dad,” I shouted jovially, “you’re hired!”
He tipped his head back and laughed riotously.
The day grew bright and hot; after an hour, a sheen emerged on his face. Bobby strode over to help my father down, took his hand, and led him to a pickup truck. He reached inside and pulled out a black cap with CAT in yellow letters on the brim.
My father took off his cap and put on the new one.
“I love it,” he said jovially. “This is the best cap I’ve ever had.”
The two men embraced, and we said goodbye.
As we drove away, my father looked not happy but stunned. Like a kid who had just gotten off a roller coaster. He asked if I had known about the excavator.
“I did not,” I said. “Bobby set it all up. The machine, the dirt piles, everything. He really loves you, Dad.”
My father’s eyes filled. He was too overcome to speak.
“Did you see how I was gripping the levers?” he said after a long pause. “I can’t hear much, but I can tell what’s going on by the feel of it in my hands.”
I thought of how, each time my car went over a bump, he said the tires were too full. “Can’t you feel it?” he would say. “There’s no give.”
“Machines are a part of you,” I said.
“Well, yeah,” he said matter-of-factly. “A job’s a noisy place. You gotta pay attention.”
What he calls paying attention is a particular kind of genius. A sensibility that predates the printed word, when humans had only hands and stones to cut or carve. To assemble pyramids or form cathedral arches from stone.
Young children can tap that sensibility. They don’t have the words for the marriage of agency and might or the will to raise up rock. They know only that they love the vroom-vroom, the smashing through dirt piles and gravity-defiant stacking of stones. An atavism to the first I am.
*
Before we left the job site, my father and I stepped inside a lowered bucket—my idea—while Bobby took a photograph. We stood side by side, each in rugged boots and jeans, our heads covered to protect them from sun. Our wide smiles are identical, though his is framed by a white beard. Our heights are identical too, not because I am tall but because time has eaten some of my father’s height and heft and apparently given it to me—until such time as it nibbles mine and bequeaths it to my son. I love the photograph almost as much as the much older picture of a chocolate-drop toddler in a green pointed cap grasping the arm of her slick-haired and smiling daddy as he squats to scatter corn for a flock of ducks. Nova Scotia, 1963, in the backyard of his childhood home. It’s her little hand I love, its easy offer of trust.
This is my dad, says the hand.
I will come back to the photograph of we two in the bucket many times. I love seeing his joy that day, the jaunty way he hooked his thumbs in his suspenders. But more than that, I love the hand encircling his shoulders. Big and strong enough that his whole upper body fits insight the shelter of my arm. An arm as easy in its offer of trust as he is in receiving it.
This photograph is for the little girl who grew up fearing corners.
*
“All music is what awakes from you,” says Whitman in Leaves of Grass, “when you are reminded by the instruments.”
And so I sing my father’s body electric. The eyes that scan, the brain that tells the hands to work the levers that lower and raise the boom and swing the monster-bucket that floats on air as lightly as ballet hands.
I sing the power of the man-machine, of flesh and metal, nerves and wires, and blood and grease; of gears that groan like a linebacker.
I sing its dominion over dirt and rock.
I sing the happy humming of the man-machine, an industrious ant, a smiling sunflower beneath a postcard sky.
I sing the power in my father’s hands.
Sand Hills Literary Journal, September 2024
Melanie S Smith 