Aftermath of Dreaming(47)

15




The morning when I was fourteen that I came home from spending the night at my cousin Renée’s house, the night that Momma called to tell me in two short sentences that Daddy had left us and wasn’t coming back, I went straight to his work shed before I entered the house. It was a late spring Saturday and the heat was already up and full and holding me in place, so to move at all required a going forward plus a breaking through. I abandoned my bike and let it fall against the porch railing, ignoring Momma’s admonishment in my head that it would chip the paint, dropped my knapsack on the red brick path—where tiny bouquets of weeds and grass were popping up through the cracks as if they too had gotten the news that Daddy had left and were reclaiming ownership since the man of the house was gone—and went to stand in front of my father’s work shed.

I knew he wasn’t inside. But his presence seemed to radiate from the stillness behind the closed door and the window facing me. Like the sacristy in church, even when Monsignor Marcel wasn’t there, it was so definitely his space—his authority hanging over everything—that you couldn’t help but speak in whispers and say only good things. I opened the door and stepped inside. The work shed greeted me as it had the many times I had sneaked in while Daddy was at work to see what he was creating, to look at the tools, smell the leather, metal, and wood, feel the cool darkness around me, him around me, the sensations more my father than when he sat at the dinner table during the silence of our family meals.

I went over to the worktable and looked up at the tools still hanging in their spots on the Peg-Board, tools utterly left behind, and I understood. My daddy was gone. Not just at his office or on an errand to the hardware store, but gone. Like a dead body is how it was in the work shed, all the physicality was there, but the life was gone, the secret was gone, the not-supposed-to be-in-there was gone, my father was gone.

I sank down on the tall stool he never much used, and the cool metal seat was a slap to my bare legs, so I perched on the edge, just where the bottom of my shorts covered me. I could hear the buzzing of the spring day outside, dragonflies, air conditioners, the air so charged with heat it practically made a sound itself, but inside the work shed was quiet and peaceful. Had he come in here before he left? Considered taking some tools with him, but changed his mind? Where did he go and would he make instruments there? The last one he had been working on, a violin, was nowhere to be found. I couldn’t remember if he had already given it away to a relative or not. Or not. Maybe he took it with him to give to someone who would be in this new life with him. The air in my lungs seemed to leave all at once and I couldn’t get any more in. I grabbed my chest, gasping in the dim light, then felt dizzy and let myself crumple to the floor. The wood shavings and dust filled my nose with their scent, and I curled up under my father’s worktable and cried myself into an exhausted sleep.

When I awoke, the sun was higher and hotter in the sky, so a couple of hours must have gone by. I got up and started taking down the tools before I even knew what I was doing. Scraps of leather, pieces of wood, musical strings, and all sorts of materials were in the bins my father kept everything so well organized in. It was mine now, the work shed was, as if in my sleep that information had been passed to me like waking up from a dream and instantly knowing a truth. It was a realm I could enter and stay in by the sheer power of using its tools.

I began working on an instrument of my own that afternoon—a mandolin, which seemed less forbidding than a violin—teaching myself to use the tools, work the wood, the hard and soft objects to be manipulated and changed into a greater sum than their parts, but finally had to stop hours later when I heard Momma’s voice calling me. I guessed she’d called my cousin’s house, then seen my backpack and bike lying where neither should have been. She yelled once more, then I heard her start back up the porch steps, and I knew I should call out to her. I opened the work shed door, saying, “I’m here, Momma, I’ve been home all day.” I saw her eyes see where I was. They looked like someone was about to strangle her, the one hazel and one green seemed to view a horror that was invisible to me. Then she made a “huhnn” noise, a kind of “I can’t believe it, yet doesn’t this make sense,” sound, then turned around and walked inside.

We never talked about my using the work shed. In fact, she pretended from then on that the entire structure didn’t exist. Which was fine with me. The world inside the house didn’t exist when I was in the work shed, which must have been why Daddy went there. At certain times, when using a tool or trying to figure out how to construct part of a piece, I’d hear his voice in my head guiding me. Saying things I knew he would say, but things I’d never heard him utter in real life. As if part of him was still in the work shed, and that part of him was talking to me, working with me.

That first instrument I tried to make came out looking more like a Cubist sculpture than a real mandolin, so I let it be that. I put it in a box I built and added some things of my father’s that he’d left behind—cuff links, part of the newspaper that was lying on his leather chair, broken bits of an Old Spice bottle, a bill addressed to him, the sash to his robe, an old 78 LP he loved more than anything—and titled the whole thing What’s Left. I kept it in the work shed until I moved to New York, then before I left, I sewed a velvet bag for it that it has stayed in behind the clothes in every closet I’ve had since then. It’s the only piece I’ve never shown anyone and probably never will.