The epoxy is starting to set and I’ve got blood in my eyes. All the raw, untrimmed fiberglass hulls around me have cured sharp and thin at the edges, and each time I pass one I find small, clean cuts in the backs of my hands and fingers. This stuff’s got a cure time of about eight hours and I’ve been working for seven. My palms are starting to get tacky and stiff as the glue sets. I ran out of gloves hours ago, and didn’t have the time to restock.
I’ve got to smooth the epoxy out, the fiberglass saturated with glue spilling over like an overwatered plant. Keep smoothing, clean the excess out from the keel of this baby blue canoe, get it under the vacuum press and into the oven to sit for the night.
I’m moving fast, swiping a squeegee over the thin wet fiberglass. It’s too hot—the hottest week of the year. I need to finish the boat before I leave for college 2000 miles away. I’m moving fast and I’ve sweat through my shirt, my pants, and the second layer of thick canvas at my knees. My face is pink and slippery with blood. I don’t know if it’s from my bleeding hands wiping at my face or if the stitches on my forehead have opened up and released red from the small gash. Maybe both. Either way, my right eye is stinging, blinded by blood and salt, but my hands are still fast. Deliberate and fast.
—
They’ve been deliberate for years now, ever since the day that they weren’t, the day that they grasped so desperately at bed sheets and shirtsleeves. Pathetic. Open and closed. The day that he was gone. Deliberate since then—moving pen to transfer the things in my head to things on paper. Moving the bodies of others, keeping them close or holding them away. Breaking, bending. I didn’t know my hands could strike through drywall. I didn’t know that broken knuckles heal in different shapes and sizes. That dislocated fingers really do “pop” back into place, the warm, sick onomatopoeia to a story you’ve written. These hands have been deliberate clasped around kitchen knives, a pair of metronomes, bell peppers on a cutting board. They’ve been deliberate at the filter ends of cigarettes and joints. Deliberate, wrapped around aluminum cans and the long glass necks of liquor bottles, praying, willing joy to some center of control. They’ve lifted my weight countless times. They’ve held my ribs as I gasped for air, bones cracked and floating in my chest. They’ve put things together. Put beauty where it was not. They’ve made mistakes, been ashamed, made up for most of them, and rest now, pink and white and gnarled, at my sides. These hands have moved in so many ways since they first begged to move, to be used, to make better that early morning August heat when all they could do was thrash at her words.
—
The boat is done in the morning when I pop it out of the mold. Well, most of it. I was able to finish all the glassing in time, got it into the oven before it hardened up. Now I’ve only got sawing and pushing left, destroying wood, fragrant western red cedar, to shape and bend the grain. It takes so many broken parts to make something that floats.
—
The day my father died was beautiful. Warm, not too hot, humidity cooled off for an August day in New England. I’d always imagined mourning in the rain, but it was so bright.
My mother was having an asthma attack. That’s what woke me up. I found her in the dining room, leaning against the big white wall, little hands clutching her chest. There’s a ledge that runs the perimeter of that room about seven feet up. It’s lined with Happy Meal Toys and plush animals, a collection of little nothings to look at from when I was young. These toys peered over me as I rifled through her purse and grabbed the inhaler, panicked and fumbling. Back in that doorway, tie-dye T-shirt, awake with fear, my hand on her shoulder, the other hanging limp. She wouldn’t use the little red canister of medicine. Albuterol makes her depressed. When she could finally gasp it out, croaking that my father was gone, that it was suicide, a stuffed purple dragon from some movie came crashing down from the ledge. And then it was a storm of plastic snakes and plush dogs as she made herself brave and I made the walls tremble, shrieking, balled fists pounding on plaster.
I have never known courage like a mother holding her son’s eyes, their son’s eyes, and giving him ugly honesty before he shook the house. She’d moved to the bathroom, where I found her later, on her knees crumpled by the baby blue bath mat, her hand in the toilet, pink and peach from the 50s. And then she rose like a giant and took me up, calmed me, and let us catch our breath.
—
Shaping wood by hand is so different from running wood through a power tool, which is difficult in its own right, but much less personal. A mistake with a power tool is still the fault of the hands behind it, but with distance. When you run a spoke shave, a two-handled blade that you draw toward yourself, too deep or at the wrong angle, you experience the mistake up close, eyes fearful and a feeling of pressure in your arms. And then you learn to adapt, to make the mistake something intentional, shaping the wood to fit the error. When you’re shaping wood by hand, you learn just how powerful your hands are. You learn how easy it is to be too strong, to push too hard, how simple it is to break everything in an instant. And then, if you’re lucky, you learn to rebuild, to use your hands and make something that floats.
—
“Stop crying Kelan. This is good,” he told me. “I’d take you with me if I could, but your mother …” He looked away. My mother was right. She wouldn’t even consider thinking about letting me move with him, nervous of me even being around him, fiddling at home with her beads and wire watching the phone. He had only been clean for a couple weeks, maybe a month.
“Stop crying, she needs someone strong around.” I knew that he meant someone to carry us, and that he knew it couldn’t be him. He probably knew that it had to be her, that she was strong enough for the both of us, working early mornings and late nights to pay the bills. He knew that he couldn’t carry us if he tried. That bottles break under pressure and that he was always a bottle when things started piling up.
“Stop crying,” he told me, looking away to keep from feeling the weight.
We left the car and headed for the supermarket. He pulled me close as we got to the double doors, just in range of things breakable, watermelons and ceramic planters, before he pushed me away. The game began. I was shoving him and hopping on my feet to avoid his pushing, making a scene at the automatic sliding doors of the supermarket. An elderly woman tried to sneak by, all Sunday pink and shuffling feet, yelling as my father’s big shoulder clipped her wing and she began to fall. Suddenly, he was a boy again, well-mannered and gentle, as he caught her softly, big hands on her shoulders. He guided her into the brick building, broad back curved down to hear the things she said. Chuckling now, she told him she’d thought he was trying to steal her purse. He laughed, pulling a cart for her from the silver masses, before looking down at her, earnest and smiling to say, “Ma’am, if I’d been trying to steal your purse, I would’ve knocked you over.” And they were both all white teeth and shaking as she gasped jokingly and slapped his chest before walking away, swinging her head in laughter.
He had that way about him, making us laugh, whatever it took, kind and sharp always. He was doing it to me now in the cereal aisle, with Barry White oozing from the speakers, rolling his fists at his chin, leaning his body back and side-to-side. It was a motion reserved only for boxers and disco dancers, and he was both. That day he was feeling the music, sliding across tile, eyes closed, calling to me, “There’s a dancer trapped inside my body!” And I was laughing, red in the face, nervous of the crowd he was attracting as he yelped “Oooooooh! Man!” past the wall of stiff cardboard boxes, long and short and low- and high-pitched, looking for my smile. And of course, before I felt it happen, I was moving my feet, banging the quick bag with my dad, our shoulders swaying and our audience growing from Captain Crunch and Toucan Sam to more than a dozen Stop & Shop patrons. Their clapping and laughter rang out against the cardboard boxes, but eventually, they moved on as Barry faded out and our chests heaved with exhaustion. He drove me home to my mother, who threw her arms around me and told him “Good luck.” Neither he nor I said a thing.
—
He had pills swimming in him when he died. Two weeks before, he had wrapped his car around a tree and his chest around the steering wheel. After the crash, doctors gave him small white opiates for his broken ribs, which he washed down with whiskey and water before his hands tied knots in rope. My hands were tying knots now too, almost five years later. The rope was run bow to stern, a knot every three feet, over the wood I carved to run the perimeter of the boat, the gunwale, to make it float, the final step to make this thing really work. Underneath the boat, I pulled tight on the cord, bathed in glue and wood shavings, tying taut bowlines.
Pills make you black out, or at least that’s what happened to me when I took them, half a year after he was gone. I did it the same way, a couple sips, and then a quick toss of the head, and a gulp or two more, chasing white chalk with liquor. I haven’t needed anything yet, the way that he needed numbness, the way most of us need water. I wonder if it felt good, if only for a moment, when his lips met the glass mouth of a bottle again. The room would spin, and I would sink into a hole on my couch, head swirling with questions I should’ve asked and things I should’ve said. My mind focused on the phone call I should’ve answered, my birthday, how I should’ve asked him if he was okay. My mind asked him what it felt like to be so afraid of something inside of himself, told him that I’d been angry and scared too, until the edges of my vision blurred. Then I’d let the world drift away and come back hours later, always in the same place, or maybe in some place new, alone and dazed and drinking water from plastic cups.
I couldn’t seem to ruin anything, not like he did. Everything that I did was fine. Good grades, good athlete, actually improving in almost all categories once he died, once I stopped caring. I wasn’t losing anything except my mind and small circles of skin where cigarettes went out. Nobody knew besides a few friends who only thought I was being wild. People thought I’d just made mistakes during the soccer games when I slid out the wrong way, letting some kid’s cleats catch my chest and send me into the air, or when another cleat clipped my head the night I lost most of the hearing in my left ear. Everyone was impressed by my tenacity, my will. I was mostly confused by it.
—
“Dennis,” my mother whispered, “What the hell happened?” I was young, maybe four years old, pajama-clad and holding the bars of the second floor banister in my hands. It could be my first memory. My mother had her hands on his face. My father. He was dead-eyed, hair a mess. He was wearing a white T-shirt, partly untucked from his blue jeans, always the same. “Dennis,” she said, “What the hell happened.”
He was swaying a little, mouth closed tight, and there was blood all over his chest, a little on his thighs. Neither of them felt me there, seeing this thing I shouldn’t have seen, and it scared me to see them that way, unaware of me, wide-eyed and gaping through the banister. I was in bed quickly after, letting the soft pads of my feet pull me to my room and into my sheets so no one could hear my moving. He had red hair, brown and red, and red always looked good with the white T-shirt. In the morning, he woke me up, drinking coffee and smiling, telling me we had to take the dog out for a walk. There wasn’t a mark on him, smooth freckled face, but it was winter, and he was wearing his gloves inside.
—
I was 17 the first time I ever held a knife in my hand to carve a spoon. The spoon was awful, but it worked. My hands had made something that worked. They took off then, moving in and out of things, creating. They picked up a pen, so many tools, but left glass and plastic pill bottles behind. There was no cleaning up, no habit-breaking or urges, just a collecting of all things broken and put together again, some great mosaic of myself. I felt like I was moving again, like my head was on my neck and my neck was on my body, though maybe connected differently than before. I had broken so many things that I made, and the broken things became parts of the new things that moved and worked. There was an awareness of what my hands could do, the things they could build and break—especially of the things that they could break. It wasn’t until I wrote something I liked, or maybe it wasn’t until I made a spoon that was well-weighted and easily usable, that I regretted the broken knuckles and black spots in my memory. It was then that I became so afraid, that I felt like him. That every day I would wake up and see his face in the mirror and wonder when I would come home covered in someone else’s blood, so aware of the pain I could cause and wanting to run from it. Now it’s one day away from five years since he hanged himself, and my hands are tying knots in rope.
—
The boat will float, but it isn’t finished. The wood will rot, and needs to be sealed. My dad died today, five years ago, at his own hands, and I’m going to finish the boat that I made with mine. I need to sand all the wood in-between coats of spar varnish, so the sealer can cling to something. Smooth surfaces don’t bond with smooth surfaces, and I need to rough things up for anything to hold. I’m painting the liquid on, and though the boat’s a translucent brown, the red cedar, a nice brown red, pops against the baby blue paint. It’s beautiful. I’ve cut up my hands making this thing. There was a day when I had worked so long and drank so little water that my knees buckled when I was done and I had to sit for an hour hydrating before driving home. I hadn’t seen much of anyone for awhile.
When it was done, my boat, my shirt was covered in clear varnish, a little brown. A little on my thighs. The cut on my head, above my right eye, was healed up. So much healing since the night I’d come home from work, and my mother had gasped, held my head in her hands and asked, “What the hell happened?” Now stitches out, only a soft pink memory above my brow. I said, “All right,” and felt my face smiling, kneading my knuckles in my hands and looking the canoe over. This thing floats. It works. It even looks pretty good. The mistakes, the scrapes in the hull, the scars in the wood, it’s something to be proud of for a little while. But in the car, driving home with the windows open, my hands are tight on the wheel, and always I’m afraid I’m going to crash.