Bonus Chapter First Christmas #4
I want to record the rest of the visit briefly, because the rest of the visit was the visit, and the visit was good.
My father stayed for four days. He woke up early, the way he had always woken up.
He drank coffee at the kitchen table. He read the paper.
He walked, with the cane, the two blocks to the diner on the morning of the twenty-fourth, where Sienna gave him pie at nine in the morning and refused to let him pay, and where he sat for an hour and a half talking to the older men at the counter who recognized, in him, their own kind.
He came to the shop. He stood in the lobby in front of Tomás's Indian Chief for twenty minutes, reading the small brass plaque, and when he came out to find me in the third bay he said, Son, this is the cleanest shop I have seen in my life, and Alma, who was wiping down a workbench, looked up and beamed in a way I had not seen her beam at a compliment in a long time.
He came to the forge. He watched me work for an hour on the railings I had promised Diesel.
He did not say anything for most of the hour.
At one point, when I was bringing the hammer down on a long spiral, he said, quietly, Your mother would have loved to see this.
I had to set the hammer down for a minute and walk into the back of the forge to collect myself, and when I came back he did not mention it.
He came to the compound for Christmas dinner.
Diesel made him sit in the green chair again.
Sadie put him next to her at the table. He ate three helpings of Sadie's ham.
He drank one bourbon. He told two stories I had heard before and one I had not — the one I had not was about my mother as a young woman, in the year before they got married, when she had stayed up all night reading him Walden by flashlight in the back of his Plymouth because he had told her he had never read it and she had been horrified — and when he told the story he laughed for the first time in front of the club, and the club laughed with him, and the laughter was the kind of laughter that does not have a tone, just volume, just the small open mouth of a group of people doing the thing together.
He left on the twenty-seventh.
He left on the twenty-seventh because his connecting train was only running on certain days and his neighbor in Banner Elk was looking after his dog and the dog needed him back.
He hugged Alma at the bus stop. He hugged me at the bus stop.
He hugged me long. He said, into my ear, Son.
I am not going to be around forever. I have got, by my own accounting, ten years if I'm lucky.
I want you to know I am going to use them.
I said, Yes, sir.
He said, I am going to use them on you, and on the daughter, and on whatever grandchildren you give me, and on the work of being the father I should have been for the previous twenty years. I am going to use them well. That's my plan.
I said, Yes, sir.
He boarded the bus. The bus pulled out. Alma and I stood on the sidewalk and watched it go.
We did not move for a minute after it had gone around the corner.
The snow that had fallen on the twenty-third had melted, then refrozen, then melted again, and Mill Street was, on the twenty-seventh, gray and clean and ordinary.
Alma said, "He's coming back."
I said, "Yeah."
She said, "He's coming back for as long as he can come back."
I said, "Yeah."
She said, "We have him, Beckett. We have him."
I said, "We have him."
We walked back to the shop.
I had work to do. Alma had work to do. The shop opened the next morning at nine.
The forge fired up at ten. The customers came in.
Mill Street did what Mill Street did. The Mary Oliver poem hung on the wall above the kitchen table, and Earl's plaque hung above the door, and my grandmother's quilt was folded back on the daybed, and A Christmas Carol sat on the small table next to the daybed where my father had left it, because he had told us, on his last morning, Keep that here. I'll finish it next time.
I keep it there still.
I have, in the years that have followed, finished it for him on the nights he could not make the trip.
I have read it out loud to Alma in the loft on the nights my father called and said his knees were too bad for the train.
I have read the fourth stave and the fifth stave out loud, both of us with hot chocolate in our hands, the woodstove ticking, the small particular peace of two people doing a thing together that had been started by a third.
The book stays on the table.
The quilt stays on the daybed.
The father is coming back next month.
The forge is warm.
The town is doing what the town does.
The long slow work of being put back together — of being forged, in the most generous sense, into the shape we should have been all along — is, as my father told me on the brook, the work that does not finish.
It continues.
I tend it.
I tend it the way I tend the fire.
I keep it lit.