by Joseph Milosch
One spring my dad found his hammer in the mud by our fence. He had me clean it with steel wool and light oil. I remembered the day he taught me to miter bridging for floor joists. We spoke of his days as a musician. One Thanksgiving it was so cold the reed in his mouthpiece split. He worried his lips would freeze to his clarinet.
I dream of him as a lamplight silhouette sucking his reed. He looks into the bell of his clarinet like an ebony chalice. He closes his eyes, takes one deep breath, gathers himself, and tucks his elbows to his ribs. He plays sharps and flats that rise up and in like a wind in silk curtains. A wind writing a history of canaries, finches pulsing in red tops, in yellow beaks, and the white feathers found in the curve of a bird’s neck.
Today, I hammered hubs in a road’s sub grade on a job site overlooking the Pacific. A west wind rose off the waves, off the beach, cliffs, rocks, trees, and seagulls rode it in circling flock. I pried with a screwdriver the small rocks caught in my hammer’s claw that curved like the mouthpiece of dad’s clarinet.
I remember his lips pressed tight in the center, the corners limp, as if he forced his mouth to imagine the route his breath would take through his horn. I watched him work into each note his memories.
Men laughed because he couldn’t read music. Laughed at his Polish accent, the way his undersized suit pinched at his shoulders. He learned to read music, to speak without remembering his native tongue. He learned it was easier to teach his son to take a punch than to teach him music or Polish. I pretended to be free from fear when we built a porch deck, stairs, or hung drywall. I feigned disinterest when he practiced and watched him from a distance. His eyes followed the last note like a carpenter checking his cut’s plane.
One spring thaw, he found his hammer. “Hammers don’t grow legs and walk,” he said the day I learned the hands who built decks, shoring, tools, the woodwind’s round oak notes could toss me around like scrap two by fours.
Once he accused me of being weak because I didn’t live through The Great Depression, or unload sacks of grain at thirteen, or postpone marriage or a career to fight. “You will not run to Canada,” he said as we walked Sandy Beach. There we stood, eye to eye with our anger a fine line of heat between us. Abruptly a marsh bird flapped itself free of its reed perch, a blaze of red on its wings. We turned only to see him disappear at the juncture of shadow and leaves.