My father traded his life’s plan for a Purple Heart in Korea.
Instead, he made aluminum extrusions in a plant that was as loud as any combat.
He cut aluminum billets and fed the extrusion machines:
Loading them into the ram,
Firing them in the furnace
To something just short of 1220 degrees,
Sawing off the butts,
Attaching a new billet,
Heating,
Pressing,
Sawing,
Loading.
During smoke breaks,
Squatting against a wall
Like a Korean farmer,
He flicked ashes in his pant cuffs–
A habit he picked up in the war
to help hide his presence from the enemy.
When he was a saw-man,
His cuffs were full of aluminum shavings and ash.
He never emptied them.
Even at 5, I knew that made Mom mad;
He could not remember his cuffs full of irritation until too late.
He turned them out in the kitchen
And swept them into a dustpan with a small whiskbroom.
But even a single stray burr could hide
Beneath the lip of the heat register for days,
Guarding against glinting in the darkness,
And bite bare feet on the way to breakfast.
When he wasn’t a “feeder,” he was a “puller” on the other end,
Keeping extrusions from kinking
While they were shit out of the machine die muzzle,
Headed for the stretcher and the hardening tables,
Cutting them to length.
He came home enfogged in a layer of invisible oil
Mixed with sweat from the heat of the furnace;
He smelled sour from feet away.
His black hair,
Cut in a military flattop every other Saturday,
Gleamed greasy.
Even his breath smelled oily
Every day…except Sunday.
By the time he had bathed and washed his hair
And changed clothes twice,
The smell of extruding oil had faded.
On Sundays Dad smelled right: cigarette smoke and beer.
That’s how a blue collar Dad smelled in the Eisenhower era.
On Sundays Dad often produced a half-pound sack
Of one inch roofing nails
And my hammer.
In our small backyard kneeled a long-dead tree stump.
It had been there far longer than I.
Dad wanted me to practice driving nails into it.
By the time we left that house in 1957,
That stump was entirely galvanized—
Silver nail heads
Overlapping like fish scales—
Impervious to rot.
He had taught me how to hold the nail with my left hand,
Tap-start it with the quick hammer in my right
And to drive it
With the last strike to set the nail deep and hard.
To this day, I enjoy no job more than driving nails
And setting the nail with that last strike, just so!
I own three different nailing guns,
But when the job calls for a hammer, I know the special finality:
“Tap,” “bang, bang, bang,” “BANG!”
In the way of securing this to that and making a thing.
Dad often sat on that dead, silver stump to smoke
After I had been put to bed.
I saw him there at night,
Or rather I sometimes saw the hot orange spark,
And if it was a warm night,
I was soothed by tobacco smoke
Blowing in through the one small window.
Other times, if the wind was blowing too hard,
Or the weather was poor,
He cupped the cigarette to shelter it,
And to guard the telltale glow from the enemy.
He smoked them unfiltered, far too short
Until the pads of his middle finger and thumb
And his too-long fingernails
Were stained brown.
He knew.
He called them coffin nails.
In the end, I didn’t make my father’s coffin,
Although I would have found it an honorable labor:
Sawing and planning,
Joining and setting screws.
Somewhere I would have found a way to use some nails–
Maybe roofing nails for a simple pattern on the lid.
A fish-scale, perhaps.
Tap, bang, bang, bang…BANG!
He chose cremation, returned to the furnace,
Much hotter even than for extruding aluminum billets.
[243]
