It was raining when I gutted the shed, crystal balls swinging from spider’s webs long vacated, crusty arachnid shells punctuating graves within a woodworm’s gable house. The vintage scent kissed me first. Denial. And sap and dust and all the years my father haunted here, every surface smoothed, soothed by the meat of his tender hands, short nails, split finger screws. Everything was in boxes. Neat. Unlike the nook he’d filled at home, paper-strewn, feet up every time mother vacuumed his crumbs away.
Glue had set in rudimentary containers: washing up bottles, label-scarred jam jars, thimbles. It was as if he had wanted to bring a handful of mundanity in with him, as if he inhabited a space shuttle rather than a box in the garden. I felt his distance now.
There was a peg on the back of the door. A worn, green apron hanging on I died a little when I found an old smile in the pocket. Mother said to donate it.
Why
was there no warning? With a warning, I might have coped. If only he had hung a sign on the door to inform me that do not disturb would be forever. And I was disturbing. Rummaging. Grave robbing. But it all had to go, a life in boxes. Neat. He would have appreciated that. Green bottles, an assortment of screws, washers, bolts, I sifted them through my fingers like flour and butter. I could not make in the way he made, create in the way he created. Grey-bearded Santa Claus with hints of a child’s God. I did not wish to judge the things he’d left half sanded, unfinished, joints jutting out like the bones of a leg. Everything reminded me of him, and the world was weeping
but not inside, as he had felted the roof last month. I was not felted or prepared for winter.
For once, there was a doll
his tape could not fix, a wire could not hold straight, or a hammer lovingly tap back into shape. Broken. Tell no one, but I piled dusty shavings onto the vice. In desperate communion, it became his hair and stubborn old head. He had to fix the guttering. The broken rungs of his ladder jutting out like the bones of a leg. I pressed myself against the block of wood still clamped within. I imagined his arms around me one last time.
He told me I was the best thing he ever made.