Giffels David - Furnishing eternity: a father, a son, a coffin, and a measure of life

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ALSO BY DAVID GIFFELS

The Hard Way on Purpose:

Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt

All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House

Are We Not Men? We Are Devo!

(cowritten with Jade Dellinger)

Wheels of Fortune: The Story of Rubber in Akron

(cowritten with Steve Love)

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Copyright 2018 by David Giffels

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First Scribner hardcover edition January 2018

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Interior design by Jill Putorti

Jacket design by David Litman

Jacket photographs: Flowers Elenaleonova/Stock/Getty Images Plus; Hammer And Screwdriver Tim Pannell/Mint Images/Getty Images; Level Syahrel/Istock/Getty Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-5011-0594-4

ISBN 978-1-5011-0597-5 (ebook)

Photo on by Laurie Emery

For my mother, Donna Mae, and my father, Thomas E.

I am a little world made cunningly

Of elements, and an angelic sprite.

JOHN DONNE, HOLY SONNET V

He was sleeping when I arrived, a half-shape through the sun-warmed porch screens, an impression, familiar and calm. It was late spring in Ohio, and the yard surrounding him was dappled with afternoon leaf shadows. A rubbery hum droned from the highway beyond the dense screen of pines and the high stockade fence. Birds chirped. One cloud dragged the sky like Linuss blanket.

He was sleeping. I could see him from the driveway as I slowed to a stop and shifted into park. His old straw hat rose and dipped softly where it rested on his belly. I sat there for a long moment in the beige leather drivers seat, watching through the windshield, engine still running, wondering if I should disturb him.

After a lifetime of driving crap cars, most of which had held the specific purpose of hauling building materials and guitar amplifiers, I hadin what I guess Ill have to concede is middle agecashed out a very small windfall to buy this seven-year-old Saab turbo convertible. Such a car would seem to imply, if not outright midlife crisis, at least the illusion of leisure. I could have left him alone, put the top down, and gone for a drive in the country.

But I dont go for country drives. Relaxation is not a part of my familys DNA. We spend much of our time trying to outwork each other. My father may have been napping, but it was not a matter of leisure so much as the fact that he was eighty-one years old and had spent the morning chainsawing a fallen tree. So I shut off the engine, pulled out the key, and reached over to the passenger seat for a shaggy folder of notes and sketches, including a couple of drawings from an old Mother Earth News article, freshly printed from the Internet: Learn How to Build a Handmade Casket.

The porch where he slept is a rustic little lodge, cedar post-and-beam, which he built next to the house. Its his favorite place to be when the weathers nice. He spent a year working on it, then another half year fiddling and refining, tweaking the lighting, hanging a porch swing. He still kept the building permit tacked to an inside post, a certificate of ingenuity, of progress, of his own craft. He builds everything he built a bridge across the freaking Rhine River when he was in the Army Corps of Engineersand the things he didnt build, he changes. He tinkers like its his job, which, when youre a retired civil engineer, it kind of is. He reads on the porch, Lincoln biographies and good detective novels and every page David McCullough has written. Sometimes when he finishes a book and decides I might like it, he brings it to me. Sometimes I do the same. And he watches the birds here, those yellow and blue flashes outside the screens, looking them up in a thumbed-over field guide hes had for as long as I can remember, and he frets about how to keep the squirrels and raccoons from the suspended feeders, and he often takes his meals here, cooked on the adjacent barbecue under its own pitched roof, which he also built. And he naps here every afternoon, until the changing seasons force him inside.

I approached the porch by way of a ramshackle brick walk, which hed cobbled from a lifetime collection of street pavers, each stamped with a different name: CLEVELAND BLOCK... CANTON BRICK... BIG FOUR . Through the screen, I could see him lying on his back across the flowered vinyl cushions of the wicker couch, stockinged feet propped up and crossed at the ankles, hands folded across his chest. He is a man given strongly to quips and mischief; the corners of his lips and eyes have always suggested the hint of a smile. Even here, in sleep, he was grinning about something.

He was dressed in a pair of old jeans and a thread-worn blue T-shirt with a pocket to hold his pencil nubs. Hes just under six feet tall, and his hips and legs are narrow, mildly out of proportion with his barrel-chested torso. Arms I remember as muscular are now loose and scaly, yet even when I try to see things as they are, they look the way they used to look. His hair is white, but it doesnt look white by the time it gets from my eyes to my mind. These are among my basic truthsthe strength of his arms, the wavy chestnut of his bangsand the betrayal of time still surprises me. Memory is stronger than fact.

His exposed face and arms bear the chalky scars from countless procedures to burn off skin cancers, a condition his doctors have monitored and treated for years, an ongoing ritual he regards as a necessary nuisance, even as hes had one earlobe and the tip of his nose reconstructed after having them hacked apart to keep the cancer at bay.