Betty Baxter


My Father's Hands

My father’s hands are soft and slender, skin almost translucent on the wheels of the chair. He had been a builder and I see his hands strong and sure, deftly guiding the plank through the whine of the saw. I watch, a safe distance back as directed, my eyes level with the table, a small wooden stake in my chubby hand. As his hands separate with the board, sawdust spits through the air.

Then I am ten, tall enough to see in his office window. One hand reaches into his back pocket. He unfolds his billfold, takes out a ten-dollar bill; snaps it between his thumb and forefinger to make sure it is a single and not two stuck together. Reaching out the window, he passes the note to me with instructions:

“Take this to the Coleman’s. Knock on the door and give it to whoever answers. They will give you your birthday bike and you can walk it home.”

That evening, his right hand gripping the bicycle seat, he walks then runs beside me until, my balance found, he releases and I am flying free down the road, legs pumping.

The winter before, maybe after, it is bitter cold. I stand in the lee of the truck, my father’s hands are red, his gloves on the bales as he ties the load, ropes hanging, then becoming taut. He turns to me and shouts, “Get in the truck now!”

A moment later he is in the cab, whipping off his gloves again, tossing them on the dash. My face is in his hands, his eyes worried, his hands rubbing and rubbing hard on my cheeks.

“You keep rubbing,” he says. “We need to stop at the scale, then we’ll be home and Mom can get some warm water on you.”

I’m silent for once, waiting in awe as the burn recedes from my cheeks. It is the first time I can remember my father touching me.

Now he is so frail and small. I lean down, touch his shoulder, tell him that I have to go. His hand lifts, a finger points to me, then back to him. He says, “You … me … love.”

A few steps away a caregiver lifts a spoon for a patient. I look up, whisper: “Did you hear what he just said?”

She nods, pauses to wipe the back of her hand across her cheekbone.

I look back at my father. His thin hand arcs in a short wave. “Thanks for coming.”

Betty Baxter is a septuagenarian and an emerging writer. She has been an activist from the LGBTQ+ community for over five decades, and still rages against the system and worries about the earth. She is grateful to live and work in xwésám (Roberts Creek, BC) on the unceded territories of the shíshálh and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Nations.

 
 

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