Life With Objects

The slaughter room door clips him on the heel as he walks out and Macmillan spits a foul word. His apron ties slither loose when he jerks the knot that settles, every time, in the dimple over the screw in his back. Those nylon cords never stain, pulled into a shining white rictus over the blood-smeared barrel-bellies of most of the workers. Macmillan keeps himself fit, which is why all the bookkeepers smile and push their breasts up for him, or so the guys say. The apron falls neatly closed in his hand, clean side out, ready to drop in the barrel for cleaning, sterilizing, burning. He never wonders how they clean them and he never looks at the barrel for more than a second. Dead pigs, big as a fat man, stuck and hung from the ceiling are numbers on a paycheck to him; but the aprons, all blithely pink from gore, littered in that barrel, looking like used butcher paper, that’s where he sees the raw meat and it chokes him.

Macmillan’s right hand evicts a cigarette from the pack in his back pocket. Can’t smoke till you’re outside, fifty more hard ringing steps. The menthol is strong and, abruptly, he can taste Debbie through it. Sweet girl. Give you a whole pack when you’re out of your own, even when you’ve just been up inside her like that; one work-rough hand gliding between her thighs, smooth as the cleaver on the grain through fat. It’s just like carving, all about where you put your thumb. His wedding ring burns as the temperature changes and images of Debbie’s ecstasy are replaced by memories of home: the shoulder height dent in the offensive blue wallpaper, the broken plates on the floor, Candace howling that there’s never enough, while she wastes all the money breaking things. Macmillan writhes under the sweater she gave him, the stubborn pressure of the thick wool tight as hands around his neck.

Only an inch of silver shows above the horizon. Macmillan climbs into his grass-green truck to enjoy his cigarette. He will inhale eight more hours of tar stapling roof tiles in the Carolina sun. Slapping the door hard, like the haunch of an animal, he flicks the butt and drives off to his day job.

Despite everything else that happened in the summer of 1969, my most vivid memory is of my father flying out the back door to save our pear tree. The power company was trimming trees in the neighborhood, but we never thought they'd go after the pear tree. It was ten yards from the nearest line. They claimed it was rotten and might fall over. (True, half of the tree was dead, but the living side still managed to give more pears than we could eat.)

I'd never seen my father so animated. A physics professor, he always seemed more interested in equations than any of us. But that day he pulled the door open like Kirk Douglas rushing out to beat back the Romans. I remember getting up and putting my hand into the hole that the doorknob punched into the wall. There was a measure of comfort in that unintended space, and I would put my hand in there after hard days at school.

He ran to the man from the power company, shaking his trusty slide rule furiously in the air. My father stood there shouting, his face turning crimson, spittle flying from his lips. The utility guy was dumbstruck and gestured at his clipboard, which my father knocked out of his hands.

At dinner my father eviscerated the power company “bolsheviks,” accusing them of trying to collectivize our yard. “But you never showed any interest in that tree before, dear,” my mother said.

My father didn't have an answer for that, but muttered something about decency. My sister and I stared at each other across the table.

The power company came back the next day. I woke up to shouting in the yard. From my window I saw my father had erected a crude fence around the tree overnight. And so it began: not detente but brinksmanship. They pulled up the fencing, but my father chased them off. He took to standing guard over the tree with my Junior Louisville Slugger. The bat looked so small in his hands, but he gripped it so tightly, it shook with fearsome menace.

Eventually, they shut the electricity off. My father said we'd make do. Something primal had risen in him. I half expected to see him roasting mammoth over a fire in the yard like Fred Flinstone. (We ate out.) Three weeks after the blackout they showed up with a bulldozer at 6 AM. At the noise we all rushed out of the house.

“Henry!” my mother screamed.

My father had chained himself to the tree.

I don't know how he got away with it, but my father beat the power company. They left, the tree stayed. And everything went back to normal: we returned to school, my father to his calculations and papers. If he ever noticed it, he never said anything, but we never fixed that hole in the wall.