My father’s hands were big, creased and calloused, crisscrossed through a hard and labored life, fingers like sausage, his index so meaty my toddler hand could not get all the way around, but they glowed with warmth, radiated heat like the furnace in the cellar. “Thermo-hands,” we called him. Hand him any fussy, crying baby, and watch the distress fall away in quick degrees, the mouth go slack, the cheeks grow rosy, the eyelids fall heavy, colic no match for the waves of warm fleshy comfort emanating from those big muscular paws, sending the infant sweetly off to sleep.
My friends had basements with televisions and stereos and pool tables and sectional couches and bars and bedrooms and refrigerators. We had a cellar. “Where’s pop?” Escaped into the cellar, big and unfinished, the length of the house, concrete floors and foundation walls of stone, ductwork and copper plumbing overhead. A creaky wooden stairwell led you down from a door off the kitchen, and from this vantage I’d hear, “Hey Cipollino, come down here,” and down into the cellar I’d go to my father, where his big hands worked, where they repaired air conditioners and freezers, cleaned and rehung tools, swept the floor, shored-up the coal bin to receive two tons for the winter.
In the cellar every morning and evening those hands re-filled the hopper so the slow spinning auger could feed the coal into the furnace to keep the house warm, me at his side watching the flash of light against his face, feeling the wall of heat as he opened the cast-iron door to check the fire, inspect the door gasket, remove and replace the ashcan underneath.
Down into the cellar, my father carried the aluminum engine of his Fiat, dropped it on an old butcher block like the carcass of an animal. Sitting on an overturned bucket, I learned the components of a car engine, his big hands removing and replacing valves as he told stories of youthful exploits, his time in the military, the joys and the tragedies, of the time starving he traded a German woman a box of chocolate flavored laxatives for a loaf of bread, the time he and his shipmates watched helplessly as a man got washed overboard in a North Atlantic squall. In the cellar, I learned of his long service in the Army, the Navy, and the Merchant Marines, and how he was drafted later, mistakenly, serving at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, becoming a unit commander and an MP until evidence of his previous service was uncovered.
In the cellar, my father described the bumbling Army recruitment officer trying to convince him to reenlist. This Staff Sergeant, “a lifer,” had an answer for every demur, counting the advantages of a military career until my father burst into laughter, his basso profundo deep and infectious, the same hearty laugh that rang off the cellar walls in the telling. Dad had his fill of the military, had his fill of war, and honorably discharged, he burned his fatigues in a fifty-gallon drum, packed his duffel bag, thrust out his thumb, and hitchhiked across the country back to Jersey to marry Angie.
In the cellar, my father developed photographs, the red light illuminating the crack under the darkroom door, telltale not to interrupt. I played with matchbox cars in the grit and dust of the cold concrete floor until his dark figure emerged backlit in red to show me his photos, not of family or friends, not of Christmas trees or landscapes, but of glimpses, of partial views, the open door of my uncle’s log cabin; the stairwell into the attic; the car covered in snow on the side of the house; the hard, sharp light cast through the foundation window above his workbench. Maybe these photos were not technically proficient, but they were imaginative, accidentally moody and spectral, capturing moments and spaces long gone, the nooks and crannies of my childhood, like the cellar where my father tended two warm fires, the furnace and himself.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit:iStock
