New Year’s Eve, 1983

POETRY

By Rebecca Findlay

“The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard” – Robert Frost,“Out, out—”

Snow, rare in the Carolinas, stretched thin from scraggle pines to the kitchen door. Before the winter sun got too dim, my not-yet father set out to cut wood.

My mother-to-be heard the door as he clanged out the back in heavy boots and only hat: Intruder written in orange on a black field: the plane he was to fly in twelve days, to another six months in the West Pacific.

The dogs whined, growled, rolled in the yard. They lunged towards him in delight each time the chainsaw rested with a rattle; he’d stamp his feet to warn them off and move his blood, and start it up again with a whining roar.

Then the saw somehow broke, spitting steel teeth, and either the unsteady saw or the steady hands slipped, and the shin stopped standing. He felt a throbbing behind the eyes, then

the dogs licking in front of them, and cold below, sitting now on the blood-spangled lawn. Mom stepped out on the porch into a scream, found herself, and fireman-carried him to the car. They didn’t know if the leg was there under the red. But the bone was steady, though pocked with rust and grease, chain oil, splinters they had to scour out. Counting at midnight: fifteen stitches inside to close the muscle tight over bone, another layer above, forty-five outside, and it was done.

He spent four months avoiding sepsis and deployment. In April he left for the carrier and took leave of his wife, just pregnant with my older brother. Three winters on, I’d come along. We learned to cut wood young, but through the years of woodstoves, hatchets, and axes, Dad never let us touch a saw. He can’t look at anyone’s blood now, not even his own, remembering the gauze spooled inside him.

I loved to wear the stained hat he’d left in the snow, faded in time to yellow on blue. The dogs had gnawed it a bit once he’d gone, enjoying the evening alone.

Out of thrift he kept the jeans, the bloody long johns, sewn up but discolored, so that sometimes, even out of season, you’d know what lay below: gnarled tissue with edges like wet paper torn. When he’d return home from months at sea, there was the familiar sign that refused to fade— oh, that old saw: knowing your father by his scars.