My dad had a stroke three days after the wedding. He died one week later. That was two months ago. A few days before he passed away, I sat next to his bed in the hospital. My stepmom let me miss school. I think part of her knew that these were his final days. Whenever I could, I read to him. I was convinced that he was able to hear me. I read to him from the same book he had always read to me. I loved the Eloi. I hated the Morlocks. They scared me. Whenever he’d get to a scene in the book that had Morlocks in it, he would ask me if he should continue. I always said yes. I knew we had to go through the bad scenes, through the scary stuff, to get to the end. The time traveler had to endure it. And so should I.
It happened right after lunch on the fourth day of his hospital stay. I had almost reached the end, the part in the book where the traveler had come back to eighteenth-century London only to disappear again a few hours later. This time for good. First I saw one of his fingers move. After a while I realized that he was pointing at me. His skin was clammy and cold when I took his hands. There was no strength left in them. The hands that had built things, had held tools for all his life, the hands that had carried me through all of mine. His mouth opened. I took an ice cube from the tray and moistened his lips with it. He might have said something, I wasn’t sure. His mouth moved as if he wanted to form a word.
"Do you want to tell me something? Dad?"
I leaned over, my ear close to his mouth. There was nothing. No sound. No word. I felt silly all of a sudden. But something in him wouldn’t let go of me. There was a word on his lips. I tried to read it. It was like an ahhhh or maybe a duhhh. He seemed to repeat it over and over. Once I thought he said druhhh.
That day, I left the hospital defeated. I knew there was something he had wanted to tell me but I couldn’t make out the word. When he died a few days later, without ever lifting his finger again, I couldn’t comprehend that he was gone. I went back to school. My sister and her husband moved into our house. They had to sell their house right after my brother-in-law lost his job.
One evening during dinner, they started talking about my father’s things. They wanted to sell the tools and the equipment. I think it was my sister’s husband most of all who wanted to sell it. My sister just nodded. My stepmother was still too grief-stricken to oppose. I told them if they were going to sell his things, I would stop eating. They didn’t believe me. I made it without food for three days. On the fourth day, I collapsed during gym at school and went to the hospital. I was released a few days later. They didn’t sell my father’s things. They even let me go into the workshop.
The shop was in an old barn a bit further down from the house. The first few times I went there after his death, I sat at his welding station in the dark, listening to the silence, trying to feel if he was still here, if part of him was still around. The smell of his pipe tobacco and the damp coal in the forge lingered. I wasn’t able to stay for long. One day, I decided that it would be a good idea to straighten up the place. I had always been responsible for cleaning after we worked together. I swept the floor planks, making sure the metal sheathing around the welding station was clear of anything combustible. I straightened out the tools and cleaned the forging hammers with oil, then swept the two workbenches. I cleaned the shelf that had all the leftover parts like copper fittings, pieces of iron, steel rods, plates, and other items. I emptied the ash container in the forge, polished the anvils, and greased the spindles of the vices.
I had my own leather apron. It hung next to my father’s under a small shelf that had our gloves and welding masks on it. When I looked at it, I started to cry and couldn’t continue that day. I didn’t go back for a few days. One morning, I woke up thinking about him saying druhhh. I began to scribble the word on pieces of paper during class at school. ‘Draw’ was the closest I could come to making sense of it. Did my father, with his last word, tell me to start drawing?
That afternoon, I went back to the shop. I turned the light on, kindled a fire in the wood stove, and sat in the corner opposite the chimney. From there, I could see the whole shop. I had a large drawing pad and a pencil and began to sketch the room. First, I tried to get the right perspective and proportions. Then I added the chimney and the large workbenches. After that came the welding station, the forging area, the large shelf with the materials, the small old dresser that had been converted to hold small boxes of nuts, bolts, washers, rags, and smaller parts. From there I went to the tool carts, the other chairs, and the larger tools like the stand-up drill and belt grinder.
After a few hours, I was done. I hung the picture in my room where I could see it from my bed. I lay awake for most of that night. The moon rose around 11 pm and I took the drawing with me into my restless sleep. In my dream, the picture was made from charcoal from the forging oven. But it was washed out and almost unrecognizable. When I woke up again, my clock showed 1:45 am. Druhhh. Druhhh. Draw. I said the words out lout. Druwh. Drough. Drought. Dry. Draw. I looked at the drawing again. Drum. Drawl. Draw. Drawer. Drawer. Drawer.
DRAWER!
I sat up. Drawer. The moonlight on the wall was enough to illuminate the drawing. The old dresser. I’d never looked inside the drawers, hadn’t gotten to organizing them yet. I got out of bed, put on my thermal pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and a wool sweater. It had gotten cold during the last few days. The first flurries of snow had fallen yesterday. I went downstairs as quietly as I could and put on my boots. I left the house through the back door and walked along the silvery path toward the dark silhouette of the barn. My heart was pounding when I arrived. I didn’t want to turn the lights on so I grabbed a flashlight from the hook next to the door. I kindled a fire in the stove and stood in front of the dresser for a while. Part of me couldn’t wait to open the drawers and see what was in there. The other part wasn’t so sure. What if there was nothing? What if I was chasing a ghost? What if my dad had simply told me that he wanted water?
There was no point in stalling. I needed to know. I opened the first drawer. On the right side, an assortment of bolts of different lengths and widths was organized into sections, separated by narrow pieces of thin, dark wood. On the other side of the drawer were nuts and washers. Over time, the sizes had gotten mixed up and now it was just a mess of bits mingling together.
I should have taken better care of this, I thought. Instead, I’d let it get to this level of disorganization. The next drawer wasn’t as deep. It held a few pieces of sandpaper for the belt grinder. Nothing else. I closed it. Then I opened it again and looked closer. It wasn’t deep enough for the size of the drawer. I took out the sheets of sandpaper and placed them on top of the dresser. A false bottom. I could see it right away. There was a small gap between it and the back board of the drawer. I pulled it up. It dislodged easily.
The beam of my flashlight illuminated what looked like a spiral notebook. It was blackened from grease and metal dust and its corners were bent upward. Large parts of the spiral were missing. I carefully lifted it up. Below it lay what looked like a piece of metal sheathing. Maybe a square foot and a quarter of an inch in thickness. I took it in my hands, expecting its weight to be much more than it actually was. It felt like lead but without the weight. I tapped at it with my fingernail. The sound was similar to that of glass when touched with a metal object. Pling! I carefully laid it on the ground.