Father's Hands

Born and bred in the deep South, uneducated and illiterate, my father learned about survival at a very young age.  He learned how to use his hands to build and rebuild cars, engines, or anything mechanical that required grease and ball bearings.  His heartbeat was in his hands.  They were his identity, his whole being, his life force, all from the wrist down.

It was after my mother left us with Daddy that those hands became the same hands that fed my body, bathed my body, held, nurtured, and sometimes loved my body, but most of all, beat my body.  Black and blue, until it collapsed.

He was six feet five inches tall and around four hundred pounds.  A giant.  My tiny hands disappeared inside the cupping of  his snake-like fingers.  At times he was a good father because his hands would be loving and quiet, and at other times bad because his hands would hurt and sting with each slap and stranglehold.  I remember those times that he'd laugh so proud and call himself "grease monkey."  I'd whisper out loud to myself, "belonging to the Devil most times."

I remember the squelching hot summers, being carried in his arms, legs bared and spread wide against his belly, his calluses rubbing rough against my thighs and hamstrings, his hands too wet, too rough, too hot, too close.  The more I tried to pull away, the tighter his grip became.  I always knew when his hands were about to change from good love to bad.  It was usually once he felt me surrender my struggle for freedom and safety.  "All right, Daddy," my body would say, "you win again."

My father has lived by his hands my whole life.  He worked as a machinist at Duke University where many years ago he was selected to design and replace the ornate adornments attached to the front doors of the glorious Duke Chapel.  Today, as those doors still stand, I am all the wiser.  I now know what it means when all is quiet and still around me.  I have found an inner peace.  So peaceful that, recently, I heard my soul singing.  Singing loud - praises of freedom and safety.  Safety which made me smile because somewhere deep inside I finally knew that it is at those doors that some of the Devil ends and God begins.

Sharon Asheton