我知道我这样做很不理智, 但我还是直奔县城, 在那里买了一本皮面袖珍词典和一支金笔。我向父亲的遗体告别时把词典和笔放在父亲的那双大手里, 那双手曾经是那样温暖, 那双手曾经让他生活得很美满, 但却从来没有学会写字。

 

 

 

My Father’s Hands

 

His hands were rough and exceedingly1) strong. He could gently prune2) a fruit tree or firmly ease a stubborn horse into a harness. What I remember most is the special warmth from those hands as he would take me by the shoulder and point out the glittering swoop of a blue hawk, or a rabbit asleep in its lair. They were good hands that served him well and failed him in only one thing. They never learned to write.

 

My father was illiterate. The number of illiterates3) in our country has steadily declined, but if there were only one I would be saddened4), remembering my father and the pain he endured because his hands never learned to write. He started school in the first grade, where the remedy for a wrong answer was ten rule r strokes across a stretched palm.

 

For some reason, shapes, figures and letters just did not fall into the rig ht pattern inside his six-year-old mind. His father took him out of school after several months and set him to a man’s job on the farm.

 

Years later, his wife, with her fourth-grade education, would try to teach him to read. And still later I would grasp his big fist between my small hands and awkwardly help him to trace the letters of his name. He submitted5) to the ordeal for a short time, but soon grew restless and would declare that he had had enough.

 

One night, when he thought no one saw, he slipped away with my second grade reader and labored over the words until they became too difficult. He pressed his forehead into the pages and wept. Thereafter, no amount of persuading could bring him to sit with pen and paper. He did still like to listen to my mother, and then to me, read to him. He especially enjoyed listening to us read to him from the Bible.

 

My father was forced to let the bank take possession of most of the acreage6) of his farmland one year when a crop failure meant he couldn’t make the mortgage7) payment. He was able to keep one acre of the farmland where the small farm house was located.

 

From the farm to road building and later to factory work, his hands served him well. His mind was keen, and his will to work was unsurpassed. His enthusiasm and efficiency brought an offer to become a line boss--until he was handed the qualification test.

 

Years later, when Mother died, I tried to get him to come and live with my family, but he insisted on staying in the small house with the garden plot and a few farm animals close by. His health began to fail, and he was in and out of the hospital with two mild heart attacks. Old Doc Green saw him weekly and gave him medication, including nitroglycerin8) tablets to put under h is tongue should he feel an attack coming on.

 

My last fond memory of Dad was watching as he walked across the brow of a hillside meadow with those big warm hands resting on the shoulders of my two children. He stopped to point out a pond where he and I had fished years before. The night, my family an d I flew back to our own home. Three weeks later Dad was dead because of a heart attack.

 

I returned to my father’s home for the funeral. Doc Green told me how sorry he was. In fact, he was bothered a bit, because he had just written Dad a new prescription, and the druggist9) had filled it. Yet the bottle of pills had not been found on Dad’s person. Doc Green felt that a pill might have kept him alive long enough to summon help.

 

I went out to Dad’s garden plot where a neighbor had found him. In grief, I stooped to t race my fingers in the earth where he had reached the end of his life. My hand came to rest on a half-buried brick, which I aimlessly lifted. I noticed underneath it the twisted and battered, yet unbroken, container that had been beaten into the soft earth.

 

As I held the container of pills, the scene of Dad struggling to remove the cap and in desperation trying to break it with the brick flashed painfully before my eyes. With deep anguish I knew why those big hands had lost in their struggle with death. For there, imprinted on the cap, were the words：“Child-proof cap--Push down and twist to unlock. ”

 

The druggist later confirmed that he had just started using the new safety caps.

 

I knew it was not a rational act, but I went right downtown and bought a leather-bound pocket dictionary and a gold pen set. I bade Dad good-bye by placing them in those big hands, once so warm, which had lived so well, but had never learned to write.

 

□by Calvin R. Worthington