Hatchets

Dad had bought a sleigh the day before at an auction and a few wagon wheels for lawn decoration. His Father's Day gift, he said. We hauled them around the place looking for the proper location of the dilapidated farm machinery.

"Next to the day lilies? Just don't smash them," my mother crooned. "No, in front of the Walnut tree. We want people to see them, don't we?"

Such decisions were crucial, now that my father had retired. Cutting meat was not what he wanted to be doing anymore. Not that being a butcher doesn't have its pleasures, I suppose, taking an entire animal and carving its muscles out into perfect wedges, neatly wrapped in tidy bundles or grinding hamburger and sausages in efficient rounds. There is immediacy about it, a sense of gratification in a few short hours. He had done it since the military. It was his trade and he had made a fine living out of it, raising two interestingly different boys, maintaining a marriage to a strong woman, and always having a nice truck in the driveway of his own home. His knives now hung sharp in the garage by the workbench, ready for occasional big game and holiday turkeys. Butchering was over, and now there was so much left to do.

Everyone thinks he retired too early and one could see it by the projects he busied himself with at the farm. Auctions have become his calling. Every week, he drives his shiny new truck to some little farm on the Colorado plains "to see what things will bring." His new sleigh? 40 bucks. The wagon wheels? 25. Once he bought a manure spreader-a rusted out piece of junk he worked on for a couple of years to get going. He bought it before his dad died last summer. Grandpa never saw him riding around the pasture, grinning 'til Sunday, manure flying thirty feet in the air by the whirling metal blades behind him. Another project was down, and so many more to follow, not yet discovered.

Auctions give him an opening. They depress him though.

"You get to see a man's entire life laid out on tables, and stacked in barns," he told me softly. "And a man's life is not something to be auctioned off." I knew he was thinking of his own father's death.

Dad, Grandpa, and I built a long stretch of the fence at the farm. We moved by sections, ripping the old fence down, replacing it with the new. I sweated with the posthole diggers, while Dad derived great pleasure in leveling and spacing the posts. His aluminum level was straight like a sunbeam.

"Nope," he squinted at the level, "we need an eighth of an inch. Throw some dirt in there." His fence runs parallel to the street and had to be perfect. He would see the line of it everyday. His attention to detail is not commendable, just irritating. We didn't use concrete, so once the post was level, I shoveled in scoops of dirt and tamped it tight, securing the post. The tamper was an old tractor axle from Grandpa's farm.

Grandpa gave me endless tips in posthole digging. Approaching noon, these tips were not wanted, but given, and given often. When it seemed I had finally learned how to dig a hole, he pried rusted nails out of the rotten fence boards, and with a hammer, tapped them flat with the care of a jeweler, and placed them in his pocket.

"Dad, what are you doing?" asked my father, resting on a shovel. "I'll sell the damn place before I reuse nails." Grandpa looked hurt, like he wasn't supposed to save something of value.

My grandpa moved into my parents' house when he could not longer function on his own. We watched him leave us. His confusion caused us pain. The day after I cut his fingernails, we moved him into a nursing home: a chair, a television, and a few clothes. We collect things our entire lives, but near the end, we take what fits in the back of a pickup. People said things like, "It's so nice here," and "The staff is so friendly," and "It's the best thing." My father looked at me and said quickly, reassuringly, "If I ever get this way, just tap me on the back of the head with an axe."

When grandpa died, we were left with a house full of tools he used on the real farm south of Fort Morgan in Eden. He was a dry land farmer for 40 years, raising cattle and sheep, a few chickens, and four children. Grandma was stronger than he was though. A farm can be a lonely place and she didn't have the pleasure of driving along the eastern plains working on oil wells. She stayed at home for years after the kids moved out young. But she had her garden. She worked hard, killing weeds and rattlers with her hoe. Outstretched and sunning themselves between the rows, she would chop the head off with a quick strike, then grab the snake's tail, its body curling around her arm oozing blood, and rip the button off as the head snapped on the ground, struggling to bite. She must have been lonely, though. It seems she was the only one to ever stay at the farm. Seems she's the only one who couldn't leave.

Grandpa treasured his enormous tool collection. Wrenches so big I thought they were for giants. One used to be as tall as I was. Even after they sold the farm and moved to the city, when Grandma was diagnosed cancer, he brought them along, packing them in the garage. All the Johnson boys are like this. "You never know when you'll need it" would be on our family crest, if we had one.

The entire family picked through most of the normal tools: saws, screwdrivers, socket-sets, Allen wrenches, drills, pulleys, chisels, hoes, shovels. But in the chests before us were the actual tools of Grandpa's trades. We all grabbed at bits and pieces we would never use, stuff we didn't know the names of, simple things that reminded us of him, of grandma, of the farm. But what do we do with what is left? Some of these wrenches only oilmen could use. His sweat could still be felt on some and others simply looked like him, looked as if they could have grown right from his shirtsleeve beside his oily hand.

My aunt knew someone who was a friend of a friend, and the family agreed to sell the lot. We were all tired from the funeral, from the family fighting, from the company, from the Alzheimer's he suffered. We needed it to end. That afternoon, when everyone else in the family had left, my dad put his arm around me. We cried in the garage. He was crying because of what he had done to his father. All of his work, all of his time, all of his life, sold for 500 dollars.

My father's little workshop in the corral is an old outhouse building. He re-roofed it with tin, painted it to match the barn, and hung efficient hooks and shelves for his ordinary tools. He even made a little bench so he could sit and work on projects while being out with the horses. It was in a new location today. He had used the front-end loader to move his "tool house" beneath the cherry tree, by the irrigation ditch. A small pulley system hung from the tiny rafters. This was the same one my cousins and I had played on at the farm, hoisting each other off the ground, the same one that had been in grandpa's garage a year ago. Before I could ask him for it, Warren, his next-door neighbor was spraying for weeds and called over the fence.

"Ronnie, could you keep your dead snakes on your own property?" he joked. He was referring to a Gardner snake my dad had killed the day before.

"Well, I hung him up on the fence for the crows and hawks," he laughed, tugging on his hat. "My dad used to do that all the time. They must've dragged him down there." We all talked for a while, and I decided not to ask him. My brother and I could fight over it later.

We continued our tour of the barn and tack room. Everything had been reorganized and organized again. Beautiful silver spurs outlined the rafters. His saddles sat on 2 x 4 stands and the harnesses were dustily draped on rusty nails. Rows of different types of hatchets filled the spaces in-between. I love the smell of a tack room, the hay, the oats, the sweat from the horses. I don't ride that often, but it's nice to be from a farm.

"Got enough hatchets?" I asked.

"There are six more on the other side. You never know when you'll need one," he smiled. My mother collects Depression glass and vegetable tureens. He collects spurs and hatchets.

Mom called from the porch, "Ron, they're going to be here any minute. Light the grill."

We walked through the dust of the corral, he in his boots and wranglers, me in sandals and shorts. He put his arm around my shoulder.

"When I die, you have an auction. You hear?" He looked at me dull in the eyes. "Just have an auction."