Work Clothes

My father was always steady and sturdy to me.

Physically, first.

That was how a child knew him.

He had huge biceps and forearms, the kind made not in a gym but by work repeated over years. Lifting, hauling, carrying, splitting, repairing, stacking, tightening, digging, driving, holding. His strength did not look decorative. It had no vanity in it. It belonged to use.

His hands were the same way.

Work hands.

Nicked, rough, practical, often stained with something that would not quite wash off. Grease. Soil. Woodsmoke. Garden dirt. Machine oil. The faint metal smell of tools. I associate him with all of it.

He smelled of work.

That sounds strange to write, but it is true. Not unpleasantly. Just unmistakably. He smelled like a man who had been doing something. A man who had come in from the factory, the garden, the barn, the woodpile, the garage. Sweat, soap, dust, coffee, cut grass, old denim, maybe a trace of chainsaw gas or basement concrete. His presence carried the day’s labor with it.

Most often he wore a T-shirt and jeans.

That was the base layer of him.

The everyday father.

The one under the hood of a car, in the garden, carrying firewood, fixing a door, moving through the farmstead with a task already forming in his mind.

After a shower, if guests were coming, he might put on flannel and jeans.

That was a kind of dressed up, but not too dressed up.

Clean work clothes.

Hospitality clothes.

Kitchen-table-company clothes.

Clothes for coffee, cards, relatives, church friends, neighbors, people stopping by long enough to become part of the evening.

And then, for church, he wore pants and a button-up shirt.

That was the formal version of my father, though even then he never seemed transformed into someone else. He did not become polished or performative. He simply became the churchgoing edition of the same man: clean, respectful, steady, carrying himself with the quiet dignity of someone who did not need to announce anything.

I have written toward him in many other chapters of this book, gathering different versions of the same man.

It is tempting to separate him into chapters of identity.

Scholar.

Farmer.

Factory man.

Widower.

Husband.

Father.

But I do not think he experienced himself as divided.

I think he simply kept doing what love, work, and circumstance required.

He did not explain the doing.

He rarely narrated the cost.

He did not make a philosophy of endurance or a speech about sacrifice.

He just got dressed for the day and did what needed doing.

That was his strength and, maybe, his burden.

Steadiness can look simple from the outside.

It is not.

To be steady for other people requires an enormous private labor. A thousand swallowed complaints. A thousand calculations. A thousand mornings when the body is tired and the work remains. A thousand small decisions not to fall apart where others can see.

As a child, I experienced his sturdiness as certainty.

As an adult, I see more clearly that it was practice.

He was sturdy because he had to be.

Because his father died when he was thirteen.

Because his sister died the next year.

Because houses burned.

Because money was tight.

Because children needed shoes.

Because animals needed feeding.

Because chimneys needed rebuilding.

Because my mother had a vision for a farmette and he loved her enough to make it stand.

Because later she died, and he had to keep standing anyway.

I do not mean he was invulnerable.

He was not.

He carried more than he ever said.

But he was there.

That is the fact I return to.

He was there in T-shirt and jeans.

There in flannel after a shower.

There in church clothes on Sunday.

There smelling faintly of soap over work.

There with his huge forearms crossed, or reaching, or lifting, or fixing, or holding a coffee mug.

The clothes matter because they were never costume.

They were layers of service.

Work clothes.

Company clothes.

Church clothes.

Each one marking a duty, a relationship, a way of being available to the world.

And beneath all of them was the earlier man I kept discovering in flashes — the chess player, the language student, the traveler.

He never left.

He carried all of them.

But the form he gave the world was almost always practical.

A repaired door.

A planted garden.

A paid bill.

A ride home if I needed it.

A freezer full of meat.

A child taught to play chess.

A barn door coaxed back into closing.

A car kept running.

A house made to hold.

That was how he turned interior life into exterior care.

And maybe that is why his body remains so vivid to me.

Those arms.

Those hands.

That smell of work.

The shirt after a shower.

The jeans.

The flannel.

The button-up for church.

A person becomes real to us through particulars, and those are mine.

I do not picture him abstractly as “my father.”

I picture him coming in from outside, washing up at the sink, changing shirts because people are coming over.

I picture him at church, looking slightly more formal but still entirely himself.

I picture him at the kitchen table, quiet, present, listening more than speaking.

I picture him standing in the old farmyard, already thinking about the next thing that needed fixing.

For years I thought of his quietness as absence.

Now I think it was often density.

There was so much inside him that did not come out as speech.

It came out as labor.

It came out as steadiness.

It came out as the life he helped build around us.

My father was not one thing.

He was the whole stack of selves, carried forward into each new season.

And through it all, he remained recognizable by what he did.

He made things hold.

He made people feel provided for.

He made old structures last longer than they should have.

He worked inside whatever he had become.

The scholar, once again, wearing work clothes over himself.