Carhartt Coat
by Violet Foster
St. Lawrence University
Violet Foster is a freshman at St. Lawrence University, majoring in English with a minor in Gender and Sexuality studies. They’re never caught without a pen, but when they are, you can find them singing with the Laurentian Singers, visiting their cattle at home, or drinking far too much caffeine.
My father’s Carhartt coat was blooming with blood, but it wasn’t from the hanging steer before him.
Arteries gushing, guts spilling, two flaps of skin exposed the insides of the Highland half-breed. Between me and my father was a large hole, deep enough so the buried intestines wouldn’t attract coyotes and foxes. I held a flashlight in one gloved hand and a knife in the other, a few drops of blood glinting off my boots. Behind me was our farmhouse, built from the blood and calluses of my aging father, and around me was the land my father had cultivated into “how mother nature always wanted it to be: diverse.” Solar panels, dying ash trees, clean night air, and fresh blood blooming from my father’s breast.
“Dad, you’re bleeding,” I said, shining the flashlight on the tan fabric. “It looks bad.”
My father pulled the hide taunt and continued to saw through the thin layers of fat that made up the skin. He didn’t say anything, didn’t even glance at his bleeding collarbone.
“The doctor said to take it easy,” I recalled. The flashlight in my hand sagged. “You just got your port out yesterday.”
“No worries,” my father said. He grunted as he bent his knees to skin the lower abdomen. “If cancer couldn’t take me down, a few stitches won’t.”
“I think the problem is that the stitches are ripping.” I squatted to my knees to follow his movements.
“Don’t worry,” my father said, teeth flashing in the LED light. They were coffee-stained and crooked; they looked like home. “It’s gotta be done tonight. Last chance before it gets too warm. Nature is telling me to do it now, and so I will be doing it now.”
~~~
My father taught me how to calm an animal when I was seven years old. The snow was thick that day, the kind of texture that only comes with the sudden cold becoming suddenly warm. It was turning solid with every one of my booted steps. My hands were cold underneath the mittens my mother made me wear, pink, a color I hated but didn’t quite have the awareness to know yet. My imaginary friend, Tanya, trailed behind me, deaf, silent, and lesbian. My father nodded to a blonde Highland cow before us.
“Buttercup,” my father said. “Hey, sweet girl. How are you doing?”
The animal responded with a small grunt, which made me giggle behind my father’s Carhartt coat. “What did she say?” I asked.
“‘I’m hungry!’” my father translated in a slow, growled voice. I giggled some more.
Buttercup swung her head around, nearly hitting my father in the chest with those off-white horns. I flinched and clutched my father’s dirty jeans. In response, he lowered himself to my level, facing me with his pure hazel eyes. He did not look scared at all, despite the soft cow eyes that had suddenly turned black and threatening.
Gently, my father said, “Don’t be scared around an animal. It doesn’t matter whether you’re showing it or not, it doesn’t matter if you're a mile away, they can smell your fear. For them, fear means a predator, and fear means to eliminate it. Animals are already wary of us; we are covered in unfamiliar scents from our shampoos and our detergents and other animals. If you’re scared, it’ll just make it worse.”
I nodded, looking at the cuts on his temple from a recent horn injury. “Okay,” I said softly, but the growing pressure in my chest did not diminish. Buttercup was staring at me with beady eyes, ready to charge at any sign of threat.
“Here’s what you’re going to do,” my father said. He instructed me with a patient hand, guiding me with gentle explanations. “Kneel down, like how I am. Don’t sit in the manure, obviously, but squat down so you seem lesser than her.”
I sat on my heels, my leggings stretching across my knees enough for me to see skin through the fabric. My father continued, turning himself and gesturing diagonally from Buttercup.
“You want to be facing around forty-five degrees,” my father explained. I knew what that meant because I’d overheard my father teaching my three-year old brother basic addition, multiplication, and angles when he thought no one was around. “Don’t look at the animal. This helps them feel in control and calm. A predator is only a predator if they have eyes on their prey.”
“Okay,” I said softly. I breathed, in, out, in, out. The tightness of fear gripping my insides leaked out of my pores and into the chilled air. We stared at the horizon, at a naked aspen tree, at a field of white meeting the distant forest of spruce. Eventually, my father said, “Let the animal come to you.”
I felt the breath of Buttercup before I heard it. Warm, curious, coming from the two large holes in the front of her face. I breathed through the fear that attempted to take me over and stared, stared, stared at the fluffy clouds. My father watched as Buttercup sniffed my hair, nudged my knitted hat, swung her deadly head a few inches from my face. I didn’t fear; no, I would not let myself be weak in the face of something that was easily mastered.
Softly, he said, “She’s swung her head, telling you that she’s boss. You can touch her now, if you’d like.”
I nodded, feeling suddenly small. Not just because of Buttercup, but because of the entire herd before me, varying colors and textures and breeds making up fifty of the most historically desired animals in American culture. They looked so free, and all of a sudden, I wished a human life was as simple as a bovine’s: you were born, you ate, you grew, you got worms and fleas and didn’t even notice them, and then got shot between the eyes and fed a family for a year. At least, the way my father raised them, it seemed like a simple life.
I held my hand up and waited, finally turning my head to face Buttercup. I already knew this part. I had watched my father do it a thousand times. Buttercup tentatively approached my outstretched hand, and as soon as her soft snout touched my hand, everything but the swirl of fur on her forehead disappeared from my vision. I was in a bubble, and her black eyes were so trusting and innocent that they turned my chest inside out and back over again. All of a sudden, I wished I could put into words what it was like to touch an animal that could kill you in a single movement. I wanted to form a sentence, a few lyrics, maybe, that encompassed the feeling of nature pressed up against your palm and the small gasp that escaped a child as she realized for the first time that life was all about trying to describe moments of nature and light and emotion and music and dance and hunger and community and death, and failing spectacularly.
The only thing that could have torn me from those wide, black eyes was my father’s pained grunt. I whipped my head, fast enough to startle Buttercup. She took a few long steps away from me as I examined my father. He was curling in on himself, his forearm over his lower abdomen. I watched as agony flooded his features, and his salt-and-pepper jaw tensed. Buttercup, noticing it too, approached my father and gently sniffed his head, pressing her wet nose into his curly hair.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. A daughter was not used to seeing her father in crippling pain. “Daddy, what’s happening? Should I get mom?”
“Nothing,” my father groaned from between his teeth. He flashed me a smile that looked more like a grimace. “Just some gut pain. Don’t worry about me. It was probably something I ate.”
~~~
Even between the ages of ten and eleven, I could tell my father was suffering with something more than just a minor eating disorder. My mother, a southern woman of infinite knowledge (despite her mild Ménière's disease that took away her license and her independence), worked tirelessly to figure out what was plaguing my father with crippling pain. She read books on the colon, on the intestines, on immune diseases that could cause someone permanent damage if they didn’t catch it fast enough. While my father lay bedridden, only rising to water and feed his cows, my mother took care of the dog, the cat, the kids, and the kitchen. At this age, I began to see the injustices of my family; my father worked and my mother did everything else, and if she didn’t do it well enough, he complained about it. It filled me with so much anger, him treating my mother with such disrespect, that the first time he ever yelled at her, I turned and screamed right back in his face.
At least, in my head I did.
In reality, my siblings, eight and six, cowered behind me as my father laid out every one of my mother’s imaginary flaws. We had never seen him like that before, face red, hands gesturing, voice almost loud enough to hurt my brother’s ears. My mother began crying, something I had never seen before. My father was the one who allowed tears to come into his eyes. The book of immune diseases lay open and forgotten on the dining room table. The dark flooring made the room feel small, suffocating, so me and my siblings transferred to the living room addition and hid behind the stairs.
After a long time of plugging our ears, muffling the sound of our father’s anger, a door slammed and the fight was over. I rose, my mother’s sobs harmonizing with the subtle dissonance of my brother’s and sister’s. I breathed, in, out, in, out, fear exiting my body with every exhale. I went to my mother, whose face was blotchy and wet, hands shaking, her body slumped like I’ve never seen before. She looked up at me, who had already wiped the tears away.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, holding me still with her gaze. “I’m so sorry you had to witness that. I don’t know what I did wrong.”
I gathered her up in my tiny arms and held her as she cried. My siblings joined me, holding onto her arms as she cried, and cried, and cried. Aslan, my gentle sister, and Conan, my witty brother, cried too, something about the exchange making me think that a turning point had occurred, a hint in the plot of the story I was living within. I found the exchange to be worthy of justice. I would not be scared of my own father. If he was going to act like a child, then his own daughter would tell him how immature he was being. And if he would not listen, then I would not turn blind and leave my family to his wrath.
Finally, I said, “You didn’t do anything wrong, Mom. You didn’t do anything.”
~~~
By the time I turned thirteen years old, my deaf imaginary friends were turning into weaponized defenders of my most intimate vulnerabilities. Every character protected a different emotional weakness, stabbing and shooting the endless armies of adolescence that threatened to carry my weaknesses to the light of day. Every day, I used these characters to write lines and lyrics and laments on pages and pages and pages of paper that must have equated to nearly a dozen trees. At school, I was beginning to analyze every person around me, studying their behaviors in an attempt to replicate them into the characters I created. My mother gave me book, after book, after book, in which I studied to replicate structures in my writing. From the ground up, I began my journey of cultivating my own literary voice. My style was my gun, and my stories were my soldiers, trained and designed to respect, control, and guide my fictional pieces.
On a particularly rainy day, one of my pieces reflected something I had never considered before. Fourteen, wild, ink splattering overlapping sentences, I asked my father, “Why don’t you go to a doctor?”
My father was off all gluten, my mother making recipe after recipe of gluten free meals that only he could ingest. She had read in a book that reducing your gluten intake could improve gut function. She made him take probiotics, give up bread, and eat nothing but meat and vegetables and whatever carb she could cultivate from her store of rice flour. He was desperate, willing to try anything to relieve himself of the pain. He was grateful for her, whenever he wasn’t telling her how she had failed. His temper was getting shorter every year that passed by.
My mother looked up from her book, waiting for his response. We were all sitting on the couch, Aslan, my mother, my father, eating, except Conan, who was upstairs building radios from scratch.
“Doctors haven’t done anything to help me,” my father said. “All they’ve done is tell me I’m lying. That’s all they say, that I’m a liar and that there’s nothing wrong with me. How screwed up is that, huh?”
I nearly flinched at his tone, so hostile towards the world. “Maybe you should try again,” I said. They were always telling me that doctors were good, but at the same time, it was as if they were colossal failures at their jobs, to never be trusted not to load you with drugs. “Keep trying until you get a doctor that listens to you,” I suggested.
Aslan flinched when he said, “No way. Not again. Never again. Will you please stop that bouncing, Aslan? God, it’s annoying the shit out of me.”
I glared at my father. “Don’t talk to my sister that way.”
“Don’t talk to your father that way. You’re starting to sound like your brother. Always disrespecting your mother.”
“I think he has autism,” I said, quick and blunt. How else were you supposed to say something like that?
“No, he does not. Don’t say something like that,” my mother said. “And if he did, we’d know and act accordingly.”
I thought of the missed social skills, certain aspects of my brother that never developed quite right. The anger, the stoicism, the sharp-witted memorization of random facts. “I’m dead serious, Mo—”
“Don’t even go there.”
I wanted to scream against the endless cycle of tension: my father with his sickness, taking it out on my mother, taking it out on her young daughter. Aslan took it out on herself, her brother taking it out on his mother. I was stuck in the middle, understanding, yet having no say. All I wanted was Conan to feel less angry. All I wanted was Aslan to not feel like she was walking on a tightrope, my father waiting to push her off with a yard stick. That’s all I wanted. Simple things. When my friends asked me if my family was okay, I only had the words to say, “We’re doing as good as we can be.” It was such a lie. I was a liar.
My father finished his meal, bringing his plate to the sink. He gestured to the pile of dishes that had been waiting while my mother took a moment to read more about how my dad could be dying. He angrily began scrubbing the food off the plates, nearly breaking them as he dropped them into the dish-strainer.
My mother exchanged a look with me before saying, “I’m sorry I didn’t get to the dishes, Mike. I’ve been baking gluten free bread all day.”
“It’s fine. They’ve been sitting here for ages. Might as well do them before they rot and fester.”
“God, I’m sorry, okay?” Mother said. “You don’t have to make me feel so…guilty. I get it. I’ll make sure to stay more caught up next time.”
Aslan was cowering now, my father’s impending anger making the air reek of unrest and strain. “It’s always like this,” my father stated. “You’re always behind.”
“Maybe it’s because I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with you! It’s hard when I have to take care of the kids and deal with the dogs and try to keep the house somewhat livable. Our own daughter has begun cleaning the entirety of the upstairs because I can’t keep up.”
“I’ll do it all, then,” my father said. “After I’m done feeding the cows that provide us food, and after I’m done restoring the land with my bare hands. After I’m done processing a few dying trees, butchering a few fat steers. Maybe after I’m done with that, I’ll clean the damn house!”
“Will you please not...” I began.
“I’m sorry I’m not good enough for you!” my mother cried. Aslan now fled, running upstairs and shutting the door against their growing volume. “I’m sorry that no matter what I do, you’re still not satisfied. It didn’t used to be like this! You make our own kids scared of you! God, doesn’t that bother you?”
“Please, stop,” I said, too quiet.
“Of course it bothers me!” my dad shouted. “Maybe if I didn’t have to do everything around here, I could focus on trying to get better—”
“Stop!” I shouted, just loud enough.
The silence that followed was out of the space between where one paragraph ends and another starts. I stood, flanked by my sea of imaginary soldiers, all living in my head, speaking reason to the hostility in my home. They gave me the strength to speak when I otherwise would not. I stood facing him, back straight, staring straight into his hazel eyes. If he was going to be a predator, then so would I. I would look directly at my prey before going for the kill.
“Go,” I said. I had deliberated for five years on the deterioration of my father, and I had come to a conclusion. “Go to a doctor, Dad. Go, and just see if they can figure something out for you.”
My father stared at me from the kitchen. He then looked outside the window behind me, focusing in on his fields, his cattle, his life’s work. He then looked at my mother. Something inside of him shattered. He stood with a bowl in his hand and began crying. Tears looked normal on him, so often I saw them when he thought no one was around.
The rain turned into the first snow of the season, and on my fourteenth birthday, I finally got something I wanted: my dad scheduled an appointment with his doctor.
~~~
They found his tumor within the first scan. They said it was the size of a football in his abdomen. He didn’t tell my siblings until after they were out of school, and as spring reached its full potential, he began treatments. Every day, he thought we didn’t hear him vomiting in the middle of the night. He thought we didn’t see the declining weight, the way his hair began thinning as the summer went by.
I began writing furiously, trying to put to words what it was like to feel the touch of nature against your palm, the way music flowed around your pours and filled you from the inside out. I began trying to write what it was like to know your father was going to die someday sooner than when he was ninety, and there were no words. My sentences took different routes, trying to describe love, my first breakup, the feeling of lips against mine in the darkness of a small room. My father began telling me his stories. How he made bomb chips without knowing it for his electrical engineering profession, how he used to tuck his own mother into bed after he got home from a six-hour shift at his first job. He told me horrors, inspirations, moments of good luck that forced him to realize how good his life was. After he shaved his head, he was a different person. He was someone who was fighting the poison in his body, and, finally, winning. He was winning.
Sickened bodies cause sickened minds. It was just how death taunted life, leaving it weak and ruined in the pouring rain, its version of being kind.
~~~
“Knowing that death is at your doorstep changes you,” my father said as he skinned the animal before him. “It makes you realize that life’s not worth worrying about the little things.”
I considered his statement, wondering what type of response I would throw at him this time. I was seventeen, fierce; I decided on what spoke to me as a writer. “The little things are what make life worth living,” I replied.
With the moonlight behind him, he was silhouetted with a cool light that shaded as his wife approached him. She smiled at him so brilliantly that it inspired an entire new story into my mind. “She’s right, Mike.”
“Marie,” my father said, amusement lacing his tone. “Our kids are always right. Have you learned nothing from being a mother?”
“I learned that kids are hard to deal with, and think they’re always right,” my mother said. She noticed the blood on his coat then, still slowly spreading to stain the brown fabric. “How about you come inside and take a break, okay?” she asked.
“Can’t, I have to finish skinning him before leaving him to hang.”
“Just for a few minutes,” my mother persuaded. “Just to grab some water.”
My father looked at me, who was nodding, then back at my mother. “Okay, I probably should.”
“Make sure to clean and bandage the hole in your chest, too, babe.”
“Okay, okay,” my father relented. He looked at me, smiled with crinkled eyes. “Thank you for your help, Hazel.”
“Anytime, Dad,” I said, my smile so similar to his, making my eyes squint and my nose wrinkle.
With blood covering my father’s Carhartt coat, my mother asked, “Will you finally get rid of that damn coat, Mike? It’s falling apart at the seams.”
My father shook his head. “Nope, no way. If there’s anything worth salvaging in this world, it’s this coat. It’s the warmest one I have. It’s kind of like you. What’s the point of getting something new when the worn thing I have is so perfect already?”
I trailed behind my parents as they bickered and blushed, boots dragging, crickets chirping, death and life trickling between the lines and lyrics of the words in my head.