Far Creek Road

I wish I had some of the furniture my father made for that house on Far Creek Road. He built a blond oak bedroom suite for the master bedroom with a headboard that was really a bookshelf one book high, my father being a reader. My mother would hide a chocolate egg there at Easter and they kept a loud rattling alarm clock on my father’s side of the bed, its numbers lighting up at night in a pale radioactive green. When my parents were able to afford a store-bought suite, my father and my Uncle Punk would move the oak set into the spare bedroom, and that was its first step out the door.

My father, Hall Parker, often withdrew to his workshop, which was built into the unfinished back end of the basement. The floor and the back wall were concrete, and pushed up against the rough wall was a workbench my father had built himself. The work surface was a wide slab of wood that Uncle Punk got for him at one of the mills, and its four iron legs were salvaged from a broken-down conveyer belt.

My father was a tall man who looked even taller in the basement. He had a slight stoop and wore black-rimmed Clark Kent glasses, and I thought both of these came from his job in the local railway headquarters over town. He said he was a bookkeeper but my mother called him an accountant, and she liked to say the Parkers were early settlers in the province who had once owned canneries and timber concessions. My father was older than most of the other fathers in our suburb, but he was popular, and always ready to fix anybody’s car. People waved when they saw him, which made me proud, although it was also understood that Hall Parker—everybody called him by both names—Hall Parker had his moods.

My father usually went into his workshop on weekends, but sometimes he went there straight after work, not even coming in the kitchen but going directly through the basement. Those were the times I had to leave his dinner on a stool outside his workshop. It didn’t have a door, and when I put down his plate, he would keep his back to me and push things around on his workbench as if he didn’t know I was there. I tiptoed, but that was politeness, too. It was because of the war, my mother said. But my father wasn’t usually like that.

I was the youngest in the family and the only one at home. …I was born quite a long time after my father got back from overseas, where he had been a captain in the artillery. My parents named me Mary Alice but everybody called me Tink.