November 2002 Issue - Essay # 8
My
Dad's Feet
By Maggi Sullivan Godman
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Long,
slender, bony, flat--they would have been elegant, even aristocratic,
had he been blessed with arches. He didn't care, though; they took him
where he wanted to go. When
he was on the farm, doing his chores, my father's feet tromped around the
barnyard in big black overshoes, with flat metal buckles that clashed
and clattered. The buckles looked like oblong grids, with latches that
poked through the slots and folded back on themselves when fastened. He
usually wore the galoshes half open.
I followed his black-clad size 11 feet in my little white pull-on
rubber boots as we threw out grain to the hens and gathered the eggs,
and I watched his boots slide in the mud as he milked the two
white-faced cows and fed their greedy calves from foaming buckets. When
he drove the green John Deere tractor or the old Chevy farm truck, my
dad's feet wore high-topped work shoes, brown leather ones that laced
up, with hooks that the laces crisscrossed before tying at the ankle.
Sometimes Dad wore these shoes in the barn or when feeding cattle from
the pit silo, giving them the pungent aroma of fermented alfalfa. When
he picked me up from school, I would hurry to the truck, not wanting my
friends to know my dad wore smelly shoes. When planting time in the fall rolled around, these same work shoes would stroll out into the freshly plowed wheat fields, where my dad would bend over and pick up a handful of soil, sift it through his fingers, and sometimes even taste it. When I asked him why he did that, he said that he could feel when the ground was worked enough to be ready to plant. My eyes grew wide; I could not say a thing. On
Sunday mornings, Dad's feet marched up the church aisle in brown
Florsheim wing tips, polished to a high shine. He was not vain about his
appearance, but my mother always wanted him to look his best, so she
went along when he shopped for his dress suits and his Sunday shoes. She
made sure the socks and ties he chose were coordinated and that his
handkerchiefs were linen, not cotton. Dad
pulled old floppy leather slippers on his feet at night, when he sat in
his pine rocker in the dining room next to the Zenith cabinet radio,
listening to the The
day we were to go through my dad's closet, after his funeral, my mother
called me. "Look at
this," she said when I joined her in their bedroom. She pointed,
and what I saw was a pair of my dad's shoes, right where he'd put them
the last time he took them off. Toe to heel, the way he always left
them, as if he'd just stepped out of them and walked away. |
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Author's Biography |
Essay
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