My Father’s Hands
Arren Lenau
I’ve finished a whole week now, sitting in
a camping chair, a trim tray on my knees, a pair of
Chickasaw scissors in my right hand, a nug of mar-
ijuana in my left, snip, snip, snipping and talking to
the other trimmers, playing word games, listening
to music or listening to an audiobook in my ear-
buds. The rash has sprung up louder on my left hand
now, though the worst is still on the base of my right
thumb and spreading down the back of my hand
with coarse little bumps along the ridge. If I hold
the trimming tray up with my right hand to knock
the shake out of it and into the large turkey bag,
the weight of it pulls my thumb down and begins to
crack the skin open and sting and bleed. I no longer
attempt to wear the nitrile gloves that most of the
other trimmers wear to keep off the resin because
after the first day, the sweat of my palms puffed the
blisters into a frenetic rosacea of inflammation that
burst into yellow pustules. Now I snip uncovered,
attempting to wrap my thumbs with makeshift ban-
dages out of strips of rags or bits of paper towel. It
doesn’t do much to keep out the tiny, fine crimson
or amber hairs that fall from the scissoring of the
buds. They scratch and chafe and fester in my scaly,
crusty wounds.
~~~
I always thought I had my father’s hands.
My fingers are thick and short yet still beautiful and
graceful. He didn’t have large working hands like
70
other fathers in our small, working-class town. He
had medium-sized hands appropriate for his build
and height, the smooth hands of a salesman who
wears a suit and tie and polished leather shoes to
match his briefcase. I have my father’s thumbs, the
wide flatness of his thumbnails, their whiteness cre-
ating crescent moons just above the cuticle. He had
this saying—actually he had a lot of sayings, many of
them clichés—“I know Grand Rapids like the back of
my hand.” But I always wondered how well he actu-
ally knew the back of his hand. He did know Grand
Rapids, Michigan inside and out. Later, I wondered
if it meant something more akin to giving someone
the back of his hand. I felt like I knew the back of his
hand, maybe better than he did.
~~~
I first learned of eczema while on an away
game in soccer with Coach Pine. I was an awkward,
chubby kid with greasy hair, and now my hands
were breaking out again. This time someone no-
ticed. I held my raw, angry-red chapped hands out to
my teammate’s dad and he knew immediately what
it was. “Oh yeah, that’s eczema,” said the country
trucker type, the kind that went into the diner across
the street from my house everyday wearing a cam-
ouflage trucker hat with a deer on it, the kind that
always had a cigarette in his mouth, listened to Top
40 Country and drank Mountain Dew and Budweiser.
He waxed country bumpkin about eczema irritants: