Adapting the Craft

Adapting the Craft My father looked up Zealot Street toward the mountain where ore buckets hung to cart the coal. “Don’t go near the mine” he repeat- ed, the chant of elders who fore- warned him of the dangerous hole. He’d just go up through Bessie’s place to find a young tree with a v that he could cut out with his knife and string with rubber like a lace to hold a pebble that might be a deterrent in the daily strife for a kid in Wiconisco who didn’t wear patches on his pants when the miners went on strike. My father bought a super sling from the Nu Martz Hardware’s stock across from the farmer’s market. It would be the very best thing to load with a peppermint rock and blast the squatting pidgin set that left its guana in a pile between the houses on our street. No one ate peppermints anymore since Hannah went away to hole up at Marion’s down on Darby Road, so my father used them to blister the butts of pidgins unloading in our alley way, day after day. “Got another one,” he would roar. Enid smiled. Should she keep score? My father kept on going for ninety years and a few months more. He shot baskets with his grandson and prowled the pathways in the park across Whitehall in search of a young straight tree with an inviting v, one that might be honed to aid the aged. But since the veterans that he served had wandered far from earlier strife, he cut a longer sapling with his knife. He smoothed the wood, applied the stain. My father’s slingshot had become a cane.