AFTER THE FERRY MAN by Jackie Levin

After burying my guinea pig in the backyard, my dad leaned the shovel against

the willow and took my small hand into his big one. Sweat dripped off the

tip of his nose, the smoke from the camel cigarette perched between his lips

rose up to the cloudless sky. And after he pulled our car off to the side of the road

to ferry a box turtle across our country highway, and after he made me dozens of

pancakes on Sunday mornings in the shapes of bunnies, giraffes and frogs, and after

he picked me up at parties in sixth grade and piled eight or nine or ten of my friends

into our station wagon—which would be illegal now—and ferried each one to their

homes, and after he bought me a grey felt hippie hat with feathers in the brim and

hugged me farewell for my journey to the Middle East, his signature scent clinging

to my memory as I rode an actual camel around the actual pyramids, and after he

wrote me weekly for the six months I lived on a kibbutz what happened on each

episode of Soap, and even after I went to college and read Marilyn French’s

The Women’s Room and said in my new strident feminist voice, “Women make

fifty-nine cents to a man’s dollar,” and even after he said, “I find that very hard

to believe,” and even after there were shouts and tears and many years of only

“pass the butter,” except in our house it was margarine, still he gave me for

Chanukah a red toolbox filled with his favorite drill, and hammer and saw,

screwdrivers, Philips and flat, nuts and bolts and three and six penny nails.

Even after I finally came out to him and he hugged me as we ate wild apples from

abandoned orchards in the hills behind my Vermont home, and after he imagined

he would smoke less, and after his heart gave out on the rim of a canyon in

Mexico—our last picture of him smiling, holding a box turtle in one hand and a

cigarette in the other—and after his flight home to New York City in the cargo

section of the plane, it was a week or so after the funeral when chopping onions,

when I thought about the way he had shown me to hold the knife—three fingers

to set the blade, so I wouldn’t slice off a finger. But it was only after those tears

fell did the scent of his camel cigarettes start to follow me around my empty

backyard. Still, even then, it was only after many hours lying in bed with my lover

Mary, her breath labored and her silence deafening but for one word, “cigarettes,”

that I finally realized she was dying and that he would be the one to hold my hand

as he ferried her across.