Easy Lifting

"Not like the old days," my Dad said, staring down Allegheny Avenue into the sunset. "My Pop used to hang fresh-killed chickens from this awning. Had ta hose the blood off the sidewalk before closin.' That was my job."

"People would buy those things?" I asked.

"You betcha. The fresher the kill the better, especially for them coal-cracker families just moved to Philly."

I nodded, glad that none of my High School buddies were around to hear him. They'd think the bloody stuff was really cool, the more disgusting the better. But I'd grown up around it and was at that age when everything my parents did was repulsive: Friday-night fights at the Armory, playing pinochle with Aunt Gert and Uncle Paul, or watching my father break down sides of beef with the band saw and quick confident flicks of his butcher knife.

I checked my watch, a half-hour till closing. "Do you want me to sweep up?"

"Yeah, and ..."

The El roared into the overhead Allegheny Station, smothering our voices. We were used to starting and stopping conversations whenever the train rattled down the line, casting blinking shadows onto us mortals below its rails.

"... and restock the self-serve," Dad continued. "Joe's off with his family to Jersey and I was busy with a crown roast for Mrs. Morelli."

"Did she give you ... " Dad grinned. "You betcha. There's a tray of lasagna in the cooler. Already called your mother and told her not to cook supper. She's mad as hell. But that lasagna ..."

My Dad was always preparing fancy cuts of meat for Mrs. Morelli, a widow who lived down the block over Sentack's Grocery. She would return his kindness with deep-dish lasagna made with homemade noodles and seven cheeses. My Mom couldn't compete with that ... and I'm sure she suspected hanky panky.

I ducked inside, retrieved boxes of Hormel and Oscar Mayer bacon from the silver cold-locker, stamped the price on each pack in purple ink, and neatly arranged them in the self-serve case. The shop was tiny and sweeping up only took a couple minutes. In the back room Dad scraped down the butcher blocks.

"You want some help?" I offered.

"No, go ahead with your studies. I gotta tend to ma knives then arrange the cooler. Gettin' a beef shipment tomorrow."

"Let Joe do the lifting," I suggested.

"That little Polack?" he cracked. "Even you're stronger than ole Joe."

Dad rapidly slashed the blade of a knife against both sides of a butcher's steel, making that juicy-metallic slicing sound that always raised my neck hairs. I glared at him, but sat at the desk in the cramped corner office and opened my trigonometry book. We had six problems to solve. I found a yellow tablet and started working out the answers. Like everything in the backroom, the tablet was spattered with fine droplets of blood ... always raised eyebrows when I handed in my homework.

Dad slid his knives into their rack and replaced the steel. "I'll be in the big cooler for a while. Could ya lock up?"

"Sure."

From the sidewalk, I retrieved the sandwich board sign announcing "Whole Chickens: 34¢/lb." Up and down the boulevard, streetlights blinked on. A trolley rumbled past, on steel rails just wet by a spring shower. I had spent my entire life within a few blocks of that butcher shop and was determined to break free the day after High School graduation.

"You should make a livin' with your head, not your hands," Dad had said. "This world will stick it to ya, wear a workin' man down to nothin'."

"Don't worry Dad," I'd told him, "you won't find me hanging around with the neighborhood jamokes."

I placed the closed sign in the shop window and went back to my trig problems. I was deep into computing the measurement of angle omega when I heard a slow repeated thumping coming from the cooler. Its foot-thick walls made yelling at Dad futile. I unlatched the heavy door, yanked it open, and screamed. Against the far wall my father dangled by his hands from two huge meat hooks. A wooden ladder lay on its side, one of its rungs broken.

"He ... help me down," Dad wheezed, his feet kicking against the wall.

Both of his palms were pierced by the brutal steel points that protruded from the backs of his hands. Blood dribbled down his arms onto his white smock. I dashed forward, slipped on a piece of fat hidden in the sawdust, and went down hard.

"Come on son, you can do it," Dad moaned. I struggled to my feet and grabbed him around the thighs, lifting him upward. He was solid and stiff; his six-foot body outweighed me by thirty pounds. I tottered under the load. Slowly, he slid each hand off the hook. Blood poured down onto my head and shoulders. Lowering him carefully onto the floor, I stumbled out of the cooler and vomited into a scrap can.

"No time for that," Dad called, swaying on his knees. "Bring me the cheesecloth and scissors ... and the alcohol."

I seized the roll of gauze-like cloth and the first aid kit and hustled back.

Dad looked at me sheepishly. "That damn ladder ... rung just snapped ... grabbed for the wall without thinkin'." He held his dripping hands out in front of him, palms up. "Give 'em a good shot, son."

"You sure?" I said, panting. "Gonna hurt like ..."

"Just do it."

With shaking hands, I splashed rubbing alcohol into each palm, the clear liquid fire draining into the puncture wounds. Dad closed his eyes and shook, but didn't make a sound. He turned his hands over and I repeated the process. Miraculously, the hooks seemed to have missed any arteries.

"Now wrap me, just like ya see boxers."

"Hold them up like this." I pantomimed. "They won't bleed so much."

Dad grinned weakly. "What are you, pre-med or somethin'?"

"Just relax." I took a deep gulp of breath. "I'll be done in a minute."

I used up most of the roll. Dad looked beaten, like he'd just gone ten rounds with Cassius Clay -- with fat white gloves, polka-dotted red.

"Come on," I said, "Mr. Levy can drive us to University Hospital."

"Ah Jeez, just one more thing that old Jew'll gripe about."

I slid an arm around his waist and walked him out of the cooler, slamming its door with that distinctive click, thud. The warmer air made my eyes tear up.

"It's okay, Tony," he said, his voice low and comforting. "This ain't the first time, or the last."

"Yeah, yeah." I brushed at my face. My bruised hip hurt like a son of a bitch, but I'd be damned if I'd let on. "Can you walk okay?"

"Sure, no problem. But ya forgot one thing," He stood with his arms raised like a prizefighter, grinning back at me.

"What? We really got to get going."

"Not without Mrs. Morelli's lasagna. Your mother's already mad, and to show up without it ..."

I hurried back into the cooler and retrieved our culinary prize.

That night Mom cried out and hugged Dad when he showed up at the door, both gloves clean and held high, as if in triumph. They snuggled on the couch and watched Lost in Space on TV, Mom never dropping a word about the lasagna or amorous Italian widows.

Two years later, working as an Army medic in Vietnam, I thought back to that first medevac, tearing along north Philadelphia's wet streets in Mr. Levy's Chrysler, with him complaining, "For God's sake, Walt, don't bleed on the seats!" The vast hospital ER maze was just a blur. But I remembered in perfect, poignant detail how it felt to lift my father off the hooks, how light and fragile his six-foot length really was.