Prosthesis

I never asked what happened. It was gone before I was born, so I never missed it. I didn’t give it another thought until I was in school and mentioned it to Jerry Wallace. The look on his face was a gift. Then I told everybody. Kids I didn’t know asked, “Does your daddy really have a wooden leg?” I was their hero. I didn’t know your story, so I fashioned my own. I told them you lost your leg in a war, a tornado, a prison fight. I said you fell asleep on the railroad tracks, you got it caught in a trap, you had to cut it off or die. They asked, “What does it look like?” I told them it had holes from knife wounds received in bar room brawls. I told them it was full of splinters, that the toes were made from steel for kicking, that it’d been autographed by Elvis Presley.

One summer you developed boils on your stump and went several days on crutches. You were in the TV room, laughing at one of your shows, your dinner dishes emptied and waiting on a metal tray table.

Mom was crocheting in the living room, the phone in the crick of her neck. She motioned for me take a basket of your laundry upstairs, put it away.

Your room was off limits, but I had been in there before. You kept a box of .22 caliber bullets behind your boxers, and I knew about the roll of twenties stuffed inside a sock, the Hallmark cards you never signed tucked away under a stack of t-shirts and the yellow photo of grandma and you when you were a boy face down in your bottom drawer.

I had never seen your leg without you in it. But this day it was propped by the bed. It did not look like I had expected. It was not like my stories. The wood resembled a polished table leg, curved, smooth and rubbed to a fine finish. It was not battered or worn. There were no autographs, stab holes. I ran my hand down the cascade of calf. It was neither flesh nor lumber.

I lifted your leg into my arms. It was heavier than I’d anticipated, but I liked that about it. The leather strap that belted around your waist to secure it to your body smelled like Old Spice and sweat. I held my arms around you. I could hear music from the TV drifting up the stairs, Edith and Archie singing at the piano. I moved around the room, holding you up before me, smiling when you whispered something that made me blush. We dipped and twirled in the soft light of your alarm clock until you said you were exhausted, that we should get a Coke.

I don’t believe I’ve ever thanked you for that. I’ve never forgotten how cold it was or the way it burned my throat going down.