The Tablet I Kept for Twenty Two Years

The Tablet

My father painted “& SON” under his name on the shop sign, on a stepladder, the week I was born in March of 1995. I have walked under it all my life. It is the first thing I think of when anyone asks me what my father is. He is the man who painted that sign.

In the summer of 2004 I was nine years old. It was a Saturday, the tenth of July, and hot, and my father was out under a combine at the Sorley place with my mother’s lemonade jug in the shade beside him. I was supposed to be reading in the cab of the shop truck. I was looking for a nine-sixteenths socket in his toolbox, the long red box bolted behind the seat.

Under the sockets, under a rag, there was a school tablet. A Big Chief, the kind with the lined paper. The red cover was soft with handling, the corners curled. I opened it because I was nine and it was there.

The first page was one sentence, copied over and over in pencil, in handwriting I knew from the notes he left on the shop door. It was a big careful hand, the way a man writes when he is pressing so hard that the pencil shines. Forty-one times, the same sentence. I counted. Some of the lines had letters rubbed out and done again. On the third line, one word was spelled wrong, and he had fixed it, and then he had written the right spelling five times in the margin, the way a kid does in school.

The sentence was the first line of a book. A book about a pig and a spider, with a barn on the cover, a paperback from the library sale that had lived on my bedside table that whole year. I had asked my father to read it to me every night since the winter. Every night he sat on the edge of my bed with his boots off and read it to me, and I thought he read it beautifully. I had never once noticed that he held the book very close to his face and that he told the pages slower than other people’s fathers did. I had never noticed that he stopped, sometimes, and said, “Let’s skip ahead to the good part,” and made up the good part.

I turned the pages. He had gotten as far as the fourth page of the book, in that tablet. The handwriting got steadier as it went. Page after page, in the evenings after I was asleep, out in the truck in the driveway where the dome light would not wake anybody, a forty-year-old man learning to read a children’s book so he could read it to his boy.

I sat in the cab of that truck for a long time with the tablet in my lap, and I understood three things all at once, the way you do at nine. My father could not read the way other people could. He was ashamed of it, so ashamed that he had hidden it from my mother, or thought he had. And I was never, ever, to let him find out that I knew.

I took the tablet. I do not know why. I think I was afraid he would find me with it open, and then he would know. I put it inside my shirt and I carried it home in the back of the truck, and that night I hid it in my own toolbox, a little green plastic one with a tray, under the real tools, where it stayed.

For twenty-two years it stayed. It has been in four apartments with me. It has been in the cab of every truck I have owned. I could not throw it away, and I could not give it back.