The Turkey Dad Carved One More Time

I rolled him into the gap and set his brakes. The table came to just about his chest. It was a little high, but it would do.

Velda opened the gray box and took out the knife and unwrapped it from its towel. She held it out to him handle first, across her palm, the way you would hand somebody something that mattered.

“Stanislaus,” she said. “Would you do the honors.”

He took the knife. His hand shook, once, the first time he closed his fingers on the handle. Then it stopped shaking.

I watched it stop. It was like watching a man step onto a ladder he has climbed ten thousand times.

The platter wanted to slide when he set the knife in, so I knelt down beside his chair on the hall floor and put both my hands on the rim and held it.

I was still in my orange county shop sweatshirt. I had not even thought to change.

“Hold,” Dad said.

“I’ve got it,” I said. “I’ve got it, Dad.”

His left hand could not grip the big carving fork, but it could rest on it.

So Velda set the fork into the breast for him, and he laid his weak fingers over the handle to steady it, and he worked the knife around it.

He took off the leg and thigh first, at the joint, without even looking for it. The knife just went where it had always gone.

Then he made the long cut along the breastbone, and then the cut at the bottom to free the meat.

And then he made the first slice.

It came off thin. So thin the light from the windows came through it.

He lifted it on the flat of the knife, his hand steady as a fence post, and he turned in his chair, slow, and held it out to Velda.

“Cook first,” he said.

Velda took it in her fingers. She stood there in her white apron holding a slice of turkey and crying in front of two hundred people, and she did not care one bit. She ate it right there.

“It’s good, Stan,” she said. “It’s always been good.”

The hall clapped again then, louder. My husband was standing by the coffee urns with his arms folded, looking at the ceiling the way men do when they don’t want anybody to see their faces.

Dad carved that whole turkey. It took him longer than it used to, maybe twelve minutes instead of four. He stopped twice to rest his arm on the table.

But every slice came off the same, even and thin, and he laid them on the platter in rows like shingles on a roof.

The line came through, and Velda’s helpers dished the slices onto the plates, and people said “Thank you, Stan” as they went by, one after another. A little boy in a clip-on tie said “Thank you, mister,” and Dad said “Eat,” and the boy did not need to be told twice.

When the second bird came out, the young fellow from the fire department walked up beside us. He was maybe twenty five, with a red beard and a flannel shirt, and he had been doing the carving since spring.

“Would you show me how you get the slices so thin?” he asked. “Mine always come out like boards.”

Dad looked him up and down. Then he pointed at the knife and at the young man’s hand and said, “Long. Not push. Pull. Let the knife.”