The Stalwart Man
We visit my father-in-law in a village fifty miles from the city, in the house where he was born and raised. The same house he fled at seventeen to join the war, only to return in 1945 with a stump where his right arm had been…
“Mick’s not here! He’s gone for firewood!” Aunt Jean, his wife, tells us with a sigh. “They’re tearing down the community hall in the next village—gave the wood away for free!”
My father-in-law is nearly eighty, but he’s still a sturdy bloke. Not like the men of today.
“How far is the village?” we ask Aunt Jean.
“Oh, not far,” she waves a hand. “Three miles or so.”
My wife and I exchange a glance.
Before long, he “arrives.” His transport—an old 1970s pram, missing its basket, tilting under the weight of salvaged planks. He slips off the straps crisscrossed over his chest, the ones he’d rigged to haul his load behind him.
“There!” He grins at his windfall, as if the wood had fallen from the sky. “A couple more trips and we’ll be set for winter.”
“How will you cut it, Mick?” I help stack the planks.
“Got me sawbench.”
He nods at a clumsily built workbench cluttered with jury-rigged tools for sawing wood. Just the one arm, mind. On top rests an old, rusted hacksaw with a metal handle—just like my father’s. The very one I learned to saw my first planks with.
My chest tightens. I want to help. I could fetch the wood in my Land Rover, or hire a truck with labourers.
“Need a hand, Mick?” I ask.
But he doesn’t listen. His one arm waves me off as he slings the straps back over his head.
“Lorries make it worse! They hug the verge so tight, one slip and they’ll flatten you,” he grumbles.
And he’s right. The road is choked with them—huge, thundering things, speeding past the tiny village. The A-road to London, always busy…
“Jean! Off again!” he calls to his wife. She steps out to see him off, and as he trudges past the gate, she says proudly:
“Our provider.”
It dawns on me then. He doesn’t want help. He lives for this—for feeling like a proper man. Not just a man, but a *bloke*. Though he spent his life as a dean at a university, none of that matters here.
I watch him vanish down the road, a lone old man with a broken pram in tow, the straps and clotheslines strapped across his chest like a harness. Once, that pram carried my wife as a baby. Now, he looks like a bargeman—but instead of riverbanks and barges, juggernauts roar past, choking him with exhaust.
I can’t help myself. My son and I drive to the hardware shop.
We leave a brand-new Swedish bow saw on his workbench, its hardened teeth gleaming in its case.
Five years later, we bring him to live with us. He lasts six months in comfort.
After the funeral, at the wake, I find the saw untouched in its case atop the sideboard. The villagers nod and murmur about Mick:
“Took care of his things. Proper, stalwart man.”
“Aye,” I agree. “A real bloke. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.”
