J. Lennon - Pieces for the Left Hand - Stories

Among the tasks on my father’s list was to defrost and wipe clean the refrigerators and freezers. In those days, most freezers tended to accumulate furry mounds of rock-hard ice, which had to melt before my father could complete the job. Consequently, he would spend one day removing all the moldy food, and then the next cleaning the kitchens and their defrosted refrigerators.

Entering an apartment one cleaning day, my father was overwhelmed by a terrible odor. He reasoned that it could not be coming from the refrigerator, as he had purged it of food the day before, so he searched elsewhere — under the oven, inside the cabinets, down the heating ducts — for the dead mouse or squirrel he figured was the source of the smell. Eventually, doubting his memory, he checked the refrigerator once more, and that is when he found the pork chop.

It had been sitting in a plastic bag, sealed into a ridge of freezer ice. Now, to my father’s astonishment, it was crawling with maggots. He couldn’t understand how the maggots had gotten into the bag so quickly, but there was little time for contemplation: the odor was intensifying. He removed the plastic bag and dropped it into another bag, which he wrapped, double-knotted, in still a third bag. He threw this bag into the dumpster.

Inside the apartment, the smell would not diminish. He lit candles, placed air fresheners everywhere. When he got home, the smell was on his clothes. My mother washed them, but they contaminated the rest of the load. My father showered and brought the smell into the bathroom, where it lingered for weeks. He drove the ruined laundry to the dump and the smell adhered to the trunk of the car, and then leaked into the passenger compartment. Months later, despite my mother’s ministrations, the smell could still be discerned in their house. Meanwhile, the apartment was professionally cleaned, twice, with bleach, yet my father still could not rent it for the new school year. The following fall, he was only able to rent it to a woman with a severe cold, who complained incessantly once she recovered, and moved out before the semester was over.

My father, always stoic, rarely mentioned the incident. But my mother talked incoherently about the pork chop on her deathbed. She called me by my father’s name and begged me to take it away, to get it out of her hospital room. Not wishing to disobey, yet reluctant to explain the truth, I pretended to toss something into the trash, then moved the metal can into the hallway. After that, however, and up to the moment my mother died, I thought I was able to smell the pork chop myself.

Though many have expressed doubts about the wisdom of our society’s dependence on computer technology, our acquaintance, a computer programmer, was always quick to defend the machines that had made his career possible. Technology, he would say, was never of unambiguous value; every negative effect a new technology precipitated was balanced by some positive change. Computers might not be the answer to every problem, he admitted, but they were certainly the solution to some.

Nevertheless, he suffered a crisis of faith at the height of his career. Computers, he realized, had taken their toll upon him: he suffered from acute back problems, severe eyestrain and poor nutrition, and he had alienated himself from his wife and children with his frequent all-night sessions of programming and Internet use. He decided to take a month’s leave from his job to engage in some unmediated personal experience. With his family, he hiked and camped; he studied the lives of birds and plants and learned their names. He took up jogging, and bought himself a workbench and a set of tools.

It was the tools, one tool in particular, that would prove our acquaintance’s undoing. In the last week or so of his vacation, he began knocking together some crude wooden items: a toy chest for his son, a stool for his daughter, a coat rack. Especially satisfying to him was the hammer. Though he enjoyed measuring and marking boards, or sawing them to the right length, no activity proved more stimulating than fastening the boards together with his hammer. After a day of hammering, he would lie awake in bed, his mind racing with the shape of the hammer, the sound it made, the sensation of pounding nails into wood with it. In a few days he was coming to bed later and later, and his basement workshop soon filled up with ugly wooden items, many of them of no practical value, nor of any resemblance to recognizable objects. Indeed, he was gripped by a kind of madness, an addiction. When it was time to return to work, he called in sick, and against the objections of his family locked himself in the basement with his beloved tool.

Inevitably, the time came when our acquaintance had to choose between the hammer and the computer. The choice ought to have been obvious: with the computer, he could make a living which would support some abbreviated version of his carpentry habit. But if he chose the hammer he would lose everything.

In the end, the very nature of the tools in question seemed to force his hand. In a fit of despair over his indecision, he used the hammer to destroy his computer.

Since then, his hammer has not done him much additional good; his family is straining to make ends meet with the meager income provided by the woodworking trade, a trade for which he has little natural aptitude and the market for which, in our lively rural milieu, is glutted with skillful practitioners. But when asked if he regrets his decision, he replies that he does not. He stands by his hammer, which he holds up against the computer as a sturdier and more enduring, and thus, in his opinion, superior, technology.

Our many trips to a local diner have resulted in our acquaintance with its short-order cook, a man in his late thirties whose intensive self-training and obsessive attention to detail have resulted in an uncanny ability to make, from such rudiments as eggs, potatoes, meatloaf and cold cuts, rough-hewn delicacies of surprising originality and variety. So pleased does he seem while at work, and so satisfied with his creations, that we were once given to ask if he’d ever made a meal he didn’t like.

After some thought, he told us that he had once been employed as the head chef at a state prison, where one night he was asked to cook a last meal for a murderer who had been condemned to death. The murderer had requested a porterhouse steak, medium rare; french fries; a bowl of raspberry sherbet; and a glass of iced tea. As per state prison regulations, it was also required that he be served a green salad. The prisoner was to be executed at midnight and would be served dinner at 7:30 p.m., after the other inmates were through eating.

Though he had little sympathy for the murderer, the cook was opposed to capital punishment and decided to make the meal a special one. He chose an excellent cut of meat and prepared it with a thick, hearty mushroom gravy; he seasoned the fries lightly with paprika and garlic powder and made the sherbet by hand, with real fruit, in an ice-cream maker he brought from home. The iced tea he brewed several hours in the sun, using the finest first-flush Darjeeling he could find, and he garnished it with lemon and a sprig of mint. The salad contained no fewer than six fresh, flavorful greens.

Unfortunately, the meal was returned to the kitchen barely touched, the meat gone cold and tough, the sherbet melted and the fries congealed and pasty. The cook was devastated. It was bad enough, he told us, that he had made an unpalatable meal, but far worse that he had, in the process, ruined a condemned man’s final hours.

My wife and I immediately pointed out that the meal might well have been wonderful, but the man’s life was about to end, and he was likely too lost in thoughts of death to eat. The cook said that this was nice of us to suggest, but he knew the truth, and would regret that meal for the rest of his life.