November 2002 Lathework by B. H. Fairchild - Also visit the Workshop Archives

The first image, I was to discover, holds the model for everything I have written, especially poems: lathework. In machine shops in Houston, Lubbock, Midland, and Snyder, Texas, I would as a boy stand on the wooden ramp next to my father and watch his hands move gracefully and efficiently over the lathe, maneuvering the levers and rotary handles and making the bit move in and out, back and forth, as the huge chuck spun a section of drill pipe in its iron grip. Once he had the bit set just right, having measured the cut with the calipers, he would let go, and a steady spiral of blue steel shaving would coil out into the darkness, dropping with a hiss into the milky mixture of oil and water below. He would then lean back, light a cigarette, pour himself a cup of coffee, and breathe slowly in that easy, contented way of someone sure of his craft, pleased with his own expertise, confident that the thing was going well, that it was going to be a precise, skillful piece of work.

Almost no words would pass between us. There were only the rumble and occasional whine of the lathe, the damp whisper of the shavings, and the surrounding darkness of the immense cathedral of the shop. That, and the mingled odors of oil and water and sweat and khaki, for my father always wore, like a uniform, a starched khaki workshirt and trousers and a pair of Boss Walloper gloves. But there was no talk, no words. I wanted to talk, wanted to trouble him out of the mystery of his pure world of work with a small boy's foolish questions, but the same instinct that kept me quiet in church each Sunday kept me quiet now. There were the machinist and the silence and the constant lesson, repeated with each drill collar, each cut of the bit, of a small thing done well.

Things and words. The words came early and in different ways: whole days spent in bed with bronchitis while words floated disembodies from radio dramas in another room where my mother was ironing, late nights at family reunions when booze had loosened the tongues of my usually silent father and his brothers so that they began to tell the stories about growing up in Oklahoma that I never tired of hearing, afternoons with my father at oil rigs where I would listen to the roughnecks cursing each other in that wonderfully inventive way that seemed to make an art of swearing. But words as a world, a separate reality as pure and hermetically enclosed as the world of lathework, did not open to me until one day on a street corner in Liberal, Kansas. We had just moved there from west Texas, and my parents had gone in to the bank across the street to open a checking account, leaving me to amuse myself in the town's tiny storefront library. I browsed around, amazed to learn from the ancient one behind the desk that I was permitted to take books home, as many as four at a time. I checked out Biography of a Grizzly, stepped outside, and leaned against the stoplight completely absorbed in the book and oblivious to the swirl of traffic and people around me. I cannot forget the exhilaration I felt at the time, the centripetal pull of the words, the feeling that I was at the center of something, that between myself and the words on the page was a world bearing significance and authenticity, a world that somehow existed not outside but within the other one.

Growing up in that little town in the heart of the dust bowl, I do not know how I would have survived without the words of the printed page, of books. I wish that I could rhapsodize about the natural beauties of the place, the rich and varied landscape, but I cannot. It was rather bleak, surrounded by wheat and maize fields, with few trees. I recall being out on oil rigs on various jobs, looking out across the barren country, treeless from horizon to horizon, listening to the chains beating against the derrick in the ceaseless wind, and waiting, waiting for life to come to some kind of point. But it only seemed to come to a point on the printed page, and so I lived, when I could, among books, and words filled up the empty horizon and made for me a necessary world.

Later, as a young man, I happened to be sitting alone in a movie theater waiting for the darkness, like sleep, to descend (movies were so like dreams to me), and I noticed several rows in front a woman speaking to someone hidden in the seat beside her. The someone was apparently her child, for she doted on it, smiling expressively, occasionally laughing, talking to it, reaching over to smooth its dress or collar. She even went to the concession stand and brought back a box of popcorn for it. After the movie started, this constant yet unobtrusive stream of maternal affection continued, and when the movie ended, I waited to see what the child looked like. The mother rose and walked out with her hand outstretched as if the child hidden behind the row of seats were following at arm's length, but when they reached the aisle, the mother's hand was holding nothing at all. There was no child. And the woman walked up the aisle and out of the theater with her hand held out to nothing, occasionally looking down and speaking to the child she only imagined.

To this day I cannot quite explain why that scene will not leave me. Surely there are terror and mystery it in, and perhaps, ignorant of and untouched by the human experience behind the scene, I can afford to be fascinated by it. Perhaps the woman and her imagined child represent for me the unspeakable outer limits of human tragedy, or some arctic zone of the imagination where reality is no longer surpassed but cruelly and impossibly replaced. I think, though, that it is the fact of absence in the scene that will not let me forget it: the absence beneath the mother's hand as she walked out of the theater, the absence of apparent meaning, the absence of real rather than an imagined life, absences like so many lighted windows as you walk through a strange city, wanted to fill them with imaginary lives and words and stories.

And so, driving past the abandoned basketball court or the small, slowly dying farmtown in Kansas, or sitting before the blank screen after the audience has filed out, I am worried—inspired is certainly not the right word—into the interesting struggle called writing: slow, halting gestures toward that centripetal universe at whose center I stood as a boy on Kansas Avenue. I think now of that struggle as it occurred may years later about four o'clock in the morning in a darkened room, darkened because my two-year old son was sleeping fitfully nearby. There was some trouble in my life, and it seemed to be echoed in the growls of a pack of dogs that passed beneath the window regularly at that time as the roamed the neighborhood overturning trashcans in search of scraps. I was trying to write a poem about my father, a poem I had struggled to write may time before about lathework and the machine shop and the peculiar beauty of blue steel shavings under lamplight. But then, as now, it had no ending, no place to go. And then the dogs moved on and there was only the silence, and I found myself writing let words be steel, let them make fine, thin lines across an empty page. It was a beginning, I thought, I am almost home. I could hear my son's easy breathing in the next room, the slow grind of the lathe, the sigh of the shavings as they dropped into the oil and water below.