The Leatherman

She hated how they fascinated me

those living statues with their glassy eyes

their varnished scales and long backs still prehistoric

they sat on shelves in craftsmen’s shops

narrow snouts always pointing up

mouths frozen open

filled with deltoid little teeth

still

somehow

hungry

I loved putting my hands on them and running fingers

across tanned bodies lacquered to an eternal wake

imagining how alive those caiman must have been

*

In an old album there is a yellowing photograph

of my father

tall and lean and young and wearing overalls

behind him are mounted house-sized wooden drums

I recall them spinning slowly deliberately

“So the hides never sit in their emulsions,”

but turned and turned and turned - disembodied

– on the back is written: Guyana Tannery 1985

*

He placed his skins in buckets in a shed

my father built himself in our backyard

a place where my mother never went

he tanned them with cold precision

tall glass beakers filled with formaldehyde

and aluminium sulphate and sulphuric acid

in passing conversation he’d explain to me

pressed against the furthest wall

“To preserve their hair roots,”

while I ripped synthetic strands free of dolls’ heads

when no one was watching

he’d comb the knots from matted fur

running his callus fingers over clumps

careful not to damage skin

even as he yanked them loose

my mother believed that changing the nature

of a thing was always an act of force

he’d flip the skins over and with a blade

my father built himself

he scraped the excess flesh away

the bits normal people never saw

the decaying underbelly of a life

and then back into solution they went

little by little

over long silent hours and all of a sudden

“You have to raise the pH slowly,”

lowering his strips of colourful paper

into buckets of decomposition

I’d watch the wet chemical change

like he was changing

like she was changing

and when the paper was right

he’d wash his creations with

an unfamiliar tenderness

caressing the patches of brown

“Time for a fat liquor,” was the last thing

egg yolks into coconut oil lavender or rose

and with his bare hands he massaged potions into wet skins

like apology after all the abuse

hanging them in a cooling evening shade to dry

these beautiful imitations of life

hiding their gruesome history

*

I was ten the first time I went hunting

with my father for animal skins

I watched the butcher take it off a cow

right there on the abattoir floor

I never looked away even

when my father started packing

it with bags and bags of salt

rolling the bloody hide

with his own bare hands

I imagined him rolling cinnamon

but his fingers were too fat for that kind of work

“Four hours, that’s the window we have, before rot sets in.”

*

In yellowing photographs that my mother never looks at

there are jaguar skins and ocelot skins and anaconda skins

and in one there is a man standing at our gate with a giant anteater skin

and there we are in the background my mother and I

mounted on our porch – she is tall and lean and imitating life

though she tries and tries and tries - disembodied

if I could only run my hands across her

and wonder how alive she must have been