MY FATHER'S TEETH 

by Jim Bishop

My father’s teeth. He must have lost them in much the same way he lost his name—his real name that is, the one he was born to.

Daddy and Uncle Louis were about twelve on their first day of junior high. I try to imagine them that morning, more than the usual first-day nerves, knowing they would be crossing the bridge into town after seven years in the Island grammar school. My father feels the comb slightly off the line he would have made as my grandmother defines a part down through his hair. There is too much water in the comb—there is always too much water in the comb—and two fat drops splash down into his face. "Stay still. Stay still," his mother says in French—it sounds like "trahn-kill"—a bit more urgency in her voice than last year.

Their father long gone, I can’t quite picture what they are wearing, how she would have kept them and their brothers and sisters—there were five—in food, much less clothes. The compulsory sweaters, I suppose, crudely darned at the elbows, and somehow white shirts for the first day. And their accents, far less pronounced than my grandmother’s, than the Islanders’ of her generation. The d’s for th’s, the present tense constructions for past, the gratuitous pronouns: the little “me” always stuck somewhere in the middle of a sentence, or at the end. But most of that would have been ironed out of them by the time they were twelve.

Still, dirt poor, talking a little funny, and coming into a new school—it doesn’t add up to a lot of confidence on their part. So I can understand how they would be too embarrassed to protest when the teacher took away their name, the one they had always thought was theirs anyway. But maybe that only held true on the Island, they might have figured, when she told them their real name was Bishop, the Anglo translation for Levesque. It’s not hard to hear the sweet condescension in her voice as she had them write their new names at the top of a sheet of yellow lined paper. "Frederick Bishop. Louis Bishop Yes, yes. That’s right." Outside, a gorgeous September day, and they had just learned their first lesson of the new school year.

And amazingly enough, it stuck. I wonder if they even told memay about it when they got home. What was she going to do about it anyway, go down and give ’em hell in French? But of course, she had to find out eventually. And then? Was it anger she felt, looking at the front of Fred Bishop’s first-term report card? Or something more like a swift punch, a stun, before she looked away and put the card down on the kitchen table without opening it.

More likely, by that time, she was just so imbued with the knowledge of her place on the bank of a river she could never enter, that it seemed their right, they who navigated the mainstream, not only to name the game but to name also any who would come to them, aspiring to play.

So that by the time I arrived, a laundered and approved name was vouchsafed me, along with the powder and the oil. And I never put it together as a kid, even though there was the evidence—my grandmother, living just across a small field bordering the river—staring me right in the face. Not once do I remember wondering why her surname was different from daddy’s and mine. That was just the way it was, a given. As was it given that my father’s teeth were not his own.

I would see them sometimes sitting in a saucer on the kitchen counter, or maybe in a glass of water. That unnatural pink of the gums, the sheer strange fact of them. Here, after all, were the innards of my father’s mouth, sitting exposed on the kitchen counter, with a clock ticking hardly perceptibly from the other room and the light falling through the high kitchen windows onto exactly the same places and in the same patterns across the linoleum as if the glass or the saucer on the counter were just another dirty dish waiting to be washed by my mother when the sun touched just the right place on the floor. Here was my father’s mouth; if I had wanted to, had dared to, I could have reached up, stuck my hand down into the water, which must have been quite clear actually, though my hand, my adult hand, even now at the thought of it, becomes slimy—and wrapped my small fingers around everything but the missing tongue of it. Had it right there in my hand.

But I never did. Maybe I was too good a little boy. Or lacked the imagination; or the balls. More likely, it was just another given that my father’s teeth should sit that way on the kitchen counter in one slant of light or another. It was a given in the house that would largely be my world that my father’s teeth would not always be in his head. Nor would my mother’s, nor my grandmother’s, nor, as I remember, any adult’s in the larger household of my blood. What was given, more precisely, was a lack of givens, as such a simple word is usually understood. I learned that names and teeth were not a given after all. That just about anything could be lost or translated or uprooted or reproduced in some strange color by whoever was out there in charge of such things. And that was that. And so long as I could go outside and the river rolled by without any name that mattered and I had the wild apple tree to sit in, what difference did it make, was I guess the way I received it all in what now seems, looking back, a wide-eyed and ongoing state of suspension.