Damage Done By The Storm

I know what he wants. He thinks there is something wrong. The feet have been coming back, my workmanship has been slipping. "Is there something on your mind?" he will say, when he has closed the door so that the others can't hear. "Are there problems in your life?" He will lower his voice, and sound genuinely interested, so that I won't take offence. "You're the best person we've ever had on Stage Two, but something must be wrong." He won't fire me. It takes too long to train someone to become as skilled as I am at this job. He will have to be satisfied to hear that I've had a few bad days. It happens. I don't know what it is about me that causes him to speak in that tone. It is as though he believes he is speaking to someone who might burst into tears, or explode in a terrible tantrum. This sort of thing has happened all my life. My father would grab my brother right up out of his act of teasing the dog and start paddling him on the spot, hollering all the while. But if I threw a shoe across the room because its laces refused to unknot, he would guide me firmly into another room, close the door, and sit down to look me sadly in the face. "What's the matter with you now? You know better than that. Do you think the lace will untie itself if you throw it?" Greg Morrison, who is the manager here at Stanford Orthotics, can be brutal when he is displeased with the others "Smarten up, for chrissake, willya? This is a piece of shit." But with me he uses very much the same tone as my father did. It is as though the whole world knows how easy it is to make me ashamed. When they promoted me to Stage Two, it was to replace a fellow who'd been laid off because so many of his feet were sent back. He was fast but not very good. At first I was lucky if I managed to complete just two in a shift. It took me a month standing eight hours every day at my bench but eventually I was completing sixteen to twenty a shift without any failures. "You're a real artist," Morrison said his best compliment. He has repeated it often. It gives him pleasure to think that the painters and sculptors and failed architecture students he hires are doing a job that has at least a little in common with their artistic ambitions. "I like to watch your face when you work," he will say to me. "You could be Michelangelo grappling with David." I wouldn't know about that. My job at Stage Two is to take the brown plaster casts that are made in Stage One from the moulds sent in by doctors all across the country dainty feet, ugly feet, children's feet and to measure them, line them up, centre them, weigh them, find where the imperfections are, and then, with white plaster, build whatever is needed to establish a perfect balance. My white additions, then, become models for the plastic inserts created in the next room. I like to think I have done my part to ease limps, eliminate backaches, and cut down on the strained calf muscles for half the people I pass on the street. Sometimes I could believe that every foot in the country has passed through my hands in the three years I've worked here. They pile up by the hundreds in the room behind me. Fallen arches, twisted toes, inadequate heels. It is a peculiar thing, to realize how many people are operating at a painful tilt. Mr. Peter McConnell of Corner Brook, Newfoundland, should be walking straight as a perfect soldier now. Alice Degrout of Red Deer, Alberta, can if she walks slowly disguise the fact that her right foot has been deprived of its natural heel. When I first worked at Stage One, I could not helHodgins, Jack is the author of 'Damage Done By The Storm', published 2004 under ISBN 9780771041525 and ISBN 0771041527.