I found the book in my father’s office, its spine black from the house fire
twenty years ago. He worked construction all his life, quit school at fourteen.

Now, sixty years later, I find his annotations in the margins of Moby Dick.
I thought he liked Montana history, trout fishing, elk hunting, and

cribbage--not whales, poetic meanderings, or recipes for clam chowder.
I sat in the grease-stained chair in his office and wondered Had I known him?

That white whale, lymphoma, usurped his identity and like Melville’s editor
I longed to ask Did it have to be a whale? And had this been his bible

all these years? After he died, what was left was not how much he knew
about this or that, not the faces of friends at his funeral, not even what he

yearned for, but only the relief of the land where his hands and feet had tread,
and the implausibility of this folded piece of paper found in the book:

a recipe for trail mix, his handwriting slanted so far to the right
it became a part of the story.

Jackie McManus is the author of The Earthmover's Daughter and a  chapbook out this fall – Related to Loon, Vignettes of a Village – about teaching school in an Eskimo village in the Alaskan bush. She has attended the Chippewa Valley Writer's Guild summer retreat for the past four years and hopes to be back in 2020.

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