I'd never noticed the scar on my Dad's left hand before. It's about two inches long, and had healed neatly.
"When did he ever get stitches?", I wondered.
I don't ever remember his hand being bandaged, except when he was scalded in 2015.
As a kid, I don't remember him being hurt, or sick, or having as much as a cold.
I wondered, "Did it happen when his father beat him for not bringing the picked berries home in a timely manner? Had he hurt himself while he was aboard the U.S.S. Bennington when it exploded?
Was it a result of the horse that threw him because it didn't want to jump a fence?
Did it happen during a Navy-sponsored boxing match?
Had he been gutting a fish, or cutting back the rose bush on Upsal Street?
Perhaps it happened when he was trying to save items from his burning grocery store in Old Morrisonville, when an open kerosene lamp caused it to go up in flames.
Had he cut it on a broken bottle or barbed wire?
Did he slip on the ice in Antarctica while playing football with his fellow Edisto shipmates?"
I'd held his hands a lot in the past few weeks, and today as I used a moist cloth to remove adhesive left over from the tape that had secured his IV, I noticed that clean, neat scar. I'll never know how it happened. I'll never be able to ask him.
It's okay.
I think I had every conversation I wanted and needed to have--the easy and the difficult ones.
Everything else I was curious about, I now know.
I can't ask questions anymore.
We can't talk anymore.
I suppose the scar will just be a mystery.
My Dad passed away.
He never said another word.
He just slept away peacefully at about 2:35 Tuesday afternoon.
He was 91.
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