THE COAL SCUTTLE
“Maybe the ashtray—a miniature replica of a coal miner’s pail, or scuttle—was a memento from the start.”
This little ashtray was my father’s, and it was a fixture of my childhood. Crooking his finger under the handle, Dad would carry it from its shelf to the kitchen table, unlace his boots and slide his cold feet into slippers warmed by the chimney. With a flick of his lighter, he’d light his Export A, inhale and blow a stream of smoke toward the ceiling as he balanced the cigarette on the ashtray’s curved tongue.
I don’t know where the ashtray came from. Perhaps it had been my grandfather’s, a man who immigrated to the Canadian Rockies from Iceland in the early 1900s and worked in the coal mines of Bankhead. When the mines closed, the town relocated four miles south, where it would become picture-postcard Banff, and where Grandpa started a plumbing business. Maybe the ashtray—a miniature replica of a coal miner’s pail, or scuttle—was a memento from the start.
I know the little coal scuttle was never a favorite of my mom’s. Heart disease ran in Dad’s family, and the sight of the scuttle filled with ash and Dad’s cigarette butts must have irked her daily. After he had bypass surgery, at 50, it disappeared from the shelf where it had sat for 20 years.
I’m guessing it was Dad who packed the scuttle away. He was a pro at packing. He could squeeze our family of five, a heavy canvas tent, lawn chairs, sleeping bags, cot bunk beds and half of Mom’s gourmet kitchen into our 1960 Comet and still have room for the dog and the trip’s souvenirs. Folks at the Okanogan campgrounds would line up to watch him load the car.
People were always drawn to my father, and he was respected by all who lived in Banff. He was a champion five-pin bowler, a builder of china cabinets and sewing stools, and a plumber, a trade he didn’t love but took on dutifully in the wake of his father’s early death. After he’d replaced a flapper valve on a toilet or thawed a frozen pipe at 3 a.m., his customers would invite him to stay for tea and muffins—Oh, sit, Reg, we need to chat! He often couldn’t bring himself to bill them, which also raised Mom’s ire.
Dad was a hard worker, a perfectionist and a private man, yet easy to be with. He whistled as he cleaned the car engine every Sunday, raked leaves or shoveled snow. Though he taught me how to whistle too—and how to fish, and how to snip maple branches and build a fence to keep out bears—it’s our time at the kitchen table I treasure most. Together we’d watch his smoke curl in front of the window, sometimes thick with frost, sometimes clear as spring, Cascade Mountain in the background. I’d look into his blue eyes and gaze at his hands, stained with solder grease, tree sap and tobacco. He’d ask about my day and tell me about his.
After his bypass surgery, Dad continued to smoke, but hid it from us. At 58, with his arteries blocked again, he needed a full leg amputation. Two years later, he was dead. But I can’t hate the coal scuttle like my mom did. I keep it in my laundry room, where it holds toothpicks, plastic tabs from shirt collars, loose change and many cherished memories of my father. “You’ll miss me when I’m gone,” he used to say in jest, before he knew he was dying. He was right.
—Janice McCrum
Janice McCrum is a cyclist, traveler, cook and retired dental hygienist whose poetry and essays have been published in magazines, journals and anthologies. She lives in Edmonton, Alberta.