Al's Coat

Last week’s arctic blast made me thankful to have a good coat. I didn’t grow up in New England, and I get panicky when the digital thermometer beside the kitchen window shows single digits.

I often think of my grandfather in Russia and the greatcoat he wore in exile in Siberia.

I also think of the old Russian story by Nikolai Gogol called “The Overcoat.” Published in 1842, it’s about a poor clerk in St. Petersburg who finally saves up to buy a really warm coat, not the flimsy cloth one he has had.

The tale doesn’t have a happy ending, but it has been hailed as the beginning of the modern short story. Frank O’Connor, the great Irish short story writer, wrote: “We all come out from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat.’”

Over the decades, I’ve had a variety of coats. The most memorable, however, was a hand-me-down. It was given to me by my father-in-law, Cleve, a milkman in Falmouth, Maine. It had belonged to his cousin, Al. This was long ago. Al was a machinist. He had worked at the Navy Yard in Portsmouth. Here’s what happened to Al.

The story goes that one of the sea valves in the submarine the Navy was building was stuck and they called in Al. Al crawled into the hold and pulled it out, reversed it, and put it back the right way. After that he felt a pain in his chest, and they took him to the hospital.

After Al died, his wife, Bessie, asked Cleve if he would like Al’s coat. Cleve took it and brought it to me. It was a pea coat, thick Navy wool, but it also had a fleece collar and leather buttons. It fit me perfectly.

Occasionally, as we sat at the dining room table with my wife’s parents, the conversation would drift around to Cousin Al and Bessie. Al was known as mild-mannered, while Bessie had a reputation for making life more difficult than it needed to be. For example.

One day Bessie said she was tired of the sofa in the living room, and asked Al to put it up in the attic. To reach the attic, you had to pull down the retractable steps in the hallway. After considerable difficulty, Al managed to get the sofa into the attic.

It wasn’t two weeks later before Bessie announced she had changed her mind. She wanted the sofa back down. Al said something Bessie couldn’t hear and went up to the attic. But when he tried to get the sofa down it got stuck in the opening. Al heaved and shoved, then reversed it, but with no success. What Al did next made him famous in family lore. He found a saw, and when the sofa finally came down, it was in two pieces.

For years after, in the wind and blowing snow, I’d get an extra bit of warmth from Al’s Coat, just thinking about that.

© Ben Jacques