A new story:

The Scar on my Foot

            My dad was a poet – I mean in the literal Greek sense. He was a maker. When I was a kid I thought he was some kind of wizard. He built our house when I was six. He also worked for the railroad on the giant locomotives. One of my earliest memories is being held in my mom’s arms as my dad climbed down into the wheel machine at work and got the sparks flying out. He was like Vulcan at his workbench.

            Carpentry was always Dad’s main artistic field. For a couple of years after he got out of the Coast Guard in the late Sixties he worked for a cabinetmaker in town. He’d already had something of an apprenticeship with his uncle before he joined the service. Uncle Jerry knows his way around a woodshop. Of course to my childish mind, Dad he had never studied his craft an hour, had never been yelled at for doing it wrong. I thought I would never be able to rival his ability to design and build. It all seemed so artless. I had no idea where the mistakes were or that Dad knew best how to hide them. I didn’t realize just how much he was making it up as he went along.

            All kids must look at the adults in their lives with some awe at what they can do. To me it was almost as if my dad had superhuman powers. He could take up his one-pound hammer in his hand, twirl it around and smack a sixteen-penny nail into a pine beam like it was margarine. Three blows and it was buried in the board. The nails were dipped in a green preservative. He would pinch on between his big bent thumb and his index finger. Bam! And then he’d let go and let loose with the hammer. He kept spare nails bitten with his lips. I’d try to imitate him and my mom would tell me to knock it off. You don’t put metal in your mouth. But I wanted to be just like Dad. I wrapped my whole fist around a nail. There was an old spare hammer around and I tapped at nails, attempting to drive them into so scraps of wood. Inevitably the nail bent and went crooked. I was so proud when I got some driven in. I can remember not wanting to stop. I kept whacking at the thing until there was a depression in the wood. I can remember my dad’s slight smile as he told me I’d gone too far. A good carpenter doesn’t bang up the wood.

            He could take the hammer way down low on the handle, almost daintily, to get the most leverage. The flesh on the back of his upper arm shook as he beat the nail. I looked at my own stick of an arm. I didn’t have any meat to shake when I worked. For the most part I was blithely unaware of the step-by-step complexities of building the house that summer. I remember playing amongst the construction in cool sand far below the shade of the redwood floor joists, and then the solid flooring. There were all the smells of clay and concrete, the tar to seal the basement walls, the sawdust. I was free to play. But Dad worked forty hours a week at the railroad and then came home and worked on the house, seven days a week. Start to finish the whole thing took less than nine months.

            I do remember him making some mistakes though. He hit his thumb more than once. He howled at the pain and then sucked on his thumb for a second, whistling instead of swearing. But then he would shrug it off. I don’t know if he lost his thumbnail but it turned black beneath it.

            Dad had a lot of tools. Some used electricity and were quite dangerous. Dad said you always had to be careful using power tools. They aren’t toys. He had two table saws. One was for ripping. That thing was quite the beast. But Dad could make it do what he wanted with great precision. I knew it was crucial for making straight cuts but I really hated that thing. It had a way of clamping its scream onto the sides of my skull and driving into my brain. The angry teeth on the wheel would lick a narrow strip up the board as dust and flecks of wood shot out at my dad, coated his hair and stuck on his eyebrows and lashes. Squinting, he forced the board with his fingertips up onto the spinning blade. I always put my palms over my ears, fearing I wouldn’t be able to handle the sound. The smell of burnt wood was strong and wonderful. Dad seemed to notice nothing but the saw blade as he bent in fearless concentration. I was always afraid that Dad would slip and lose a finger. Or worse. I sometimes had nightmares about that saw blade. There was a collection of spare blades in the garage. Some had wicked teeth that looked more like metal flames. It didn’t take much of a fantasy to picture one of those discs flying out and sticking between your eyes.

            And then there was a house in what had been just a poor cornfield. I’ll never forget that first night my brother Buck and I spent in the new house. As soon as there was carpet put down in our bedrooms we begged to get out of the ant-infested trailer (which makes it sound worse than it was; you never saw the carpenter ants in the daytime). We took our sleeping bags and pillows and carefully walked over the path from the trailer to the new house. It was a Michigan spring and the yard was a field of clay. Dad kept putting straw down but that was quickly sucked into the muck. We put scrap pieces of plywood on top of the straw and they still floated on the clay awkwardly. It wouldn’t be any kind of trick at all to land on your face.

            We got settled into Buckley’s bedroom. There was no electricity yet. But we had brought a flashlight with us. It was mostly to read a kid’s ghost story my brother had with him. It was one of those horror paperbacks with a prepubescent boy and girl on the cover with a flashlight. In the background was a gothic mansion frowning. Buck read from it aloud. Man, I was spooked. He liked to skip around to the scary parts and miss the boring stuff. Probably what creeped me out the most was that we never finished the book, never solved the mystery, never discovered that the ghost was really just some shy old person who lived in the attic. I kept expecting Buck to reveal a monster or a corpse or worse. When he finally got sleepy and decided to turn out the light, I slipped deep down into by sleeping bag. I knew that monsters don’t eat people buried beneath the covers. They go for faces. If you are too lazy to hide the monsters will get you. You have to be on your guard. You can’t be bothered by over-heating under a thick blanket on a warm night.
            I was glad that Buck was there next to me. Having an older brother around is a good thing. If he couldn’t be counted on to fight off the monster then maybe it would just eat him and leave me alone. It usually is not as scary when other people are around. There would be no way you would get me to sleep in that new house alone! You might as well ask me to sleep in a graveyard or a coffin. What is it about being alone or in the dark that’s so frightening? If it hadn’t been for that silly mystery story I probably wouldn’t have been the least bit afraid of the new house. Having my big brother with me was usually like it being broad daylight out – it made all the werewolves and vampires be gone. As it was I kept imaging a ghost whooshing down the long and empty hallway to the room where we lay on the factory-fresh carpet. I peeked out from my sleeping bag and stared at the doorway. In the darkness I was convinced I saw a woman in a ghostly gown, floating above the floor. I blinked hard. She was still there. I blinked again. She wasn’t gone but I saw that the shape was faded and probably just a glow – caused by the moon? By some distant light from the farm next door? I had no way of knowing.
            Buck snored.
            I do remember a time when a monster got me in the middle of bright sunny day. This particular event would have been just before the start of second grade. I can see it perfectly. August, 1977. A quarter of a mile down the dirt road from us a nice little creek flowed along. That first summer out there in Barry County we had taken the old Simplicity riding lawnmower down to the creek with a wagon and two five gallon buckets. Buck and I filled them up to use flushing the toilet in the trailer before the well was put in. Dad had found the creek and told us to go down yonder like Paw on Little House. After that the nameless creek had been a favorite haunt of ours. The culvert passed under the road. It was five feet in diameter and had a nice echo. We would shout and sing and raise a general ruckus. The galvanized steel was also a decent dock that we could fish off – not that we ever caught any fish. I never saw any aquatic life beyond water bugs and a rare crayfish. Oh, and there were bloodsuckers. We found that out. The hot weather had one day lured us into the cold water. We liked to get a good run off the road and down the culvert and then jump into the swirling black stream. The black was from peaty muck. Bloodsuckers lived in that muck and were the same dark color. They’d attach themselves to your legs. Pulling them off was murder. We found that if we pressed one to the baking hot steel culvert they’d let go. A dash of salt also worked. We sometimes would bring that.

            My favorite thing to do was jump off the culvert onto an inner tube. Then I’d paddle back up to the shore and avoid the muck altogether. That little pool was probably only about twelve feet by six feet. And only the very center of it was all I cared to be in. No one puts there leg down into black water gladly. The last thing I wanted was a snapping turtle chomping on my ankle. Ordinarily I had on shoes. But not this time last time I ever swam in there. We had been romping in the water for about a half hour just as wild as ever. I stood up and headed out of the creek, walking where I always did. Just as I was about to dash up the slick and steep back, I put my left foot down hard. That was when I found my monster. It bit me. I was convinced of it. It felt like wire cutters or tinsnips biting down into my foot near the pinky toe. Had I found a snapper at last? Or was it a sea monster or another kind of demon?
            All this flashed through my head in an instant. I dashed up the hill hoping to outrun the pain.

            A hesitant moan went out. I thought it was Buck mocking me. Then I realized the strange sound had come out of me. I was suddenly dizzy with pain. I’m not sure how bad the pain was. I can’t really recall. Maybe I was more frightened than in pain. I remember hopping, almost dancing on the bank. I think I was screaming. I couldn’t see anything through the tears and I had lost all sense of direction.
            At about this point Buck had a hold of me and was asking me what was going on. All I could think of was the dark blood on the ground. I saw these streams of blood everywhere I had walked. Buck wrestled me to the ground before he figured out my foot was bleeding. At first he thought I had a bloody nose because I had grabbed my foot and then touched my nose. I don’t remember any of that – he only told me about later.

            Buck too was in a panic. He was trying to find the source of the blood and to stop the bleeding all at once. He was patting my leg and squeezing it, dimly remembering something about tourniquets. He had bloody handprints all up and down my leg.

            That was when a miracle happened. I don’t think it saved my life – can a person bleed to death from a cut on their foot? But it did restore my faith in the cosmos quite a bit.

            I looked up and saw the silhouette of a man on a white horse.

            “What happened?”

            Buck answered, “He’s got blood. . .” He didn’t know how to finish.

            The saddle leather creaked and he jumped down beside me. It was my dad. I was lying on gravel beside the road in tall dried up Queen Anne’s lace. The Appaloosa’s hooves were stamping at flies very close by.

            In the relief of my dad being there and taking over I have lost most of the memory of what happened next. Did I smell his sweat? Did I see that his old white T-shirt was frayed at the collar, that it was stained in the armpits? Did my brother hold the reins? Was I afraid Pepper would step on me?

            “Here. Hold his leg up, Buck. It’s pretty deep. It’ll need stitches. You’ve done it this time, Henderson. Keep that leg elevated while I get the van,” he told my brother before he pulled himself up on the horse and galloped off into the lowering sun.
            Did I listen to the hooves pound the clay road and claw at the gravel? Did I hear the three-year-old mare’s breath, her grunt as she strained with the rider and her own well-fed guts? Or am I remembering all the other galloping horses and ponies I’ve ever heard? This one was doing me a favor. There must have been birds singing – red-winged black birds and starlings, I’m sure. Were there cicadas buzzing? I don’t remember.
            What has stuck with me was how beautifully blue the sky was – a perfect cerulean. I don’t remember anything about what Buck was wearing or how long his hair was or how many freckles he had on the bridge of his nose. All I remember is being on my back, my foot in the air. And then I caught a glimpse of my brother’s hands and saw that they were red.

            I first wrote the above eighteen years ago. I was coming home from college to spend the summer before graduate school with my parents. On the one hand I thought maybe I could write a story that would heal my family. My sister Jenny was born in 1978. By this time she was seventeen, a high-school dropout living with her redneck boyfriend. My parents had been declared unfit by an idiot social worker and Jenny had moved down the road to live Buck and his family. I imagined all of us together. I can’t remember how long ago it was that happened. One Christmas before I was married. Somewhere I have a photo. Jenny’s bleached bangs are looking lifeless. Buck’s wife Cheryl is smiling but you can tell the secret smoker is nervous for a cigarette. Buck has his mouth open because when he gets around Dad he talks and talks until someone says something he doesn’t like. Buck’s daughters are there. How long has it been since I spoke to my nieces?

            When I got out of college Buck and Cheryl were talking divorce but they managed to hold it together for a few more years. Then I listened to him over the phone for hours on end – diarrhea of the mouth my mom calls it. That went on for two years. I talked him out of everything from killing Cheryl and her new lover to threats of suicide. Then nothing for months. Then Emily got cancer. Did I hear anything from Buck then? Or Jenny? Not a peep.

            The scar on my foot I still have. Dad took me to the ER and I got seven stitches in my foot. The first day of second grade I wore one of my mom’s old slippers on my left foot. I can take my shoe and sock off to this day and run my finger across the clear white scar, nearly forty years later.
            The scar remains but the family is practically gone. I imagined reading a story to my brother and sister to break their hearts a little. It all seems a bit ridiculous now. Even at the time I thought there was something silly about this wish. I wrote: “I picture myself going back to my childhood house to begin my recitation in front of a that hostile audience known as Family. They aren’t college people. They expect some egghead thing. Everything intellectual is weird. Maybe I’ll read a bad long poem and they will make that old joke about it not rhyming. Maybe they’ll say, ‘Spit it out Professor.’ Or they’ll call me Mr. Henderson Kyd, Famous Author-Wannabe, Brainy Writer of Unpublished ‘Works,’ the College Kid with No Day Job Who Never Worked a Day in his Life. The artiste! They don’t care that I’ve laid brick, built fences, drove forklifts, cooked chickens, sold paint and TVs, scrubbed toilets and waxed floors. They just know about the Shakespeare and inscrutable allusions. In fact they will probably be disappointed if I don’t start my story with something like, ‘And now I will employ the Milesian anecdotal mode of narration’ . . .
            I haven’t got Buck and Jenny to read my story. Not yet. I did read a draft of it to my dad. He thought it was pretty good. Someday I will have to write a story that breaks his heart. Maybe I will, if we both live long enough. For now I’ll just have to be satisfied with the scar on my foot and the image of my brother’s blood-red hands.