Open Writing

There I was, in the field, sharpening a sickle by stropping it on my whetstone. When a person does this, one index finger is extended up the back of the stone. You stroke the sickle up away from you (if at all) on the side with the finger, and down towards you on the side without the finger. (Need I continue?). Yeah, yeah, I managed that day to reverse the process. In a bubbling bean-fart or less, my reward was an inch-long, suddenly-dangling fingertip, still attached to the actual finger only by what appeared to be a thin sliver of dripping, bright red something-or-other.

Thank heaven Grandpa was able to hear my desperate, curdling cries for help! (The fact that he was less than five feet away at the time was probably a plus). It took maybe one good step to reach my side, at which point he calmly removed a well-used sweat bandana from his leathered neck, and wrapped the mess — as if it had been a half, say, of a tiny river carp.

He then escorted me, neither of us at all pleased, out from the fields and into the house, where we headed for the toilet and what was to be one of the most memorable experiences of my young life.

Despite my outrageous howling, which must have withered milkweed for acres in every direction, Grandpa led me to the old-but-always-clean sink in the dingy bathroom, where a single exposed light bulb illuminated the room's entire length and breadth. (You could bet your curdled soap scum that women didn't read in the tub in those days!)

Running ice cold well water from the sink tap, and supporting my flopping fingertip with his webbed fingers, he flushed the burning wound with an expertise born of grandpa-centuries before him. With things eventually under minimal control, he had me hold my own finger under the continuing, splashing flow as he approached the cabinet at the far end of the long and skinny room. Clearly, Grandpa had used our whimpering stab at water sports to formulate a plan. I should have known! Frankly, in those days, you treated a fingertip gash with the same remedy you'd use on a splinter extraction, a severe nipple bite, or an inadvertent spleen extraction!

Although I hadn't realized it at first, I quickly saw that he was approaching me with the familiar bottle of time-tested Watkins Liniment! I'd always known that it smelled. I did not know that it burned! Needless to say, the pain was excruciating as he poured the stabbing, stinging, biting juice directly from the bottle onto my unfortunate, woebegone (and damned near just plain gone) finger; and I know even today that somewhere on that farm there must be a mass grave for the billions upon billions of germs we slaughtered in the next few seconds. When Grandpa was satisfied that no germ-beast could possibly have remained alive through such a chemical scalding, he blotted the finger dry with an old towel and applied the tape directly. (Folks in that day thought of cotton as something that grew in southern fields and was made into dresses. Absorbent cotton, like cuticle remover, daffodil hairspray, and scented bath salts, was not the sort of thing you found in the average rural toilet. Nor an unheard-of such as "gauze"). Grandpa merely taped the finger back in place, wrapped it four or five hundred times to make sure the joint would never work again, and led me back to work in the blood-stained field. I could, without thinking at all, take you to the exact spot today, more than half-a-century later.