Something sharp this way comes…

As a child, I loved to stay for a couple of weeks with my grandmother Ruby at her country home every summer, an hour outside of Savannah. My mother’s only brother, Bobby, was only 6 years older than me and I idolized him. For the most part, he indulged me in wanting to do everything he did except when he was off with boys his own age, getting up 12 year old boy things.

Uncle Bobby would take me hunting with him, using his BB gun while we looked for the wild quail in the nearby woods. He and his friends let me play Monopoly with them on summer afternoons, if they were not out looking for girls to tease. He made me a puppet theatre out of old wood found in the shed and grandmother sewed me clothes for the puppets Bobby whittled out of small blocks of wood.

Bobby loved to whittle and he had a pocket knife just for that purpose, although I’m sure he found other ways to use it, being a young boy in rural Georgia. I was watching him whittle one afternoon, as we sat on the front porch alone. I had often asked Bobby to teach me to whittle, but he always told me that I wasn’t allowed to handle the knife, as it was very sharp. Like any other 7 year old little girl, I nagged him until he finally relented.

He picked up a new block of wood and asked me what I wanted to make out of it. I told him a horse but then he explained that an animal like that was very difficult for my first time, so he suggested the face of a bunny rabbit. Not wanting to deter him from the promise of teaching me to whittle, I quickly agreed.

Bobby then preceded draw a bunny face on the small block, and explained to me how to hold the wood. But, more importantly he told me, was to always hold the knife so that the blade pointed away from my body. He also explained how to first carve the wood to get the shape of the bunny face before I got to the details. And then, he put the knife in my hand and watched closely while I began my first attempt at whittling wood.

He was extremely patient with me and that wasn’t easy to do as I was so excited; both at having a forbidden object in my hands and at the thought of carving something that would be totally of my making. About an hour went by when Bobby told me to let’s go inside for a glass of iced tea. I spent a couple of minutes whining that he could just bring my glass outside because I was at a very important part of my carving and I just couldn’t stop.

With renewed warnings of being careful with the knife, Bobby went inside. That was my opportunity to ignore him altogether and whittle my way, so I quickly turned the knife handle around so that the blade was coming towards me, convinced I could do it faster than way. You know what happened next.

I was holding the wood in my left hand, as I’m right handed, and I was just slicing through that wood in good time when the knife slipped and cut into the knuckle of my pointy finger. The knife was so sharp that I barely felt the cut but I did see the bright red blood begin to flow, that was about the time that Bobby came through the screened door and almost went into shock.

He quickly took off his t-shirt and wrapped it around my finger but the blood just kept on coming. He then tore off a strip of his shirt and put a tourniquet behind the cut and that did the trick. We looked at each other and knew instinctively that it was in both of our interests not to tell my grandmother what happened. Over the next few minutes, Bobby took me around to the back of the house to hide me while he snuck inside to get iodine and bandages.

He had to wait to clean the wound until he was sure it had actually stopped bleeding, and during this time, he would unwind the tourniquet and rewind it tightly again and again. After several agonizing minutes, when he was sure I had not cut into a vein and wouldn’t bleed to death, he cleaned the wound before administering the horrible red and stinging iodine.

At this point, I had yet to shed one single tear. I’m positive this was because I was scared to death of my transgression being discovered and the punishment that would surely follow. But when he poured that iodine on the wound, I yelled out, burst into tears and it took a few minutes for Bobby to sooth me quiet again.

It turned out to be fairly easy to hide what I had done because any time I had hurt myself in any way, I always wanted a huge bandage to cover it and my grandmother always accommodated me. We both decided it would be better to keep out of grandmother’s sight until it was necessary for me to make an appearance at dinner, so Bobby yelled into the house that we were going hunting for a while.

We did go into the woods where we wandered around for the next hour or so, and discussed in detail that I would explain the bandage by saying I had scraped my finger on a barbed wire fence. So it was at dinner that evening, when grandmother Ruby anxiously wanted to unwrap my finger so that she could properly clean it, that Bobby quickly explained he knew exactly how to do that, and do that he had. Since I had drawn a bunny face on the bandage, grandmother acquiesced by telling me how important it was to keep it clean and redressed each day until it healed. And it took a few days for that to happen, for sure.

It was years before Bobby and I confessed and that was only after my mother had taken me to the family doctor for a checkup and he noticed my finger was not exactly straight. He was the type doctor that always checked the fingernails for signs of possible internal problems. As it turned out, I had cut a muscle and since it had not been splinted while healing, the consequences are that my finger points upward against its will. I’m just glad it wasn’t my middle finger I had cut.

Jane