Postcards. Annie Proulx

7 When Your Hand Is Cut Off

      DUB HAD HIS NEWSPAPER CLIPPING, and for three years he’d kept it in a bureau drawer that would hardly open.

       Marvin E. Blood of Vermont was injured after he jumped from a moving freight train entering Oakville, Ct. and slipped under a boxcar. He was taken to St. Mary’s Hospital where his left arm was amputated above the elbow. Oakville Police Chief Percy Sledge said, ‘Men are bound to be injured if they ride the rods. This young man’s strength should have gone to the War effort, but he has become a burden to his family and the community.’

      Mink and Jewell had to drive down to the hospital in Connecticut to get him. Mink stared at the empty sleeve of the donated corduroy jacket and said, ‘Twenty-four years old and look at you. Jesus Christ, you look like a hundred miles of bad road. If you’d did your hellin’ around up at home you wouldn’t be in this mess.’

      Dub grinned. He’d grin at a funeral, Mink thought. ‘Gonna have somebody sew that onto my pajamas,’ Dub said. But it was no joke. And when Dub saw the package store on the street in Hartford he told Mink to pull over.

      It was hard, opening the pint with just one hand. The cap seemed sweated on. He clenched the bottle between his knees, spit on his fingers and twisted until his fingers cramped. ‘Ma?’ he said.

      ‘I never opened a bottle of that poison for anybody in my life and I won’t start now.’

      ‘Ma, I need you to do it. If you don’t I’ll probably bite the top of the goddamn bottle off.’

      Jewell stared fixedly at the horizon, her hands folded hard into each other. They traveled another mile. Dub’s breathing filled the car.

      ‘God’s sake!’ shouted Mink, swerving over to the grassy verge. ‘God’s sake, give me the damn thing.’ He bore down on the cap until it gave a crack and spun free. He passed it back to Dub. The smell of the whiskey flowed out, a heavy smell like roasted sod after a brush fire. Jewell cranked her window partway open and for the two hundred miles north Dub said nothing about the air that chilled him until he shook and had to drink more whiskey to see straight.

      They’d known he was a fool since he was a baby, but now they had the firsthand proof he was a cripple and a drunk, too.

      It was a little easier, Dub thought, since they’d culled four of the cows, but they still didn’t get done with the evening milking until six-thirty or later. Even if he skipped supper he still had to clean up and get the stink of the barn off him. No matter what he did, whether he took a bath, sliding under the grey water, or scrubbed his arms and neck with Fels Naptha until his skin burned, the rich mingle of manure, milk and animal came off him like heat when he danced with Myrt. But on Saturday night after the milking he cleaned up and took off for the Comet Roadhouse. Try and stop him.

      It was cold. The truck wouldn’t turn over until he set the hot teakettle on the battery for half an hour. He probably wouldn’t be able to start it again at midnight when the Comet dosed, but he didn’t care now and a kind of impatient joy sent him skidding around the gravelly curves, running the intersection stop sign. He didn’t see any lights coming. He rushed toward the Comet’s warmth.

      The parking strip was full by the time he got there. Over the roadhouse’s roof the red neon comet and its hot letters glowed in the icy night. Ronnie Nipple’s truck, with a load of wood in the back to give some traction on the lull, was parked at the far end of the row of cars and trucks. The snow squeaked as Dub cramped the tires and pulled up beside it. He could probably get a jump from Ronnie if he had to. Or Trimmer, if he was here. He looked down the row for Trimmer’s woods truck but didn’t see it. His breath gushed out, building up an edge of time on the windshield where the heater air hadn’t warmed it. He dammed the truck door, but the worn catch didn’t hold and it bounced open again. ‘Fuck it, no time to fool around with that.’ He ran toward the door with its frosted glass and jingling bell, anxious to dive into the roar of sound he heard coming from inside.

      The steamy, smoke-hot room sucked him in. The tables were jammed, the bar was a row of bent backs and shoulders. The jukebox glowed with colored bubbles, saxophones flaring, gurgling out of the bubbles. He threw himself toward the fire of wooden matches, the glint of beer bottles, the mean little half-moon smiles of emptying shot glasses. He stood on the bar rail and looked for Myrtle, looked for Trimmer.

      ‘How the hell do you get it so hot in here,’ he shouted at Howard who was rushing back and forth behind. The bartender turned his long yellow face toward Dub. The sagging smoke-discolored skin seemed fastened in place by a pair of black metallic eyebrows. The mouth opened in a grimace of recognition. A wet tooth winked.

      ‘Body heat!’

      A man at the bar laughed. It was Jack Didion. His arm hugged the older woman next to him, wearing a long baggy dress printed with navy blue chevrons. She worked at Didion’s, milked cows, wore men’s overalls all week. Didion whispered something in the woman’s ear and she threw back her head and roared. ‘Body heat! You said it!’ Her broken fingernails were rimmed with black.

      The colored bottles stood in a pyramid. After Howard’s wife died he had taken the round mirror etched with bluebirds and apple blossoms from her dressing table and hung it on the wall behind the bottles so their number was doubled in richness and promise. Howard, too, was doubled as he passed back and forth, the back of his head reflected among the bottles.

      The little stage at the end of the bar was dark, but the microphones were set up, there was the drum set. A cardboard sign on the easel – THE SUGAR TAPPERS in glitter-dust letters. Dub, gyring through the dancers, saw Myrtle at a table against the wall, leaning out into the throbbing light so she could watch the door. He came up behind her and put his cold hand on the back of her neck.

      ‘My god! You could kill a person that way! What took you so long, as if I didn’t know.’ Her brown hair was screwed into a chignon that had slipped its moorings and rode low on her neck. Her mouth was drawn with lipstick into a hard little crimson kiss. She wore her secretary suit with its ruffled blouse. Her small eyes were a clear teal blue fringed with sandy lashes. Her shallow face and flat chest made her look weak and vulnerable, and Dub enjoyed that illusion. He knew she was as tough as oak, a trim, tough little oak.

      ‘What always takes me so long; milking, washing up, get the truck going, drive down here. We didn’t get through the milking until late. Usually I don’t care, but tonight I was goin’ crazy tryin’ to get out. He was just squeezin’ slow, I guess. What a fuckin’ hopeless mess.’

      ‘Did you tell him?’

      ‘No, I didn’t tell him. He’ll go through the wall. Want to make sure the rifles are all locked up before I tell him. I thought he got a little mad when Loyal took off, but it’ll really rattle his marbles when I drop the word we’re getting hitched and moving out.’

      ‘It isn’t going to get any easier the longer you put it off.’

      ‘There’s a lot more to it than just telling him. I can’t clear out until I know he’s got a way to get out from under that farm. Sell it, is what I think he ought to do. Then I got to come up with some money. Some real money. It’s o.k. for us to talk about moving off, about me taking the piano tuning course and all, but money is what makes it happen and I don’t got any.’

      ‘It always comes down to money. That’s what we always end up talking about. It never fails.’

      ‘It’s the big problem. He don’t say much, but I know damn well the mortgage and the taxes is way behind. He ought to sell but he’s so damn stubborn he won’t. I try to mention it he says “I-was-born-on-this-farm,-I’ll-die-on-this-farm,-farmin’s-the-only-thing-I-know.” Hell, if I can learn piano tuning he could learn something different. Run a drill press or something. Want a beer? Fizzy drink? A martini?’ His voice puffed, rich, comic.

      ‘Oh, I