Two Fingers

One of my earliest memories of grandpa is holding two of his fingers. He had very thick fingers and I remember two of his fingers were all my chubby toddler hand could really hold. He was a veteran, but the kind that seemed to have come back with a broader worldview more so than trauma. He had killed people. However, he was either a psychopath or he had found a way to reconcile the belief and the cause because there was no apparent regret over what he had done.

 When I was young, he would take me out to work on weekends or after school. We lived near him, and with Dad not home, it seemed like he had taken on the responsibility to make a man out of me. The labor usually consisted of either cutting trees for firewood or working the garden that provided the family with tomatoes, cucumber, squash, and snap peas. I remember one Saturday morning in particular. 

“Use two fingers, son. Your fingers are still too small to make a hole big enough for the seeds you need to put in it.” 

“How many do I put in again?”

“Do about four or five.” 

I started to use two fingers, hoping for the best. 

“Grandpa, why do we put more than one seed?”

“We do that because not all seeds will sprout.” 

“Why do they not always sprout?” 

“You are asking a lot of questions today huh?” 

He paused to straighten up from his hunched position, took off his gloves, and pulled a rag from his breast pocket to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He stared, contemplative, at the sky, daring it to rain.

“Son, you can do everything right. You can choose a good seed, plant it in good soil, water it, weed it… Some seeds just don’t sprout.” 

__

“I know how to block the two-finger poke.” said the boy with spiky hair and a sleeveless shirt. 

I had recently moved to this school but this boy spoke to me as if he had known me all his life. 

“How?” 

“Look, you have to do this.” 

He held his left hand vertically in front of his nose to block the two-finger poke he exemplified with his right.

“And that way, when he pokes you like this, his fingers can’t reach your eyes. Unless he has super long fingers.” 

“What do you do then?” 

“You have to run.” 

We liked to play ninjas during recess because it gave us an excuse to work out our karate moves. The teachers hated it when we were within reach but were relatively unbothered by it when it was seen from afar. 

__

“I hate when you do that.” 

“You hate when I do what? I’m literally just sitting here.” 

“You rub your eyes when you’re annoyed or fed up. The more frustrated you are, the deeper you shove those fat fingers of yours into your eye sockets.” 

“Well, I’m sorry. Add that to the list of reasons you want a divorce.” 

The lawyer sitting across from us fidgeted uncomfortably watching our interaction. 

__

“Picking is easier when you plant one or two fingers as a base.” 

He gestured toward me, asking for the guitar wanting to show me an example of this principle. I handed it over. He played something I’d be able to play in a couple of years.

“See, if you set your fingers here, your hand doesn’t have to float around, it kind of anchors to the guitar. Your chords sound good, you just need to improve your picking.” 

I took the guitar back and tried.

__

She held my hand as she told me the story of her stepdad in her room in the middle of the night when mom was away at work. She could still remember his fingers, pointer, and thumb, gently pulling at the thin drawstring that held back her dignity. She told me how she still remembered the smell. Men’s body wash, dyed black, given a name that evoked machismo. 

__

“Stop doing your fingers like that.” 

“It means peace mom.”

“Not when you put your tongue between them, it doesn’t.”

“Ugh, fine.” 

They sat the rest of the night in silence, the only sound coming from the softly glowing television, playing a rerun of a rerun. She loved her daughter, but this was the age at which mothers and daughters fought. Divided by some Freudian desire to be unchanged. Nixon and her little girl, holding up the sign for peace, but meaning something else entirely. 

__

One of my last memories of Grandpa was driving him home after the hospital said there was nothing else they could do. I held his hand as I drove, and I don’t know if it was his weakened state or clouded mind but he grabbed ahold of two of my fingers, just like I had all those years ago. It looked silly, to see his large rough hands weak and limp in my own. 

“Are you feeling hungry Grandpa?” 

He hadn’t been hungry much, at this stage of his disease. So I was surprised to hear the answer.

“What are you craving?” 

“Pull up right here. They do that fried squash.” 

It was humbling to see the man that had raised me, held me on his shoulders, pulled my loose teeth, look so weak and desiccated before me. 

After quietly eating most of what was on his plate, he pushed it away with a look of slight annoyance and mild disgust.

“Done?” 

“Hmm.” 

I finished my food as he had taught me and pushed the plate away, more from satisfaction than an annoyance. 

“If life can be compared to the seasons, I am in the dead of winter.” 

We didn’t talk about Grandpa’s state much around mom. Thinking of her father-in-law’s condition made her so sad that we had both decided to not bring it up around her. She wasn’t there at the moment. 

“That would put me somewhere in the middle of spring.” 

“Squash planting season,” he said as he dropped the napkin he had been fiddling with onto the plate of unfinished fried squash. 

“Are you ready?” 

“To leave?” 

The pause after his “question to my question” indicated that I wasn’t asking if he was ready to leave the restaurant. After a moment he answered: “Yes, I am ready.” 

“I’ve been around a while.” His eyes seemed to grow misty as he looked away wringing his hands.

The ride home was quiet. 

“I’ll hold down the fort.” 

“You always have.” He rested one hand on his lap and one on the door handle. His hands seemed weak, barely able to grasp. Although still a bit cloudy, his brain had seemed to allow him a brief moment of clarity to enjoy the ride home. “Your Dad was always too busy building his own.”

“Yeah. You were never too busy.”

“You know he loved you right? He just grew up stunted, never seemed to grow up. The responsibility of having you was too much to bear at that age” 

“Yeah, I know.” 

“Not much is going to change for you. You’ll just have one less mouth to feed. It’ll be nice for you to only have to worry about one soiled diaper.

“It hasn’t been too bad…” 

After a few more minutes of silence, as he looked out the truck window to the roadside fields, he said “Almost planting season isn’t it?” I nodded yes as he grabbed for my hand with two weak fingers as the sun descended in the sky in a red and yellow display.