My father is the compass that bleeds. “Turn left here. Another left up ahead.” This in the time before Siri or dashboard screens with maps. You had to know the world, the alphabet of country roads, the highway arithmetic. My father’s detached thumb bled through the oily bandanna wrapped around it like it were just a wrench from the garage. The fabric was red before, but I could still see the blood.
It was the chainsaw. He yanked its cord and rattled it to life. He walked toward me, angry, hands full of noise. Then the slip or misjudgment that dissolved into a hush of breeze and birds. Stern and blank, in a world where one task follows the next and there was no moving forward until that task was completed, he said, “Let’s go. Take the keys.” The unfinished job a surrender. His severed thumb my trophy.
I was cutting the grass on his land. He ordered me. Acres of rural property bought for no reason and never used until sold decades later. No promised cabin. Not even a trailer. Nothing. He owned this land miles outside the city, thus he owned grass and grass needed cutting. “Let’s go to the land” meant, “You will cut the grass when we get there. It’ll show you the value of work because your mother sure can’t.” She had thrown him out years before because she wanted a job outside the chores of home. He said, “no.” She said, “go.”
Stupid. I thought the mower’s engine loud enough to hide my voice. I was yelling at him, profanities, thinking he couldn’t hear. Things like, “cut your own damn grass you lazy shitbird.” I said much worse. He heard each yelled word. Stood staring at me through the whole sermon, tall and thick. I thought he was watching me work. Making sure. Instead, he heard me shout truth in the way a twelve-year-old with new words would shout it. When the mower choked on fumes, he picked up the chainsaw and instead of meeting me, his son, with an armful of spinning teeth, he cut off his thumb. It thumped in the grass.
This made me believe in the Greek gods. It was their kind of fun. Laugh at a man lording over a boy. Invent a story about how a youth who had never sat in a chariot before drove a car for the first time. How once they arrived at the country hospital, a man in pieces would turn to a boy and say, “You drive like a sissy. Park. Let’s go make me whole again.”
Chuck Rybak lives in Wisconsin and is a professor of English, writing, and humanities at the University of Wisconsin—Green Bay, where he coordinates their prison education initiative. He is the author of two chapbooks and two full-length collections of poetry. Chuck also writes on Substack as The Declining Academic.
Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Ken Lund
Beautifully done. Economically written yet evocative.