No Shadow of Turning

Photo by Mike Norton

bonny:

My grandfather, the Reverend Thomas Argyle Faith, lost his right thumb when he was sixty-five trying to save a cow in labor. After that he used his index and middle fingers to write his sermons, the conviction of his strong, boxy penmanship compromised by an imbalanced teetering to the left. I tried to write my name this way to see how it would feel, the difficulty of the task further increasing my awe of him. I would look through his bookshelves, finding slips of his notes in his many Bibles and volumes of theology. I could tell by the handwriting when he had read them, before or after the loss of the thumb.

I was nine or ten at that time, taller than all the boys but still young enough to make crosses of wooden tongue depressors and pipe cleaners in Sunday school. The minister’s family sat close to the front during the service. I had a devil of a time facing forward, for behind our family and a little to the left sat the Lesters, Jack Lester most significantly, who’d gotten me in trouble passing me a love note the year before in Mrs. Satterfield’s third grade class. I hadn’t forgiven Jack, but neither had I forgotten the rather crooked heart I’d glimpsed at the bottom of the page before Mrs. Satterfield caught the paper up from behind me.

I knew I’d brought the trouble down upon us myself. One day during reading I’d been staring hard at Jack’s face, admiring the cloudy pink blotches on his white, round cheeks. I was imagining what it would feel like to poke one of those soft pillows with my finger, and before I knew what I was doing, I’d reached over and done it. His cheek had far less give than I’d hoped, but my finger left a satisfying pink bull’s-eye when I withdrew my hand. He turned slowly and looked at me, unreadable, for almost a minute. I suppose that moment was what ignited his passion, the communication of which would in turn ignite my intense hatred of him due to a missed recess I spent glaring across my desk at him while he hung his head and avoided my eye.

Now there was no safe place, not even church. Where before I had enjoyed the Bible stories and coloring sheets of sandy scenes of the olive-treed Holy Land, now I could only bite my lips, itchy and aware of Jack a few seats down the table. One day there weren’t enough pieces of candy to go around. When the basket came last to me, I found that no caramels remained, but, remembering my mother’s lessons, didn’t say a word. Jack saw and flicked his piece down to me, right in front of everyone, the teacher and all our classmates. I was aflame with humiliation, but the teacher congratulated him on his generosity, quoting the Bible verse about giving the poor man the cloak from your back, though I’m not sure that particular scripture quite applied to Jack and me right then. I saw the pleasure in his smile and saw also that it did not result from the praise.

My grandfather must have heard about his action, because he brought it up in the sermon that day, holding Jack up as the virtuous paradigm of charity that I knew quite well he was not. The way I viewed it, my grandfather might as well have announced Jack’s and my covert entanglement to the entire congregation, for when I looked back—I found I couldn’t stop my head from turning—Jack was looking too, with the same wicked eyes he’d used on me that day in class.

My sister and I had to sit for a long time at the hospital the night my grandfather lost his thumb. Our parents and grandmother were in his room, getting things lined out before...