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Exactly Where I Am
- University of Georgia Press
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don't know where I am—on the porch, at the screen door, standing on the backyard walkway—but 1 know that I'm there when Daddy and Uncle Gill find RayAnn's fingers in the grass. Where I am standing seems less important than the way the flashlight steals the grass from the night, studies it slowly, then names it green. Daddy holds the light and Uncle Gill bends from a lifetime of factory work into the grass for his daughter's fingers— RayAnn who has cried all the way to the hospital, her hand wrapped in what was a clean bath towel. I'd call her a big, fat crybaby, but I'm half-sick myself, wherever I am—porch, screen door—the halfgrown daughter of another factory worker, the one who holds the flashlight and yells at me to get back into the house. "Mind your own business," he says. "Go watch the kids." I think my cousin's fingers are my business. I think my cousin's fingers , strangely enough, are the proper study of this night. She didn't even realize they were gone until her brother started screaming. She 120 Exactly Where I Am I Exactly Where 1 Am had run past the metal storage shed, and on the torn corner where Uncle Gill had accidentally backed the Buick too fast two winters ago, she had caught her hand, the metal sharp and cold and always just beyond Gill's fixing. That's constantly the way it was—more to get done than there were hours in the day: the storage shed, the roof, the upstairs window. In the garden nearby, potatoes swelled, then rotted in the ground. And then so fast that even a moment seems too long an explanation , RayAnn's fingers were gone and she was running past the tree, beyond the gladiolus to the rock driveway. Slender and turning dark as peach pits, two fingers lay in the cool, thick grass. Cory screamed with every ounce of breath in him and pointed, not at the driveway as we first believed, but at the setback in our lives that night: RayAnn's hand in its new shape. Before pain or shock or understanding, before RayAnn's shorts streak completely red, I know where I am. Barefoot and half-grown at Uncle Gill's birthday and these are the two families of factory workers in a summer yard and when we sing we are thieves and castaways. Our rendition of "Happy Birthday"is the one where everyone draws the last word out, fighting against breath, letting the trick candles have their time to pop and spark. Gill closes his eyes when he makes a wish. That deep, that strong. One layer of chocolate and one layer of white to please everybody, my Aunt Jen says, and we are pleased, cake in our hands, a wish, the box fan whirring in a kitchen window. My uncle is not even forty the night he finds his daughter's fingers in the grass after we have sung to him with the voices of country radio where all the songs are sad or humbled or on the very verge of drifting. Daddy takes the flashlight down off a pantry shelf, and Gill kneels near the shed out of necessity, and the light falls between them, cold and pale as dishwater. The doctor has sent them back here to work the grass, to hold the light, to grow old, and to be sung to. 1 have been born to watch the kids, though instead 1am watching two men from some place beyond my memory, beyond the rock driveway. 121 [44.221.81.212] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:01 GMT) A Brief History of Male Nudes in America The TV is on in the background and in front of me is a moment that cannot be relieved by time or surgery. Gill takes his handkerchief and wraps the fingers like small mementos which he and Daddy will drive through twenty miles of a summer night to deliver. My business takes me out there—porch, screen door, walkway— to watch what happens after a party when the men are given the odious task of picking up. They search the grass quietly because they know how to get a job done, having been trained at J & B Manufacturing . Gill is in Quality Control and Daddy operates a lathe, and together in the yard their figures speak of labor that...