No.
Now I'm so verklempt.
I can't actually-- I can't actually begin
to read this harrowing story.
But it was actually perfect, because the thing
that I was planning to do since I'm apparently-- oh, wait,
is this real water?
Yes.
OK.
It's not sodium-laced.
I have a big thing about Dasani.
[LAUGHTER]
But what the plan-- the thing I was planning to do
was, since I'm going to read for about 40 minutes, what
I thought I would do is just read the first two chapters
without any introduction to it at all,
just to see what happens.
We'll see if I can actually do that.
But it's such a great pleasure to be here.
And I'd like to thank everybody who introduced me
and everybody who did not introduce me,
but is still helping to have brought me here.
And now, I'd like to introduce-- no, no, I'm sorry.
You are just stuck with me.
All right.
So let's just do this.
"Little Muddy."
After escaping from the farm, Eddie drove through the night.
Sometimes, he thought he could feel his phantom fingers
brushing against his thighs.
But above the wrists, he now had nothing.
Dark stains covered the terry cloth wrapped
around the ends of his wrists.
His mother had stanched the bleeding with rubber cables.
For the first hour or so, the divot-riddled road
jostled the car, increasing the young man's agony.
And he clenched his teeth through the sickening pain.
Steering the vehicle with his forearms stuck
in two of the wheel's holes, Eddie couldn't keep the Subaru
from wobbling and swerving.
And he feared the police would notice, pull him over
to find that he had no license, and arrest him
for stealing the car.
When he came to smooth asphalt, he turned right
for no good reason.
And after a few miles, he saw a sign
that proved what he and his mother had believed all along.
"Louisiana," he breathed, "almost six years in that
place."
To finally see evidence of his whereabouts
momentarily eased his mind.
But he had to keep going.
He had only a faint memory of where the farm ended.
And he couldn't tell if he'd driven himself closer
to the center, where someone might capture or kill him,
or a way toward freedom.
The gas-pump symbol on the dash turned red around the time
he saw signs for Ruston.
The owner of the Subaru had left his wallet by the gearshift.
And Eddie found $184 in it, which, to his 17-year-old mind,
meant he could pay for gas to almost anywhere.
First, he went to Houston to look for Mrs. Vernon.
But to his surprise, the windows and doors of her bakery
had wooden boards nailed over them.
That such a responsible woman had either failed or fled
implied nothing good about the fate of the neighborhood
these past six years.
The only other safe place he could think to go
was his Aunt Bethella's house.
He slithered into an oversize sweatshirt
to hide his injuries from her.
But when he got to the door, he could
tell that someone else lived at her address--
all the patio furniture had changed,
toys lay jumbled on the cushions,
and a wooden sign next to the mailbox said "The MacKenzies."
Since it was too early to knock, he left.
But at the curb, he spoke with a neighbor who remembered her.
She told him Bethella lived in St. Cloud, Minnesota.
His aunt had told him that she might move,
but not that she had gone so far.
Hadn't she said she would call with the address?
Was that before the phone got cut off?
In the abstract, Eddie knew that Minnesota was far away.
But he couldn't fathom the distance.
The name St. Cloud sounded to him like heaven.
His confusion only rose when a sleepy Texan trucker
in a Stetson made getting there sound easy.
"You take 45 North until you hit 35," the dude said.
"Then just keep on 35.
That there's the ramp to 45 just yonder."
To save money, Eddie stopped only at Tiger Marts
or On the Gos to get gas, and snacks, and use the john.
If he saw a police car in the lot, he kept going.
If a truck-stop bathroom needed a key, he'd go someplace else.
After he got his zipper down the first time,
he couldn't pull it up.
He thought of sleeping, but whenever
he pulled into the corner of a parking lot
and lay down in the back seat, fiery twinges of pain
snaked up his arms into his neck.
When he asked for help squeezing the gas pump,
strangers would knit their eyebrows together,
shocked eyes asking, "This kid can drive without hands?"
He'd say nothing but bristle and think, "I got here, didn't I?"
On the third morning, feeling safer
after reaching Minnesota, the pain now a dull throb,
he sat nursing a Coke in a diner off I-94, the Hungry Haven,
a cozy place decorated in beauty board,
with citrus remnants cooked onto the silverware.
In the smoking section, a lone waitress sat facing away from
the counter, her body slack as any customer's.
An urgent story resounded on the TV behind her.
Some rock star in Seattle had shot himself dead.
She stared at the highway as if it were God.
It took Eddie a while to get her attention.
But once he did, she snapped to and hopped
over, spine straight, pen behind her ear.
"Do you mind, miss?
Can't light it myself," he said, his request
muffled by the cigarette he'd wrangled from its box
and picked up with his mouth.
He grinned and raised his elbows,
meeting the woman's eyes with his own.
"Oh, of course, right," she said, her eyes
failing to mask her surprise.
She struck a match, and he inhaled the fire
through the cigarette.
"Going to be a nice day," she announced,
like something profound.
"Let me know if you need anything else."
Her name tag said "Sandy," pinned
onto a dingy pink dress with a gray apron wrapped around it.
Under her nasal tone, something cared so strongly
that Eddie moved sideways down the bench a little,
crablike, to avoid the power of her interest,
fearing that she might get to know him against his will.
Sandy turned away.
"Actually, I'm looking for work,"
Eddie blurted out to her back.
He wasn't looking yet, really.
But suddenly, he needed her kindness, superficial or not,
craved it beyond his ability to stay distant.
"Near here," he went on.
He didn't think Bethella would let him sponge for long,
if at all.
She might not even care that he'd lost his hands.
She'd probably blame his mother.
Sandy turned and the glow left her face.
"Mm," she said, "What kind?"
"Of work can I do?
You'd be surprised.
Fixing stuff, computers, I also do carpentry, wiring,
odd jobs."
Doubt spread across her face.
And Eddie thought he could almost read her mind--
now, how can this boy do all that in his condition?
He sat up.
"I can do just about anything I set my mind to,"
he said, pouring brightness over her hesitation.
"God makes three requests of His children-- do the best you can,
where you at, with what you got now."
"That's beautiful," Sandy said.
"I bet your mama told you that."
Eddie smiled, because he knew his mother would never
have said such a thing.
He'd picked up the saying from Mrs. Vernon.
But then, it occurred to him that Sandy
would think the smile meant, "Yes, mama sure did."
Confirming that her fantasy of his life was the truth
would make her more likely to help.
After a brief chat, he told her his full name,
and she wrote it down on a wet napkin.
He figured he'd never hear from her again.
It took Eddie a day and a half to find Bethella.
He asked one of the few Black pedestrians
where he could find a beauty shop,
adding that he meant to find his aunt.
The pedestrian asked his aunt's name,
which she didn't recognize, and then
recommended he try Marquita's Beauty Palace on St. Germain.
To get there, Eddie had to drive across the Mississippi River.
He read the sign aloud as he crossed.
It astounded him to think that this
was the same river as the one near his hometown, Ovis,
Louisiana, and that it flowed as far as he had just driven.
Seeing the same river here helped him adjust.
The Great River wasn't wide or grand in Minnesota.
But it didn't fill him with the same panic as it had back home.
It had less to do with death.
The past didn't slither through this shallow water.
He didn't imagine any drowned ghosts staring up
from the riverbed or bobbing up out of culverts,
their googly eyes asking, "Why?"
St. Cloud pacified him.
Its evenly spaced suburban homes reminded him
of a balsa wood city he'd seen in a children's book.
Even its housing complexes sat comfortably
behind tall, healthy trees, and sprawling plots of grass.
And though, a 100 Day-Glo toys might
lie upturned on one driveway, the next several lots
would have neatly arranged yards already flashing
a few green shoots, while here and there, a crocus forecast
a pleasant spring.
It felt more like home than Ovis,
a place he hadn't seen in almost a decade.
Eddie circled the area for nearly half an hour
without getting out of the car, suddenly embarrassed
not to have hands after what he took
to be Sandy's condescension.
But eventually, thinking of how his mother needed him back
in Louisiana, he parked at a beauty shop
and nudged the door open with his shoulder,
holding his arms behind his back with calculated ease.
The women at Marquita's did not know Bethella,
but they did know a different beauty shop, the Clip Joint,
on the west side.
That place had closed for the day by the time Eddie arrived.
So, finally exhausted, and no longer in the kind of pain
that prohibits sleep, he moved the car
into the corner of a deserted parking lot,
contorted his body into the hatchback,
and took a long nap until it got too cold to sleep,
and he had to turn the engine on,
twisting the key in the ignition with his teeth.
When he visited the Clip Joint the next morning,
he kept his wrists shoved into his pockets.
It was best to keep them raised, but self-consciousness
had overtaken him.
A beautiful fat woman in a skin tight black-and-leopardy outfit
said she knew his aunt and told him exactly where to find her.
She then began a long one-sided conversation,
first about how much she admired Bethella,
then about the situation in Rwanda,
and several other subjects.
He walked backward out of the shop,
and she continued to talk, turning her attention
toward her coworkers instead.
Still wearing the sweatshirt, now for warmth
as well as subterfuge, he arrived
at the address the woman had given him
and stood on the stoop for a moment,
fearing he had the wrong information,
then ascended the remaining steps and rang the doorbell.
When he swung his forearms, the fabric concealed his wounds
and flopped over his wrists in a congenial way,
almost like the ears of a friendly dog.
He thought that this awkward solution,
along with the baggy pants, might
make him look enough like a normal 17-year-old
to fool his aunt for a while.
He stuck his wrists back into his pockets.
Presently, he heard movement inside the house,
perhaps, someone's feet descending
a carpeted staircase.
Then, he saw a finger move a bunched-up taffeta curtain
at the side of the door, exposing
one of his aunt's eyes, which registered instant shock.
Eddie heard a muffled squeal of delight,
and the air moved as she threw open
the door in one wide swing.
Bethella was a slight woman with a skeptical eyebrow
and a high forehead.
Grayer now, in chalk-mark streaks,
her thin hair stuck to her skull under a pantyhose cap.
She hadn't yet put on today's wig.
A homemade dress with tiny daisies
hung on her like it would on a wire hanger.
Her collar bones poking up, her angular fingers
tipped with fragmented nail polish.
The second-to-last time he'd seen
her, the Thanksgiving of his 10th year,
Bethella had shown up at the Houston apartment
he shared with his mother, carrying a sweet potato
pie encased in tinfoil.
Before crossing the threshold, Bethella had told his mother,
"You've got one last chance to be honest with me, Darlene.
Have you been using?"
When his mother shouted, "No!", Bethella
hurled the pie sideways onto the stoop,
where it broke and stuck.
Then she did an about-face and marched across the pavement
to her car.
In her vestibule, she hugged Eddie.
And he noticed she had on the same light gardenia perfume
she had worn then.
The scent returned Eddie to the time when he was 11
and had briefly stayed with Bethella and her husband,
Fremont Smalls, in Houston.
They had taken him in one night when Darlene
had used heavily and gotten stabbed
by someone the adults kept calling
"a friend" or "her friend."
But even then, he wondered what kind of friend
could stab someone bad enough to require a hospital stay.
Between her reluctance to return him
to Darlene and his mother's unpredictability,
Bethella ended up keeping him for a week.
But she didn't like children much.
And after Eddie accidentally toppled a vase
from Thailand, which hadn't even broken,
she decided, as he figured it, to wait long enough that she
would not have to admit any causality,
and then deliver him back to his mother
once she got home from the hospital.
Or as Bethella put it, "She needs you."
Fremont worked long hours.
He wasn't home often enough to weigh in on the matter.
Two days later, Bethella returned Eddie to his apartment
at dusk and locked him in hastily, not wanting
to interact with his mother.
But as soon as Eddie entered, he realized that Darlene
had gone again already.
He knelt on the couch, pulled the blinds apart,
and watched Bethella drive away.
Bethella now taught social studies and French
in the St. Cloud school system, she told him.
She and Fremont had moved north from Houston
to be closer to his family.
And he had worked at Melrose Quarry for almost five years.
From what his mother often said about Bethella,
he expected to find empties piled
in the closets and the backs of cabinets.
But he saw none.
Darlene felt that Bethella had her nerve
judging Darlene when she had her own habits.
But like many families, everyone wandered around
like children in a funhouse.
They could hardly see one another around the corners,
and what they could see was completely distorted.
The sweatshirt trick did not fool Bethella.
Almost immediately after standing back
from his stiff hug, she stared at his right sleeve,
lunged forward like someone trying to catch a falling
plate, and seized his forearm.
As she unsheathed his arm, her face took on an expression
mixing compassion with horror.
"Good God Almighty, Edward.
What on Earth?
When did this happen?"
And he supposed that she'd asked "When?"
because it was easier to answer than "How?"
"A few days ago," he said.
Bethella said, "Lord, have mercy,"
almost whispering, her lids narrowed, jaw low.
"Lord, have mercy."
Everybody Black knows how to react to a tragedy.
Just bring out a wheelbarrow full of the same old anger,
dump it all over the usual frustration,
and water it with somebody oughtas, all of which
Bethella did.
Then quietly set some globs of genuine awe
in a circle around the mixture, but don't call
too much attention to that.
Mention the Holy Spirit whenever possible.
Bethella shook her head and spoke hazily
of the Lord's Plan.
"We have to get you to a doctor," she said.
"Who did this?
Why?
Where have you been?"
Too many questions to answer at once, Eddie thought.
"It's OK now," he told her, which seemed
to pacify her momentarily.
But it didn't take long for her to peer at him.
Her skeptical eyebrow rising like a drawbridge.
"OK in what sense?"
[LAUGHTER]
"I have to go back for my mom."
Bethella pulled her chin back and shouted, "Oh, Darlene!"
As if his mother was standing there.
"I am guessing this isn't the first time," she said.
"What the Sam Hill has that lady gotten you into now,
that someone did this to you?
Come in already, boy, let me close the door.
Hands, my God!"
Mostly Bethella's house smelled of mold,
with hints of stale candy, mothballs, and something
earthy, maybe manure from the garden
or chitterlings boiled last night.
Dust had settled on the plastic-covered furniture.
Nobody had sat on it in a long time.
Eddie decided not to be the first
and took a seat in the kitchen.
Bethella walked over to the kitchen phone,
announcing that she was calling her doctor.
But Eddie begged her not to, insisting that he did not need
help, that the wounds did not even hurt much anymore.
It took some doing to convince her,
but eventually, she relaxed and offered him
tea in a chipped mug.
And wanting not to placate her more than he wanted
the beverage, he accepted.
"You sip it out of that straw," she said.
The liquid was weird and bitter, something
herbal you couldn't even improve with sugar.
"Mate," she explained, "from South America."
Having summers off allowed Bethella to travel and bring
back bizarre cultural things.
Eddie sipped, asking himself why exotic stuff always
had to be disgusting, bitter vegetables, fish heads.
Trying not to taste, he commented
on the odd flavor of the drink, knowing at once
that this type of discomfort would color his whole visit.
So much for freedom.
Bethella wrinkled her nose and said,
"And you won't be smoking in my house."
They moved into the dining room, and he sat.
"How long you think you'll need to stay?"
Bethella asked.
She probably hadn't meant for it to sound so impatient,
but a consistent quality in her voice
telegraphed impatience no matter her intentions.
A long pause clouded the space between them.
Eddie didn't know how long he would stay, maybe
only until somebody from the farm
discovered where he'd gone, or until he figured out
how to get Darlene back.
But he couldn't face that.
He winced at Bethella's ability to reject.
It was as if she had brought him back to his drug addict mother
again.
The pressure she put on him to explain
and the memory of her previous rejection rising up
a second time made him feel like someone
had taken a hold of his gut and twisted it until it emptied out
at both ends.
He projected his agony through his face
and let out a strange sound, a sigh
blended with a growl, burnished with a whimper.
Then he put his wrists in front of his face
and curled into his own lap.
Bethella pulled her shoulders back slightly
and remained silent for a while in the face of his animal
response.
She swallowed.
"Oh, no, dear," she said.
"I meant how long do you need to stay
before you go get your mother.
I'm sorry."
She patted his shoulder and stroked it.
"It's fine.
Everything's fine," she soothed.
And though it wasn't, and might never be,
the words painted over everything.
"I mean, I hope you're not expecting me to go with you.
I'll help you to the amount that I can,
but it's probably best if you don't bring her up here and--"
Eddie scowled and his aunt closed her mouth.
After a pause, she sighed and turned
on the television, which she kept in the dining room
for some reason.
Afternoon-news trumpets blared.
"Stay a while," she said to the television.
"I understand.
It's OK."
She lied, he figured.
Because the truth was always a tiger,
and the past, with its ugliness and struggle,
was a ditch so deep with bodies it could pass for a starless
night.
After the news, she showed him to what
she called the guestroom, actually the attic,
by pulling down the staircase from the ceiling with a rope
and urging him up without going in herself.
"A former student in need of sanctuary was my last guest,"
she told him, "about a year ago.
A few months before Fremont passed."
Eddie flinched.
"Right.
I guess you didn't hear that Fremont passed," she sighed.
"Since your mother dragged you off to God knows where."
Eddie shook his head and stared at her dumbly.
"I reckoned he was working," he said.
"You know he had a bad heart.
I mean, a good heart.
But it didn't work so well, plus the hypertension.
As hard as I tried, I could not get that man to eat right.
It happened at work."
Bethella paused, her eyes glistening.
"February 17th last year," she whispered.
"He was a good man," Eddie managed
to say as he turned to climb the stairs.
"He loved music."
Lit by a single bulb, a twin-size mattress,
neatly dressed with striped bedclothes faintly burned
by the old dryer, created a small oasis
in the middle of a disorderly storage space.
A pilly orange blanket lay on top.
Gradually disintegrating piles of dusty jazz albums,
carefully folded wooden-- woolen blankets-- oh, woolen, wooden,
that would be bad--
a broken decades-old vacuum cleaner, and an antique fan
clogged at the periphery of the room.
A long box that looked like an old suitcase
caught Eddie's attention.
But when he unsnapped its clasps, with some difficulty,
to discover a shining brass trombone inside,
nestled in red velveteen, the sight
put him in mind of both Fremont and a body lying in a coffin.
And he flipped the case shut.
Eddie stared around the dim room,
doubtful that he could sleep well there.
He pictured nights of watching for unpleasant signs
in the inky crevice where the halves of the roof
came together.
In less than an hour, Bethella changed her mind
and insisted that Eddie see a doctor.
"My doctor," she said, "she's a Chinese,"
perhaps assuming that her nephew would not
accept a white physician.
Eddie wasn't immediately swayed, though.
And Bethella gave him a lecture on the stubbornness
of certain Black men in the family,
like his grandfather P.T. Randolph and his uncle Gunther.
"You're acting just like your granddad.
He enjoyed sitting in his pain and wallowing," she said.
"Well, Gunther's got all the time in the world
to feel sorry for himself now in prison.
And all of you are smart enough to know
exactly how the world screwed you, and the Man screwed you,
and that there's no hope to change it.
Your daddy wasn't like that.
See, he was on the Hardison side, a fine man.
He tried to change things."
Eddie shot a weary look at his aunt.
"Oh, they got him," she continued proudly,
"but at least he died fighting."
She scratched her biceps and continued.
"Fine, be hard-headed.
But I don't have any time for a young man who
loses his phalanges and won't see a doctor.
And you're going to tell me how this happened
and who is responsible ASAP.
So help me God."
At first, Eddie resented Bethella's involvement
and resisted going to a doctor merely
for the sake of resisting.
But after a while, he admitted the stupidity
of his stubbornness, and weighing it
against the possibility of gangrene,
the workings of which Bethella explained to him in detail,
he agreed to go.
She offered to pay half or figure out how
to put him on her insurance.
"I'll say you're my son," she promised.
Quietly, he enjoyed that idea.
Dr. Fiona Hong had a clever face and an easy, staccato laugh.
Her limbs seemed loose for someone
in medicine, someone who had to jab folks with needles.
Her swooping arms won Eddie over.
It didn't bother him that she called him by his first name.
When she unwrapped his bandages, she
did not register very much shock or even curiosity.
Instead, she seemed impressed, almost thrilled.
Maybe doctors liked unusual cases.
"We're going to need to get you to the OR, Eddie,
pretty much right now."
Her bright, possibly nervous laugh, sounded like a bark.
"You'll also need antibiotics and painkillers,"
she informed him, "and we'll see each other again soon, OK?"
Several days and doctors later, as the two of them
rode back to Bethella's house, his aunt's thin patience
disappeared.
Her head flicking toward him like
a bird's, her eyes reddish and intent
and halfway off the road, she said, "You're not
telling me what happened, because you don't want me
to know what your mother did.
When are you planning to stop protecting her?
Stop protecting her.
What, did she do it herself?"
Eddie did not agree with Bethella,
but he knew better than to sass the most responsible member
of the older generation, especially when he
needed to sleep in her attic.
If he argued, she would pull rank and stick to her version
anyway.
Mostly, he wanted to make sure that his aunt knew
that Darlene was not to blame.
A few weeks after arriving in St. Cloud,
Eddie started to pick up jobs here and there.
He randomly encountered Sandy, the waitress from the Hungry
Haven, at a drugstore.
And she told him that an overworked construction
guy who didn't do concrete had heard
about a divorcee in a Victorian outside Pierz who
needed a whole pool patio and front walkway done.
Pouring concrete didn't require much finesse.
And the construction guy could handle anything Eddie couldn't.
When Eddie met with him, the guy made the call
while Eddie sat right there.
People did favors for strangers here,
Eddie noted, without exactly being friendly.
Nevertheless, he felt like he had a reprieve.
Bethella had mixed feelings about his decision to work.
Sometimes, she warned him to get a diploma, other times she
openly wished for solitude, seeming
to imply that he should get a steady job and get gone.
Eventually, Bethella stopped tolerating
Eddie's announcements about going to find Darlene.
"Your mother and I," she would begin, always
neglecting to finish the thought.
Then she'd say, "Just don't.
You have to have a bottom line."
Darlene had called the house, begging him to return.
But it soon dawned on Eddie that she hadn't quit drugs.
Their conversations splintered into anger and incoherence.
And while brooding over their relationship
in his workspace, a.k.a.
Bethella's basement, one day, he admitted to himself
that some problems and some people can never get
fixed even by a skilled handyman.
After that, Eddie might speak abstractly
about going to rescue his mother.
But he said very little to his aunt about the exploitation
and injury he'd suffered at Delicious Foods.
She never encouraged him to return for Darlene.
And she never asked for details.
The more time went by, the more ashamed
he grew about taking Darlene's side,
and the more he saw the sense in Bethella's
dispassionate, rational decision to cut her off.
In the meantime, good luck at work
made hedging easier for him.
His one job grew other jobs, then an apprenticeship,
and soon, a regular business sprouted up around him.
That September, Eddie turned 18 and moved
from Bethella's to an apartment just down the street.
So they could still look out for each other.
Sometimes, Eddie would go over to her house
and watch her new favorite TV show, a sentimental series
featuring a Black woman angel.
She would rub his shoulder blade and describe her pride in him,
but he could still hear the undertones of relief
that he'd left.
She might come over with a piled-up plate
sometimes, no sweet potato pies, but juicy greens
that made the breading flop off her overcooked fried chicken,
mashed potatoes in a tin foil pouch,
soaking up its metallic taste, undercooked pig feet.
He ate only enough to be polite.
He never complained.
He knew that good intentions always trumped bad soul food.
And he grew as comfortable with the surrogate motherhood
she provided as she did with the way
that he partially filled the space left by Fremont's death.
In due time, Eddie learned to stick a pen in his mouth
and write again.
And once he gained some skill, he sketched out a device--
two short cups, each with a pair of pincers attached, a simpler
model of a prosthetic hook he'd studied in a trade magazine.
The carpenter, to whom he'd become apprenticed,
helped him make a version out of wood, cheaper that way.
Together they perfected it, a custom
fit for the end of his right arm.
They smoothed and finished it, covered it
in a lightweight polymer.
And when that one worked, they made another for his left,
attached it to a harness with catgut strings,
and looped it around his back.
Wearing the contraption felt as grand to him
as putting on an expensive new suit.
Eddie stretched his arms and elbows,
testing out the potential for movement,
for subtle inflections in each pincer,
for a lifelike bend in the wrist.
The prosthesis seemed to wipe out the past
and stretch the future into infinity.
Eddie began to hope ferociously.
Perhaps, he would go back south after all
and get Darlene to leave Delicious
whether she wanted to or not.
He spent eight months or so gaining dexterity.
Mornings and late nights, he practiced picking up
grains of rice, turning doorknobs, spigots,
and pages, holding utensils, raising glasses.
As he grew more confident, he tried juggling two eggs,
but after covering his kitchen table in goo,
he switched to small rocks.
The range and subtlety of motion Eddie's invention
offered him expanded his abilities
well beyond what he'd hoped.
Pouring concrete and tarring roofs no longer
made up his entire work schedule.
After being in St. Cloud for a year and a half,
he returned to doing electrical wiring
and repairing appliances as he had done at the farm,
though it took longer to overhaul a radio than before.
He had trouble managing the tiny screwdrivers,
the intricate circuitry, but soon.
To the clients he started attracting,
Eddie became something of a curiosity.
They would come in to watch him work in his garage,
behind a house he now rented.
And he would sit intently on his high wobbly stool,
lit by a fluorescent desk lamp, amid oily file cabinets,
and plastic drawers full of washers, lug nuts, screws,
nails, and grommets.
They would stay sometimes until it seemed rude.
Fascinated, he assumed, by the fact
that a physically disabled man could
make a profession of such precise work,
by the added hardship brought on by his color, and eventually,
by the minute detail he could accomplish
using only the curved wooden hooks of his prosthetic hands.
Eddie knew that they viewed him as a novelty,
but he didn't have the luxury of begrudging
them their reactions.
Instead, he sought to translate the amazement in their faces
into a stable income.
If he could have pulled coins directly out of their mouths,
he would have.
He'd meet the men's sheepish gawking
with technical conversation.
"These here wires, this darn microchip,
did you ever see a circuit board this?
Your screen is blown out."
Or if they showed no interest in the gadgets or home repairs
he hunched over, he'd start with the weather.
You could nearly always complain about the cold in Minnesota.
And if you couldn't, you could marvel
that for once it wasn't cold, or about the strange summer heat.
You could then graduate to the Twins or the Vikings.
Somebody who brought a child or a dog into his garage
hardly had a choice about whether to become
a regular customer, when the pressure to seem
compassionate and good in Eddie's presence intersected
with the cuteness of animals and children,
the resulting atmosphere could probably
have made a bedridden hermit throw a dance party.
Only the kids ever asked about his condition, though,
and, provided the adults didn't hush them,
he'd speak frankly and jovially.
One day, a red-haired girl asked, "Hey, mister,
how come you have claws?"
"I had an accident," he told her calmly, though,
at the same time he remembered every second,
the blindfold made with a sweatshirt,
the tension in his clenched teeth,
the moment when he blacked out from the pain.
Her father stroked the nape of her neck.
"Don't bother the handyman when he's busy, Viv."
"He's a handyman without hands," Viv observed.
Her father let out a loud anxious laugh,
Viv giggled, and Eddie turned away from his work for a moment
to share their laughter.
As the father laughed, Eddie wondered
if the man would hold the comment against his child.
But the tension ebbed, and Eddie leaned down
until some flyaway strands of her hair tickled his nose.
"You know, that's exactly right, Miss Wilson.
I never thought of it that way."
Her father made an apologetic mouth,
"She's darn plucky, my Viv.
I'm sorry, Mr. Hardison."
"No need," Eddie said, "that's a great saying.
I'm going to put that on my business card."
He turned to the girl, "How would you like that?"
"I guess that would be fine," Vivian said demurely.
"Be careful," her father warned him,
"this one will want royalties down the line."
The following week, Eddie visited the printer
and offset a run of small stiff cards emblazoned with his name
and contact information, carrying the girl's description
above it in red, curved like a rainbow over a landscape
with a river zigzagging through the center--
"Handyman without hands."
When he thought of the phrase, Eddie
didn't mind that it reduced his troubles
to a friendly, manageable quirk.
The funny contradictory label covered up
all the loss and pain, and made it
so that customers could approach him
with a feeling of comfort and friendliness.
People didn't recoil or start anymore
when their eyes traveled to the ends of his wrists.
"He's the handyman without hands,"
they'd say, "How cool is that?"
The St. Cloud Times wrote an article
about him and his business.
In the photo, he grinned, holding his prosthesis up,
a hammer balanced in the right one.
A headline described him as a local John Henry,
as if you could find that many John Henry's in Minnesota,
he snickered to himself.
Eddie saved 25 copies of the article.
And though he gave most of them away,
he hung one above his workspace inside a plastic sheath.
Soon, a flood of customers sought out Eddie's services--
people who had seen the article, or the card,
or heard about him through friends and relatives.
He welcomed the mild amusement spread
across their creamy complexions, the nervous questions pumping
through their blue veins.
He preferred curiosity to derision.
So he controlled his impatience, because the discomfort came
with a bag of gold attached.
Some of the white folks brought items to him
that they wouldn't otherwise have bothered
to get fixed just to meet Eddie Hardison,
the Handyman Without Hands.
The superior quality of his work,
however, brought a large percentage of the gawkers
back with more serious issues--
prewar homes begging for rewiring, bathtub reglazing,
wood-paneling installation or removal, patio design
and reconstruction.
He saved for and bought a more up-to-date prosthesis,
stainless steel this time.
But he preferred the comfort and facility of the early model,
wearing the newer one mostly for public appearances,
socials at the Nu Way Missionary Baptist Church,
business meetings, visits with friends.
2 and 1/2 years after arriving in St. Cloud,
Eddie opened up a bona fide shop downtown, Hardison's, selling
hardware, fixing appliances, organizing home repairs.
When the florist next door went out of business,
he expanded into that space.
The shop thrived, and the novelty of the Handyman
Without Hands wore off.
But Eddie never removed the phrase from his business card.
Eddie didn't let his disability get
in the way of an active life.
And that attitude paid off in many ways.
On an ice skating outing to St. Paul,
he met a paralegal named Ruth, four years his senior.
Ruth was the only woman he'd met in Minnesota
who remained unfazed by his missing hands,
though she did prefer to remove or warm up his metal
prosthesis with her cardigan before lovemaking.
After eight months of dating, which Bethella considered
too short a time, Ruth moved in with him
and became his fiancee.
They had a son out of wedlock whom they named Nathaniel.
The boy seemed to inherit his father's tenacity
and his grandfather's charisma.
Eddie presumed that by drafting and adhering
to such an average blueprint for a life,
he could overcome his misfortunes
and shake off all the agonizing memories of Delicious Foods.
But they never left him, nor did the urge to return to Louisiana
and set things right disappear completely.
Sometimes, he snapped awake in the earliest morning
hours, convinced that he was back at the farm.
Shrouded in pitch black, the memories
would return, alighting on his bed
like dark birds poised to attack him.
Inevitably, they seemed to say, someone
will reveal everything that happened on that farm,
and you will have to go back.