By now I should have learned to be careful about what I ask for. In this space last week, I commented about missing my late father’s story suggestions.
Saturday afternoon a childhood friend called and suggested the day he smashed my finger would be a good topic for this week’s column.
Tom was in town to visit his nearly 100-year-old father and while here he drove out to look at the site where we attended country school. Though in our grade school days he was older than this writer, I was the biggest. We lived on the same quarter section and often went to school together. We lived about two miles from school. We had various methods of getting there. Somedays we rode horses, occasionally we rode bicycles, one year we hitched my horse to a cart my father had built out of an old trailer and rode to school in style. Sometimes his father took us to school in a pickup, but that usually meant we had to walk home.
When not in school, we got together to fish, watch television, play games and sometimes just to talk and be. Though neither of us had driver’s licenses we sometimes took his sister’s Crosley out for a fishing trip.
Though the school house was torn down about 55 years ago, the front steps and basement remain. Saturday Tom looked at the remains and remarked the school doesn’t appear to be nearly as large today as it did when we were enrolled there. The grounds have shrunk by at least half as neighboring land owners have moved fence lines.
As we talked about our school experiences, Tom suggested this week I write about the day I “stuck my finger in the pump.” I remember suffering a smashed finger when it was caught in the pump but I don’t think I stuck my finger in the pump.
We were having some trouble with the pump and the teacher sent two of us out to fetch a bucket or two of water before the noon meal. Most likely we were to fill the drinking water bucket and perhaps another bucket for hand washing. I may have been the last to get a smashed finger but I don’t think I was the first. It had happened at least once before. My injury might not have been the moste serious but it was the most dramatic.
I suspect part of the pump apparatus was broken and I was trying to hold it together while Tom pumped. It is also possible we mechanical wizards thought we had figured out a better (perhaps not safer) way to operate the hand pump on the days when there was not sufficient wind to turn the windmill wheel.
Tom was pumping rapidly when my third finger slipped into the wrong place and was pinched.
We stopped, looked at my finger and decided the injury wasn’t so bad and continued filling the water pails.
When we carried the water into the school, the other pupils were lined up in the kitchen waiting for the water to arrive.
When the teacher saw my bleeding finger tip, she insisted the wound had to be cleaned and bandaged. As I held out my hand for her, I remember it became difficult to see my classmates, it was like they were underwater. Apparently I lost consciousness and fell to the floor.
I came too on the floor looking up at my schoolmates. All were gathered around staring intently at me like I was a circus freak.
As Tom described that time in the kitchen, “He recalled I was a big boy, about 6 feet tall and that I made a terrible thud when my body hit the floor.
I shouldn’t argue with an older eyewitness but I couldn’t have been six feet tall in the fifth grade though I was taller and heavier than he was.
That winter I got even. We had gone to the pasture to ride our sleds. I wanted to use a sled run my father first used when he was a youngster growing up on that quarter, but Tom wasn’t satisfied. He thought we should look for a better run.
We found a likely spot and I went down the hill sitting on my Flyer sled. A particularly rough place may have bruised my tailbone but I suggested Tom try the run.
He lay down on the old Flyer and went shooting down the hill. When he encountered the rough place, he split his lip.
If it hadn’t been for that rough place and we had continued to use that run, we may both have been drowned for a pond was built at the bottom of that hill. Go down that hill today and a sled rider could glide over the spring fed pond surface and likely fall through the ice.
Perhaps we shouldn’t have talked Saturday afternoon for I had forgotten Tom’s role in the smashed finger and he had forgotten my role in his split lip. Even if we did bring back some unpleasant memories, it is good to visit with a childhood friend. I hope we can do it again some day.
Reader Comments(0)