Roy seemed almost to wake up then. He seemed almost to come out of his wild fascinated daze. “I ain’t leaving,”
he said. He wasn’t yelling anything now; he was just talking, high, in a kind of old man’s shocked whine. His fingers were gone. “I ain’t leaving,” he said. “They’re mine.”
“What? No, come on. What are you talking about? We’ve got to hurry. Help me.”
“I ain’t leaving them here. They’re mine. They ain’t yours, are they? They ain’t yours.”
“No, please. Oh God. Help me, John.”
John Roscoe took Roy’s arm and tried to lead him away, tried to get him to walk towards the road. But he pulled his bloody arm free.
“They’re mine, goddamn it. I tell you, they ain’t yours. I told you, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you told us,” John Roscoe said.
“They ain’t yours.”
“No.”
“They’re mine. I told you already.”
“Yes, all right. We’ll find them.”
“Give them to me. I want them all.”
“We’ll find them,” John Roscoe said. “Lyman, go get my car started. Bring it here.”
“Oh Jesus,” Lyman said.
“Hurry up, goddamn it. Run.”
Lyman turned and ran stumbling across the wheat stubble to get the car. He fell down, jumped up again, and ran on. Edith and my father stood with Roy Goodnough beside the header. His hands and arms were twitching uncontrollably now, dripping blood all the time. He held them out in front of him. His face was bloody from the wound above his eyes, and there was more blood running down the back of his neck.
“I told you,” he said. “I already told you so.”
“He’s going to die,” Edith said.
“No, he isn’t. Not yet.”
“I’m afraid he’s going to die, though.”
“Stay with him. I’ll look if I can find any of his fingers. Jesus Christ Almighty.”
“Give them to me. They’re mine. They ain’t yours.”
“Yes, Daddy. Hush now.”
“I want them.”
“Yes, I know.”
“They’re mine, I told you.”
“Oh, please be quiet. Please, Daddy.”
“They ain’t yours. They’re mine.”
JOHN ROSCOE found two of the fingers and one of the thumbs. The thumb was still stuck in the section blades. The two fingers he found in the sand and stubble behind the header, but he couldn’t find any more. Edith held them in her lap on the way to town, sitting in the back seat of the old Model T Ford behind her father. They looked like thick bloody sausages in the handkerchief on her lap, except that they had black hair on them between what would have been knuckles and they had fingernails on the ends. There was still dirt under the nails. Edith brushed the sand and wheat chaff off them: the fingers were very stiff. Roy sat in front of her with his head fallen on his chest. He was mumbling to himself, and his bloody hands dripped blood steadily onto the floorboards of the car.
“I’m afraid he’s going to bleed to death,” Edith said.
“I don’t know,” John Roscoe said. “He’s getting weak.”
“Daddy,” Edith said. “Daddy, can you hear me?”
“I told you,” Roy was saying. “I told you, didn’t I? I told you.”
“God in heaven,” Edith said. “At least he’s still alive.” “Yes. We’ll be there soon.”
Lyman sat beside his sister, staring forward at the back of his father’s head, without saying a word. They drove as fast as they could in the Ford on the dirt road going north to town.
Holt didn’t have a hospital yet; there wouldn’t be one for another fifteen years. They stopped the car on Main Street at the storefront that was the doctor’s office, next to the harness and general store that has since become a Coast to Coast store. They got Roy Goodnough out of the car, and my father and Edith supported him under the arms and walked him inside. Doc Packer wasn’t there.
“Go find him. Quick.”
“I can’t,” Lyman said. “What if I can’t find him?”
“Just look for him. Hurry up. Goddamn it, ask somebody.”
“But Jesus,” Lyman said. Then he ran out onto the sidewalk.
I don’t know whether or not Marcellus Packer was the first doctor in Holt, but he was one of the first. He was a short man, and fat, with a walrus moustache like you see in pictures of Teddy Roosevelt. His moustache was always discolored from tobacco juice, even as an old man, when I was taken to him as a kid with mumps. He parted what hair he had in the middle. Lyman found him in the dark beer saloon on the corner, talking to some of the men at a table.
“You got to come,” Lyman said.
“What’s wrong, boy?”
“It’s Pa.”
“What’s wrong with him? Slow down. Stand still a minute, can’t you?”
“It’s Pa.”
“Where is he?”
Lyman ran back onto the sidewalk in the sun and up the block to the office. Packer followed him, taking short quick steps under his big stomach, on up the sidewalk and into the back room of the office, where Edith and my father had Roy seated on a chair with a bucket on the floor between his feet to catch the blood.
“Good God, man,” Packer said. “What happened to you?”
“They ain’t yours,” Roy said. “They ain’t yours neither.”
“What’s he talking about?”
“He got caught in a header,” my dad said. “He was trying to pull some wire out. The horses spooked.”
“He’s so weak now,” Edith said. “He’s been bleeding all the time.”
“I can see that. Help me get his shirt off him. That cut over his eyes ain’t so bad, but them hands of his. . good God.”
They cut his shirt and long underwear off along the sleeves so they wouldn’t have to touch his hands yet. He sat there in his ripped pants dripping blood into the bucket. Then they moved him over to a table.
“Pick up his feet,” Packer said. “There now, there. Lay him down. Hold his arms for him. Get another bucket, boy, if you ain’t going to help lift him, so he don’t bleed all over my floor. Over there in the corner. There now, that’s better. Hold him still now while I try to wash some of this blood off him. Jesus God, he’s lucky he don’t feel nothing.”
“They ain’t yours,” Roy said.
He was lying back on a table with his arms held out to the side, and Doctor Marcellus Packer was washing one of the stumps of his hands with alcohol. “I told you they’re mine,” he said. “I told you so.”
“What’s he talking about? Hold him still.”
“You might as well give them to him, Edith. Do you still have them?”
“Yes.”
Edith reached into the pocket of her dress and handed the handkerchief to Doc Packer.
“What’s this?” he said. He looked at the two fingers and the thumb in the bloody handkerchief. “What do you expect me to do with them things?”
“He had to have them,” Edith said. “But we couldn’t find the others, and John looked all over. He wouldn’t leave without them.”
“You wasted your time,” Packer said.
He shook them off the handkerchief into one of the buckets. They looked like they might be blunt fish nosing one another in the bucket.
“I ain’t no Jesus Christ,” he said. “Hold him still now. This is going to hurt. Maybe you think I’m some damn circus magician?”
IN THE END about all Doc Packer could do was to trim the stumps of Roy’s fingers and thumbs a little bit so they wouldn’t be so sharp, then he stretched the ragged flaps of skin over the ends and stitched them up into hard welts. Roy still had the one uncut, unscratched little finger on his left hand, and he damn near died. He probably should have died, too, but he didn’t die. He lived for another thirty-seven years with those cruel, raw-looking hands. He could crook his arms under a bucket and hold a fence post while you tamped in around it, and he learned to push a button through its hole so he could get his shirt on by using that one little finger, but he couldn’t milk a cow or work a fence pliers or drive a tractor. He couldn’t do any of those things that mattered. So he was snookered all right. He was fixed. Now he was dependent on other people, and he hated it.