The Card I Laid on His Desk

The Hand He Still Has

They fired up Number Six with the new curtain on a Thursday.

Maintenance set it to run and then one of them waved his hand through the beam, and the big old press just stopped, dead, the ram hanging in the air like it had been caught doing something wrong.

A couple of the guys cheered. I did not. I just breathed out.

Dale Pruett came across the floor to me that afternoon, still in his brace, and he had heard, the way everybody had heard by then, whose idea it was and when it had been drawn.

He stood in front of me a minute without a word.

Then he held out his left hand, because his right one cannot open, and he said, “Thank you for trying to save these in March.”

He held up the brace a little when he said it. “I know you tried before. I know it was in that box.”

I took his left hand in both of mine. I could not say anything.

All those months I had carried the card in the box, the going home, the telling myself I had done my part, and here was the man it had been drawn for, shaking my hand with the hand he still had and thanking me for the one I could not save.

He did not say it to make me feel better.

He said it because it was true, and because he is a decent man, and because he had done the math on that date same as Mr. Odom had.

He told me the therapist in Fort Wayne had him squeezing a soft ball and buttoning a board with buttons sewn to it, learning his hand over from scratch at forty-one years old.

He told me his boy had to tie his shoes for him for a while, and how that about finished him, a grown man and his ten year old kneeling on the kitchen floor over his laces.

Then he said the part I did not expect. He said, “I’m not telling you this so you feel bad. I’m telling you because somebody finally made it so the next guy keeps his. That is worth something, even now. Especially now.”

I have thought about that a hundred times since.

A man who lost the three fingers, standing there telling me the fix was worth something even though it came too late for him, because it would not come too late for the next one.

There is more grace in that than I will ever have.

That was the moment Joyce in my head cried, if you want to know. That was the one.