Our newest “HOOK” is by:

Ann Wahlman spent her formative years in New England. She now resides in Baltimore, Maryland, where she has lived for the past seven years. Ann holds a degree in Psychology from The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC and is planning to pursue a Masters in Writing.

When I was a boy, my family lived out in Minnesota in a town by the name of Adrian, about halfway between Worthington and Luverne, where the soft undulating hills gave way to the wide open expanse of the prairie. The grasses would rise up gold in the late summer, the autumn sun drying them out to a pale silver-gold while the wind whipped the dust up off the ground and threw it into your eyes. Old Man Winter would come hard and fast, blanketing the state and our little town in snow until the massive lands seemed frozen in time. The winter thaw always gave way to the spring, where trees would awake and bud, the grasses thrust their way out of the wet earth, and animals forego their winter hibernation. In summer it was so green you could smell it — a rich, verdant bed of grass as far as the eye could see. Each season had its own look, like the ladies in town that had a different type of frippery for each day of the week.

The country was just recovering from the Great Depression in the 1930s. Our Ma didn’t have any of the fine frocks that the ladies in town had, but that didn’t seem to bother her one bit. She had a saying that went “food before finery”, and that was one thing we could always count on – we would have food in our bellies, even if we didn’t have shoes on our feet.

Our Pa was a cattle rancher, unlike his father who had worked laying the tracks of the St. Paul Railroad Company that still ran through our small town. Pa was the silent type, as stoic as the tall juniper tree in our backyard. Its branches only wavered when the wind blew something awful, and even then the branches would only give the slightest quiver. When Pa quivered, we knew he meant business.

Things were a lot different back in those days. Like many of our neighbors, we weren’t wired for electricity yet and we lacked indoor plumbing. The outhouse in our backyard was sweltering in the summer — a stench that would make you gag even if you held your breath, and colder than a witch’s tit in the middle of winter. During those two seasons you could set your watch by our lightning fast trips to the john.

Like most families in Adrian, ours was both German and Catholic – though we were also part Irish, thanks to Ma. I was the middle child of five, smack between two older twin sisters, and a younger brother and sister. As the eldest boy in our family, I had a lot of responsibility even at the age of seven. My younger siblings — Mary, aged three, and Walter, five —fell to my care once they became toddlers. The only time I wasn’t required to look after my younger siblings was after school when I went hunting, or when I was helping Pa out on the ranch. Caroline and Hannah — both aged ten — helped Ma out with the chickens, the housework, the gardening, and other kitchen duties deemed unfit for a boy my age.

In those days, you could bring your shotgun to school and sling it right on the coatrack with your coat, and no one raised so much as an eyebrow if a young boy had a pocketknife in his desk. So it was that one afternoon in the spring of 1937, Billy and I had our shotguns slung over our shoulders as we walked alongside each other, slopping through mud and kicking stones along the path on our way to our hunting grounds — a thicket of trees nestled into the side of a hill not far from the school house. It was late in April and the weather had turned a few weeks back. The snow had melted, funneling itself into the creek bed with such speed that what was normally a trickle in late summer was now fast rapids. The first spring grasses were pushing their way out of the thin crust of snow that was left and the trees had just begun to show the first buds of spring.

Billy and I were playing cowboys and Indians, firing off imaginary rounds at each other and arguing over who would play John Wayne. Billy carelessly swung his rifle toward me, and there was a loud crack as the ammunition discharged from the barrel. We were familiar enough with our guns to know the sound, but it still scared the devil out of both of us. I’d never known what it was like to get shot at before, but suddenly I knew more than I’d ever wanted to know about it. It hurt like the dickens — a burning, searing pain hotter than the hottest day I’d ever spent fanning myself in the shade while the cicadas chirruped loudly in my ears.

“Harry!” Billy yelled, the fear rising in his voice. “Harry, are you all right?”

I hollered something awful back at him.

He dropped his shotgun as if it were a red-hot branding iron and came running at me, skidding to a stop on his knees by my side.

“Aw hell, Billy! You shot me!” I held my hand out to him to show him my mangled paw. The buckshot had nicked up my left hand and had taken off the tip of my thumb.

“Oh, sweet mother of Mary,” he breathed. “It was an accident, I swear!”

“Don’t you dare use the Lord’s name in vain. My mother’ll get a switch if she so much as hears you breathe it.”

“Oh, Harry… Oh, that looks bad,” he said, inspecting it a little closer.

“Well quit gawking at it and let me get home to my mother,” I said, a little irritably.

He paled at the mention of my mother — she had a reputation that wasn’t at all exaggerated.

“You’re not gonna tell, are you?”

“If I show up with my thumb half blown to bits, you think she won’t ask?”

“She’ll tell my mother, Harry. They’ll take my gun away!” Billy loved that gun like a girl, that is, if he had a girl — which I knew he didn’t.

I rummaged in my coat pocket with my good hand for my white handkerchief and wrapped it around my hand. Blood soaked through it almost immediately. “Don’t worry about it, Billy. I ain’t gonna tell her you had anything to do with it. I’m gonna be in trouble anyway, so I’ll tell her it was me.” I got to my feet and slung my shotgun over my shoulder, holding my injured hand out in front of me like a priest holding the Bible at the liturgical procession. I started off towards home.

“Where are you going?” he called after me.

“Home. Where do you think?” I said. “You’d better run on home yourself now. I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”

I left him there standing next to his beloved shotgun — lying neglected in the dirt.

Ma was in the kitchen with my older sisters. I stepped into the kitchen doorway and the beginnings of dinner wafted to my nose, making my stomach growl. They were working on some dough, rolling it out and cutting out shapes, piling the scraps back up to be rolled out again. My mother, blessedly, had her back to me.

“What took you so long, Harry?” she asked, her attention on the dough rather than on me.

“Ma, I…”

I was just working out how best to tell her when Caroline caught sight of the blood-soaked handkerchief. Her eyes went wide and I shot her a warning look that begged her not to scream — but she screamed. My mother turned around to see me standing there, silent, bloody, looking scared — and a whole host of terrible things likely went through her mind.

“Lord have mercy!” she said as she dropped her rolling pin onto the floor. It made a thud against the wooden floors and rolled to her feet. She ignored it completely and rushed to my side. “Oh Harry, are you all right? What happened?”

“I’m fine, Ma. I just…” I looked down at my hand. “I done shot my hand.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’ll need to see the doctor,” I said, trying to sound calm. “But I won’t die or nothing.”

She straightened up a little, being assured of my continued existence — though her switch might end me after the doctor had stitched me up. “Well, let’s see that hand,” she said.

I unwrapped it for her and she had a look, clucking her tongue at the shame of it all. Without a moment’s hesitation she put on her coat and her hat, ordered the girls to mind the house and finish dinner, and ushered me down the steps to the Chevrolet Six they had bought the year I was born. They had gotten it brand-new, and although it was seven — going on eight — years old, it was still running fine thanks to Pa’s careful maintenance. It was still better than riding horseback down to Dr. Adler’s house with my hand throbbing with each sway of the saddle, but as the little Chevy bounced and rolled its way down the dirt road, I was starting to think it wasn’t all that much better.

Dr. Adler’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Evelyn, met us at the door and showed us into her father’s office. I was sure she was used to seeing some pretty horrifying things being a doctor’s daughter and all, and her father having his practice out of his house, but she seemed white-faced and terrified. Dr. Adler came in, all business, and took a look at my hand. He picked out what buckshot he could and cleaned it up, but he hesitated with a frown as he looked at my thumb.

“Mrs. Persig, I can try to save the thumb if you like. But I’m concerned about gangrene. Otherwise, I’ll have to amputate the portion above the knuckle and stitch it back up.”

I didn’t understand half of the words the doctor had said, but I knew what gangrene was from Pa’s stories about the war — and it scared me.

Ma pressed her lips together in a frown and looked at me critically. “If he’s old enough to shoot his fool thumb off, he’s old enough to decide how to fix it,” she said. She folded her arms across her chest and stared me down.

Dr. Adler looked at my mother carefully. “Mrs. Persig?” he asked.

“It’s his decision,” she insisted. She nodded her head in my direction, not even bothering to look at him.

The doctor looked at me with his eyebrows raised. I don’t think he’d ever heard of a mother letting her son make such a choice. “Harry?” he asked, finally.

I looked at my mother, and returned my gaze back to him. I set my chin and gave them both a nod of my head to make sure they knew I meant business.

“Take it off,” I said.

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