Granddad blogging: What's bad? knives and locust trees

Last week marked the end of my grandfather's war story. This week I go back to the beginning, with stories of his boyhood in Wilson County, Tennessee.

To put a little perspective on this story, my grandfather had a dud pinky finger. It wouldn't bend right if he made a fist. He could fold it in manually, but he couldn't make a proper fist. Like most morbid little children, this was a source of fascination and he used it as a key prop in the life lesson: Why I must not play with knives.

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How I cut my finger. I was a little old boy, and like lots of little boys, I was fascinated by knives. And my Uncle Ben had a real pretty little knife with a real sharp blade. He always kept a sharp knife, and I wanted to see it. He didn’t much want me to see it and my daddy said not to, but anyway somehow or another I finally got to see it and I took it and stabbed in a locus tree and I didn’t have a good hold on the handle and my hand slipped down the blade of the knife and sliced into my hand down into the bone, cut the leaders in two and that’s the reason always now my little finger is still stiff on my right hand and not as large as the little finger on my left hand.

And it hurt real bad, and my daddy said that was good enough for me. And we were supposed to go pick beans that afternoon, and I didn’t want to go ‘cause I’d hurt my hand and he said if I hadn’t played with that knife I wasn’t supposed to I wouldn’t have hurt my hand, so let’s go pick beans. And he gave me a big basket and we picked beans and got it full. I couldn’t carry it in my left hand so I had to carry it in my right hand and I guess that pulled my hand a little more. But anyways it was a long time before my finger got well and it’s always been stiff.

I would say I was about 8 or 9, pretty young. Cause I remember where we were. In our front yard there was four locust trees that grew real close together and I was standing sort of in the middle of them and I stabbed this knife in one of those trees. And they stood there for a long time, til a storm came through and blew ‘em down. The locust trees have pretty flowers on ‘em that smell good. The bees liked ‘em but they also have thorns on them and they would fall off. Little old barefooted boys runnin around would step on these thorns and get ‘em up in their foot and then they would start hurting and they would fester and you had to lay down and hold your foot up and let your mother take a needle and poke around and stick and finally pick those thorns out of there before they would get well.

So I was never very fond of locust trees. We had a great big locust tree right outside the front door of our house. I remember it was a big one. The trunk was as big around was as big as you see on some big beech trees, big poplar and big oak trees. And it had a big holler in it, and we lived up on a hill and storms came through an awful lot. They worried about that tree blowin over on our house for a long time. And finally it blew down some other locust trees and didn’t blow that one down. So my daddy cut it down and cut it up into firewood. And we burned it up a stick at a time one winter.

This is the first in the series of boyhood tales - for more including his WWII experiences:
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Technorati tags: oral history, history, , tennessee, Wilson County