I watched carefully as he unwrapped the man's thickly bandaged hand. "Good," he said. "You've kept it clean. There's no infection.
"Look, Katy," he told me, and nodded when I left my chair and came close, though the man with the wound seemed surprised.
The stitching thread was black against the man's pale skin. His other hand was ruddy and dark, like all workingmen's hands, but the bandage had kept the light and labor from the wounded one and made it pale. I could see where the jagged cut, shaped like a drawing of a lightning bolt, zigzagged across his palm, ending in the soft flesh at the base of his thumb.
"Move your fingers, Sturges," my father said, and when the man did, he nodded.
"Good. Now the thumb." While I watched, the large thumb bent and straightened. "Any pain?"
"Stiff is all," the man said.
"And you can feel? Try this against your fingertips. Do you make it out as chain and not a piece of wood or maybe rope?" Father handed him his watch chain and the man rolled it back and forth, and nodded. "Gold chain," he said, and grinned.
"You're a lucky man, Sturges. No real damage. Now you won't mind if I show my daughter? She wants to be a doctor."
I moved closer and Father showed me, running his own thumb across the pattern of dark stitches.
"It was the palmar fascia that protected him from worse injury," Father said. "It's very thick and strong tissue here. Below it are the nerves and muscles, and if he had sliced into those, we d have had to haul him into town and do some pretty complicated surgery."
"Wouldn't have gone," the man muttered.
"You'd ve gone or lost your hand, Sturges," Father said, laughing. He began rubbing the area of the stitches with gauze soaked from a bottle in his bag. The smell was strong and medicinal, but the liquid had no color and it dried quickly. Then Father lifted one of the stitches with a pincer in one hand, snipped it with sharp scissors in his other, pulled it through, and laid the snipped thread on a piece of gauze set out on the desk. It didn't seem to hurt the man at all. I counted as Father did it again and again.
"Sixteen," I announced, when he was done.
With the black stitches gone, I could see only a jagged pink line on the man's palm, and some tiny dots where the stitches had been. It seemed astonishing to me, to have what had seemed a terrible wound be gone entirely, turned to a faint pink line.
The man named Sturges seemed surprised as well, and kept opening and closing his hand as if he had newly learned to do it.
"Keep it clean, still," Father told him. "Wear a glove on it when you're working. And keep it limber. Sometimes a scar like that will tighten. You don't want that." He wrapped the tools he had used in a strip of cloth and replaced them in the bag. I knew why he wrapped them, because he had told me once. You could never use an instrument twice, because it might carry infection. So you wrap them and keep them set aside after they are used, until they could be properly cleaned. I tried to do it with my little toy bag of instruments, but it didn't seem to matter, really, and some of them couldn't hold together for being washed, anyway.
They shook hands, and I saw the man open and close his injured one again, after shaking, as if he were still surprised that it worked. Then he nodded to me, and said "Miss" before he turned and left.
Father snapped his bag closed, looked around, and sighed. "That boy," he said. "He slipped off while we were busy. He did it last time, too."
I was frightened. The mill with its noisy parts seemed dangerous, now that Jacob had disappeared into it. But Father told me not to worry. "I know where to find him," he said, and took my hand. "You hold on to me now, though, Katy. Here, Jackson, put this in my buggy, would you?" He handed his medical bag to the clerk who sat at a table outside the office door.
With Father's hand tight around mine, I followed him into the huge open section of the mill, where flecks of grain spun against the daylight that came in from narrow windows. Off to one side I saw workers who were dusted with flour so that their faces looked ghostly. One man laughed, and his open mouth was dark against the powdered face. I knew he was only a man, but I held Father's hand tighter while we looked for Jacob.
"He'll be by the grindstone," Father said, leaning down so that I could hear him against the noise of gears and workers. "He likes that big stone. You heard him in the buggy, making the sound."
"Father?" I asked. "Is he an imbecile? Is that what it is, to be touched in the head?"
"I wouldn't call Jacob that," Father said firmly, "because imbecile means having no brains. And Jacob, he's different, all right, but he knows how to go to what he loves, and how to stay safe near it. That takes brains, I'd say. Katy—there he is."
I looked over and saw Jacob in the shadows, watching the great stone turn and grind. He was rocking back and forth where he stood, and though I couldn't hear, I saw his hands moving at his sides and knew that he must be murmuring, "Shoooda, shoooda, shoooda." Father was right that he knew to stay safe, out of the way, and I saw that the sound and rhythm of the turning grindstone made him happy.
When Father told him it was time to go, he pretended he didn't hear. He had a funny way of doing it. He put his hands up to cover his ears, and he continued his rocking and humming. But Father touched him firmly again and mentioned the horses. "We'll give the horses a bit of grain before we leave," he told Jacob. And so he came.
We left the mill to find that the back of the buggy was piled with sacks of flour as payment. Jacob fed each horse a handful of grain and then climbed up and sat atop the flour sacks, his cap pulled low over his forehead.
We took the long way home, past the Stoltz farm, and left Peggy's brother there with a bag of flour for his family. Before he took it, he touched the necks of the horses and made a sound to them, though he said no human goodbye to us. A dog dashed to the buggy to greet him; and I saw, as he turned and walked to his own barn, carrying the flour, that two cats ran out from the shadows there, rubbed against him, matched their steps to his, and followed him in.
4. NOVEMBER 1910
Mother wasn't feeling well and so most mornings Peggy helped me get ready for school.
"If Jacob can't go to school," I asked her one morning as she brushed my hair, "then why can he roam all around the way he does? If I have the sniffles and can't go to school, Mother makes me stay in bed all day and drink hot water with lemon and sugar in it. And I had to stay in the house forever when I had chicken pox. But not Jacob. Father says he sees him often, very far from home. And I think he has even been here, behind our house. Levi saw him. That's four miles!"