Meeting Mr. Porter

Part II

Like some sort of flashback, Mr. Porter’s offer to take his bloody hand sent me to the place of my too short childhood days when boys were small men and would, on some convenient occasion, commit to becoming blood brothers.

In the Western movies of that period Indians from Hollywood would do it all the time…or at least every other production.  The largeness of difference was that the Indians, usually “Comanch” (as The Duke would call them) would be sitting by a campfire eating pemmican, or some such prop from the studio commissary, when the brave on stage right would pick up his blade of choice, usually an enormous, razor sharp, chrome-plated Solingen steel Bowie knife and into one of his wrists slash at least an inch and one half deep.  Miraculously, the “Injun” (as how Walter Brennan might reference the actor) would avoid causing critical damage to his ulnar artery and any tendons that may have been snuggling nearby. 

The “Native American” (modern lingo) on the viewer’s starboard side of the flickering campfire would then be compelled to unsheathe his own hand ax or similar horribly glistening tool and gash himself as deep or more than his new BFF.  Right in time to keep from bleeding to death, the two would press their respected, yet leaking, wrist to the other’s and recite some tribal oath from the script and immediately become blood brothers. The whole of which ceremony being much less stressful and traumatic than the act of matrimony  as I would later discover during my second childhood.

In that less responsible time of life as a boy, my blood brother ceremonies would be not as dramatic. My ‘brothers’ and myself were more likely to employ a rose thorn or the needle of a century plant to draw a barely sufficient amount of blood to make the party official.  That life sustaining liquid would appear as a droplet at the tip of a pinky rather a gush from the delicate and sensitive wrist area.  Most of the time one boy would have accidentally cut himself on something like a broken bottle and the other, so as not to be called ‘Chicken’ would reluctantly prick himself and touch the other’s toe or bleeding area d’jour.

Facts being facts, my first blood brother was no brother at all.  On one sunny April day my darling sister, Diana, and I were picking dewberries as we were wont to do in the spring when not fist fighting.  As we were disengaging from an extremely successful ‘pickin’, I noticed that she and I were pretty torn up from two-handed picking.

 I take time here to inform you that we were picking in a style that Old Mr. Hodges had schooled the two of us.  How you do it is to take your retired pillow case (buckets tip over in the worst spots imaginable) into the middle of a patch and pick outward in all directions with both hands. You don’t even look; you just feel where they are. When you get in the zone, you can leave a patch pluperfectly plucked.

  After The King of the Patch keeled over from too much hard work, too many Lucky Strikes, and a faulty heart, Diana and I were the envy of all who consider berry picking as an art form. On that day, at that moment, we each looked at the other, dropped the berry bags and simultaneously decided to hug. BFF.  I wish we could do that now.

My mind drifted back to the present and I heard Mr. Porter say, “…dam’ white bass sure do bleed when you filet ‘em.’ ‘looks worse than it is…rinses right off…pull up a chair and have a donut…I’m ‘bout done here…almost done”

There was a box of donuts sitting on a mud colored steel folding table next to the filets. Noticing Cerberus had moved in closer to my leg, I looked down.  I would swear he winked at me with his one good eye. I declined the pastry offer.