Knife

by Jansen Estrup

My father always carried a knife. A pocket knife. I recall a small inlay in the worn wood. Case. It was probably a model called 'Trapper' with two blades about 4 inches long, the kind outdoorsmen would need for skinning and butchering game.

I remember him using it for that, on the cattle he and neighbors had hoisted up a tall pine, and pigs, too. Nasty business, slaughtering animals.

But mostly I remember the way he honed the black blades on a long whetstone, distractedly, as if he traveled somewhere and sometime else as he made the motions. Often, a muscle along his jaw would flex or quiver.

I'd seen other men do that with a different sort of blade, and they'd whittle wood or bone into artistic designs or toys. But my father never did that unless he needed a plug or shim.

Or, oddly, I remember the way he peeled an orange. He'd cut off the stem,then use his knife to cut down to the meat, never actually drawing juice, as if the mild acid might damage the blade. He'd end with a long snake of orange, ribbon-like peeling, and a pattern of white pectin all around the orange orb. Then he'd set the fruit aside, carefully clean his Case of any residue, often on his boot or trousers, before folding the blade and putting it in his pocket.

Then he'd break the fruit in half, carefully pry out a segment, a 'plug', and offer it to me. We'd eat them all, alternating, the sweet warm juices on our lips and tiny globs of goodness sliding around our gums and teeth, nature's goodness on the inside matching the warm sunshine on the outside of our faces. 

I was older then, maybe ten or eleven. He was already in his late-sixties. It reminded me of an earlier time, when he'd prop me in the crotch of a tree and feed me mulberries which got us both stained black and blue, or raisins, a word I could not yet say. My father would call me 'Reener-man” and I would try to chew them with sore gums because I did not quite yet have teeth.

I remember those things now. Many things ...that my brother has been dead for twenty-five years, this month. That this is the fiftieth year since my father's death. Symmetry? What has that to do with anything?

I've never carried a knife. I wonder why.

I use them.

I take a carving knife, a serrated 3 inch blade, and use it to peel my orange. But I do it differently. I slice to the meat from stem to butt and up, turn it 90 degrees and make another cut all around. Then I put the knife in the sink, or rinse it off and replace it in the knife block on the counter.

I go outside, removing a quarter of the rind as I walk to the creek bank. There I spin the orange rind, like a heavy falling leaf, in a downward arc into the tall pinyon pine tree which grows up from the creek bed. Then I break the fruit into two halves and remove a segment, a plug. I take a bite, about half, and offer the other half to my dog, who waits patiently, wagging.

My brother carried a knife. So did his buddies at school. They played mumbly-peg and carved into their desks with them, generation after generation of initials and symbols. Some of the desks had no real level space on them anymore, and our writing papers had more holes in them than letters. They used theirs in a threatening way, too, sometimes. But I never did.

But I did use a knife for other things as a kid. Once.

I don't recall the exact circumstances. Perhaps it was Christmas and both Pete and I had knives as presents. Not the folding blade kind that rode in a pocket, but real knives with their own leather sheaths you could put on your belt and carry on your hip like Johnny Weismueller or a Hollywood Indian.

I was twelve, maybe, which would have made Pete eleven. It didn't take us long to prove we were too young for knives, although we'd had mixed results with rifles and shotguns by then. That probably should have been a warning.

Our parents and sister had gone to town. We boys were told to pull the weeds in the front pasture and to get it done before they returned.

We tried pulling them at first. They were about two and a half feet tall, half the diameter of a standard arrow and the many thin branches broke off easily, leaving a raspy surface. This made them brittle and thorn-like and within minutes our hands, not rough-neck calloused, but not sitting-room pink, either, raw and bleeding. The damned things simply would not pull out of the rock-like hardpan which weeks without rain had made of the soil in our field.

We were getting nowhere, but the job had to be done. Come the rains we wanted this field to feed our cattle, and the weedy stalks were sharp and close enough together to keep a cow from grazing without a constant stabbing at their eyes.

So we had an idea. We might have chopped them down with a sling-blade, but neither of us was really tall enough to swing it properly. But we could use our new knifes to cut these damn weeds down near the base.

That was still not good enough. I could feel the stubby remnants popping, trying to puncture my Keds. Cattle, with cloven hooves, would be vulnerable in the soft tissue between. And their noses were sensitive, too.

But we kept on, me at one end of the pasture, Pete at the other. We had most of an acre to do, stooped and stupid.

We worked hard at doing the wrong thing, and got a great deal accomplished. By the time we saw our big old Packard coming off the highway, we were almost done.

“Here they come!”

We stepped up our pace, chopping like madmen. And when my sister opened the front gate we'd come close together. Then, just as the car pulled up the driveway, we closed in on the last weed.

Exhilarated, scarcely seeing each other, dizzy with hie and stoop, we both swung at it. He was ever so slightly quicker. His knife took down the stalk, mine cut deeply into his wrist.

My brother had a blood disorder. Maybe we all did. Anemia due to iron poor Florida soil. Blue-blood, my mother called it. Thin blood. It would take a long time to coagulate. Sometimes his nose would bleed for no apparent reason and it would take hours to stop it.

This time, with my knife cutting him to the bone right through the artery, it was a literal blood bath. Both of us were covered with it by the time my mother reached us and I remember it spurting over her even after she'd wrapped it tightly in a towel.

She got him to the hospital in time to save him, but my father would not talk to me for days. Without my father, I ceased to exist, didn't I?

It was almost like that time in Tampa. That terrible time in Tampa.

I never carried a knife after that.

And so this, like the other stories, becomes a piece of the Puzzle. I place it carefully in the box with the others, as if it means something important.

 Note: Available here is a further piece of the 'in progress' book, Puzzle. It is called Aircraft Down ... look for it on my page under 'Stories' ...