Lost Was How Everybody Said It

Albert Ducharme lost his fingers, they said. Pointer on his right hand, lost. The one just next to it, also lost, though there Albert still had a stub that wiggled when he waved. His couple older grandkids laughed to see it but the smallest, called Little Al after Albert himself, yipped and hid his face behind his mother.

Gone, the fingers were, but not lost. They'd been lopped off when Albert was 14. He'd climbed up to change a bobbin, slipped, and caught his hand in the cogs. He'd gone black from the pain, but his older brother John, who was 17 and knew his way around an accident, kept sharp.

"Skittered clear across the floor, Al's finger," was how John told it later, and later, and later still. "Like a puck on ice, no stopping 'til Charlie Levasseur's boot. Should have seen the look on him." After a few tellings, John knew how to play Charlie's disgusted face and everybody, including Albert, laughed to see it.

Tabernak! Charlie Levasseur swore, and then he kicked the finger clear back to Albert, who was out cold and wouldn't have known any of it except for John. After a boss shook Albert awake, wrapped his hand, and sent him off white-faced to the doctor, a boy came in and swept the finger away before scrubbing up what blood he could tease from the wood floor.

The other finger, the one Albert kept the bottom inch of, that finger gummed up the cogs and wasn't so much lost as mashed into nothing. John told it to everybody. The spinning machine that did it wasn't used the rest of the day and John got sent home early, maybe for no work or maybe because of Albert, though John didn't think the bosses knew which was kin among them.

John and everybody always said lost, but Albert never looked for his missing fingers. Albert's grandmother, who kept her French though she hadn't seen St. Ours since a girl, her and some of the other old ones said it the same, "perdu ses doigts." Matty Boucher, he'd had his leg shorn clear away from the knee down, he'd talk about going to scratch an itch and finding air. Ghost limb, was how Matty said it, but Albert's fingers weren't ghosts. They just weren't there anymore.

Albert couldn't write too well after, but he didn't write too well before. He couldn't work anymore as a doffer, but anyway he'd been getting too old for that. Even without a couple fingers he was handy, and he made himself a job of going from mill to mill, fixing whatever needed fixing. During the war, he couldn't enlist for his fingers, but so many other men were over there, he couldn't keep up for the work they left behind.

By the fifties, when the mills started closing or going south, everybody in Farfield swore by Albert and his eight fingers. "Albert Ducharme can fix anything except a broken heart," was how they said it. And he could.

Albert never told about the fingers except the one time to Mamie LaJoie, who he called Mae. He and Mae grew up a few buildings apart on Dow Street. He'd taken to meeting her at the end of her shift at the silk works and walking her home. He'd never seen inside it, but he knew her flat full of LaJoies wasn't much different than his flat full of Ducharmes, flaking paint and lard-thick air, loud and close, loud and closer.

Nothing to tell there, so he told her every other story he saw, and one day when he couldn't think of one, he told her about his right hand. How he used to curl five full fingers around a stone, knock off a canal rat from "practically a mile away," his brother John said. Wasn't a mile, he told Mae who knew it anyway, but he could throw true. Had just started pitching games for the mill league when he'd had the accident. From the start he could throw more strikes than not. No one showed him, he just had a feel for how to let the ball fly. He couldn't explain how, but his fingers knew it.

After the accident, he'd tried to throw with his left hand, but he barely got the ball across the plate. But anyway, he wasn't one to mope. Besides, those missing fingers had kept him from the war, which was a sorrow to be sure but also a relief, though he'd never admit it to anyone but her.

Mae didn't say anything, but picked up his hand, the hand that threw strikes, the right hand, the hand with three fingers, and she didn't let go until they got to Dow Street. Albert married her six months later and six months after that she got pregnant and four and a half months after that she miscarried.

Lost the baby, that's how everybody said it. After a few more, they said "Mamie Ducharme lost another baby, la pauvre cherie." And only once did Albert talk about any of it, just the one time. He'd walked into the Lasalle Club. John was at the bar with a bunch of them they'd known since Dow Street, didn't see Albert walk in, and Albert could hear him telling it. "Mae lost another one."

"She didn't lose anything. Nothing." Albert who could figure out almost any machine set in front of him, could fix almost anything, didn't know how to make John understand. "Lost is maybe. Maybe you'll find it. Maybe a thing will happen and life changes. This isn't a maybe. There are no babies, there are no fingers. Nothing is lost. They're gone. They're gone. They're nothing."

Later Albert thought maybe he should have stayed with John, but right then he couldn't and so he turned and went back home, without a drink or even hello to the others. He didn't tell Mamie a thing about it. Eleven months later, she had a boy and they named him Auguste. They called him Gus and he was their only one. He grew up in a quiet home, and Mamie kept the windows always open even a little in winter, and Albert kept the walls always with fresh paint. Gus couldn't throw a baseball worth a damn, but he never minded holding Albert's right hand and only once did he ask what had happened to his father's fingers.

"Lost is how your Uncle John would say it," Albert answered. "You should ask him to tell you sometime."