‘Finger’ by Aidan O’Donoghue

For my twelfth birthday my father cut my finger off with a chainsaw. The index finger on my right hand, to be precise. We had been cutting timber in the backyard and it was my job to feed the logs through the trestle. My father liked them cut into ten-inch blocks so they would fit snugly in the fireplace. He had cut one of the logs about an inch too long. He swore at the aberrant lump of wood, then he swore at me for not telling him. He told me to put the log on the trestle – as it turned out, the last act I would ever perform with two fully functioning hands. I did as I was told even though the chainsaw frightened the life out of me. I hated the angry snarl and the smoke in my eyes and the way the sawdust clogged up my nose for days afterwards.

The blade, when it bit, didn’t register any difference in sound. My finger landed softly in a pile of sawdust. We both stared at it for a few seconds as if it had fallen from outer space. It was clean and plump and slightly bent at the knuckle like it was pointing at something across the yard. A bright halo of blood had formed around it.The chainsaw purred insolently on the ground.

– Jesus, my father said.

*

The doctor assured us that finger amputees usually went on to lead perfectly normal lives. I would have trouble with gloves and picking my nose but other than that there should be no major problems. The doctor had a beautiful melodic voice, half sing-song, half beckoning unicorns down from a mountaintop. It sounded much more beautiful than the chainsaw.

– What did I tell you? my father was reassuring the room. That’s why there are ten fingers to a hand – in case one goes missing.

My mother sat by the surgery door in silence, riffling through a rosary bead and staring into a matchbox containing the mortal remains of my finger.

– We can dispose of it for you, madam, the doctor said. Respectfully, of course.

She looked up at the doctor, her face taut and expressionless.

– Can’t you stitch it back on?

– It’s gone past its use-by-date unfortunately, the doctor said.

– That’s what I was telling her! my father howled, throwing his arms in the air. Should have put it in ice! Jesus Christ, they don’t listen at all, doctor.

My mother’s wounded eyes returned to my mangled digit. Mourner-in- chief, it was like a miniature funeral for her, part of her son dead and gone forever. The magnitude of the situation suddenly became apparent to me. The surgery lights swirled, my head spun like it was going to burst open. I felt like getting sick. I threw my eyes up longingly at the kind doctor.

– It’s my birthday today, I said before passing out.

*

I stayed out of school for a fortnight. I watched television and read my mother’s magazines. The stories in the magazines were either about philandering husbands or people who had lost astonishing amounts of weight. They showed before and after pictures of the people and I always thought they looked better when they were gigantic. There was something disconcerting about their shrunken versions, the rubbery skin and stringy arms and gaunt little eyes pleading out of the page at you for a lick of a Walnut Whip.

They were silly stories but they did manage to take my mind off my finger, or what was once my finger, the sharp fizzing pain, the endless changing of bandages and bouts of fever as my body tried to stave off infection. In spite of my physical affliction it was in fact a very happy fortnight. I enjoyed having my mother to myself. She spoke to me in a different voice than normal, like I was one of her bridge club friends. We discussed knitting patterns and bread recipes. She told me why Mary three doors down had left her husband. I became an expert in polishing with my left hand. She hummed as she cleaned out the fireplace. She never hummed when my father was around.

The weekend before I was due back at school, my father, concerned about his only son’s rapid slide into emasculation, decided I should get out of the house of an evening. For men like my father what constituted an evening out of the house was, to say the least, limited. I had a feeling he wasn’t taking me on a night of drinking, despite my recent birthday, therefore the only option left was going on a call.

– We’re going on a call, he said.

My father was an electrician with the ESB and this was his weekend to be on call. I resisted at first. I’d gone on countless calls with him when I was younger – out to substations and factories, mansions to farmhouses on the sides of mountains, housing estates with fellas riding around on horses – but in the last year or so there had been an unspoken understanding that I’d grown too old for them. A spin in the van no longer held the allure it once did. We had run out of things to say to one another.

I told him the pain in my finger was really bad today.

– The fresh air will do you good, he said.

– The painkillers are making my stomach cramp, I said.

– Enough of the guff, he said. You never know, you might learn a thing or two.

– I don’t want to learn a thing or two. I want to stay home.

My mother pulled me aside in the back kitchen and said it was my father’s way of making it up to me, for the finger. His act of reconciliation. He didn’t know any other way.

– Go with him, she said. For me.

She gave me two Solpadeines and laced up my runners.

*

My father was unusually verbose in the van.

– This is the business end you’re looking at here, he said. Pay attention and there’s no knowing what you could pick up.

For a while now my father, without my consultation, had been working on the basic assumption that I would follow in his footsteps, professionally speaking. The problem was I was about as practical as a paper airplane and we both knew it. I was even less practical now I’d only nine fingers.

– The man on the street has no clue what goes on behind the scenes, my father continued. He simply flicks a switch or turns on a dishwasher or whatever the hell it is, and he thinks it’s all an act of magic.

He clicked his finger.

– Like the electricity just appears out of thin air.

My father had a particular distaste for the man on the street. He seemed to be surrounded by them – in work, on the way to work, coming home from work, down in the pub, on the other end of telephones. It was as if their special mission in life was to torment him.

– Do you think the man on the street stops for one minute in the day to think about how it all works?

– No, dad, I said.

– No is damned right!

I looked out at the fields and hedgerows and a big shroud of mountain slowly dissolving into the night. Some of the fields had cows in them but mostly they lay empty, reeling after the havoc of winter. A sudden gush of pain pulsed in my stump. I looked down and saw spots of blood coming through the bandage. I winced and my father looked down too.

– What did you do in school today? he said.

– I wasn’t in school today. Today’s Saturday.

– Okay, bucko, what did you do yesterday?

– I haven’t been in school in two weeks, dad.

He thought about this for a second or two.

– Well, what was the last thing you did then?

I tried to think back to the time before the mutilation, to the heydays when I took for granted the beauty and purity of an intact body. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

– Me and Cormac won prizes from Ms Flaherty.

– Who’s Cormac?

– Cormac Joyce.

– He Frankie’s young fella?

– I don’t know.

– Well if he is, he’s not good for anything. What did you win prizes for?

– Poems.

– Poems?

– We wrote them and Ms Flaherty thought they were the best in the class. She hung them next to the blackboard.

There was a long pause while my father worked out what to say. He didn’t have a script for discussing poetry with a twelve-year-old boy so he made some kind of sound in his throat and left it at that.

I asked if I could turn on the radio.

– Knock yourself out.

*

The house was at the end of a long potholed road. One of those roads off of a road off of a road, with grass growing up the middle. We went over a cattle grid and the van’s headlights revealed a small pale bungalow, not much bigger than a caravan. There were no curtains on the windows and with the headlights on you could see straight into the rooms. My father turned in the yard and switched off the engine.

The house and the yard stood in solid darkness.

– Stay here, my father said.

He got out of the van and walked across the yard to the front door. He knocked twice with his fist then stood back. A few seconds later a very tall skinny man with a torch opened the door and he and my father stood there talking for a while. My father said something to the man that made them both look in my direction. Next thing the man disappeared inside the house and my father walked back across the yard. He opened the sliding door of the van and muttered curses as he fumbled around for his toolbox.

– Are we going, dad? I said.

– Do you think we came out all this way just to go away again?

– No, dad.

– Jump out, he sighed, this is going to take a while.

I stayed close to him as we went across the yard. There was a physicality to the darkness that unsettled me. We entered into a hallway and there was a strong odour of smoke and stale teabags. I couldn’t see a thing. Then a spear of yellow light lit up the ground to the left and the tall skinny man reappeared holding the torch.

– Follow me, he said.

He led us into a cold room. My father flicked a switch behind me. Nothing happened. The man waved the torch around the room, revealing next to nothing except bare carpet, a few shelves, a sofa and a tiny television with rabbit ears. I shivered once with the cold.

– You helping your daddy? the man asked.

I nodded, covering my mouth with my hand. The man shone the torch on my face, then the rest of me, catching a quick flash of my bandage as he went.

– Get into a scrape? he said.

– It got cut off with a chainsaw, I said.

– Oh dear.

I tried not to look at my father, who in turn tried not to look at me.

– Are you okay now?

– He’ll be fine, my father said. Where’s the fuse board?

– Out in the hall, the man said.

He really was a very tall man. He also had a narrow head like he’d got it caught in something when he was younger. I wondered how all his features fitted on his head but somehow they did. He led us out of the room. I’m not sure why we had gone in there in the first place. I saw something move at the far end of the hallway. I thought maybe it was a cat or a small dog, but as my eyes adjusted to the gloom I saw that it was in fact human. A boy, aged six or seven, and dressed in Mickey Mouse t-shirt.

– Hello, young man, my father said.

– Hello, the boy replied.

The boy sidled up to the tall skinny man and wrapped an arm around one of his legs. His nostrils were bubbling with snot. He was looking at my father. I noticed his eyes were not perfectly straight. One eye looked directly at my father while the other one seemed to have a mind of its own.

My father was crouched over his toolbox, talking to himself. It was one of those toolboxes that came apart in a series of multi-storey trays, the contents of which perpetually bewildered me. Everybody was looking at my father, wondering what was going on inside his addled head. A mystified reverence. Electricity was an elusive, invisible entity, dangerous and enthralling, its complications matched only by brain surgery and the sewer networks of major world cities. Those who understood its subtleties were seen as necromancers, lofty oracles of the dark arts. At least that’s what I thought.

My father got the tall skinny man to shine the torch on the fuse board while he tugged at something with a pliers. My father was making hissing sounds as if his mouth had sprung a leak.

– Hold that torch up straight, he told the man.

There followed a quick snap from the fuse board as if something not designed to be in two pieces was now in two pieces.

– Shit, he said.

He clicked his tongue. He turned to his audience. Everyone waited for the diagnosis.

– Everything’s here as it should be, he said, closing the door of the fuse board.

The tall skinny man said nothing.

– The problem appears to be outside. Where’s the meter?

– The meter? the man said.

– Yes, the meter.

The man was distracted all of a sudden, as if there was somewhere else he was meant to be.

– The meter. It’s at the side of the house.

My father was standing there rubbing his chin. The atmosphere had grown very awkward. The man turned to the little boy.

– Paddy, bring this lad to your room for a few minutes. He might like to play a game. Daddy must go out and help the man.

My father picked up his toolbox and went out the front door.

– I nearly forgot, the man said, I bet you fellas are hungry. Wait there a second and I’ll see what I can find.

The man went off down the hallway into another room. I could hear him opening and closing cupboards, rummaging through plastic bags. Something scraped across a table. A minute later he came back up the hallway holding something small and round in each hand.

– Put out your hands, he said.

We put out our hands.

Carefully, as if he was bequeathing us precious gemstones, he gave us both an orange.

– Thanks, daddy, the boy said.

I looked at my orange. It was shrivelled and hard like a diseased scrotum. The man padded his son’s hair and went out the door after my father. Without saying a word, Paddy turned and ran down the hallway. I felt silly traipsing after a six-year-old, but I hadn’t exactly options. I felt my way against the walls, which were cold and slightly damp. The smell of stale teabags grew stronger the further I went. There was a faint quiver of light coming from a room at the end of the hallway, so I walked down to it and found Paddy inside the room, kneeling on the floor. The source of the light was a candle on a low metal shelf in the corner. It was even colder in here than in the living room.

I realized I was still holding the orange.

– Do you want this? I said to the boy.

– No thanks, he said. I hate clementines.

– I think it’s an orange.

– No, it’s a clementine.

– You’re confident for a six-year-old.

– I’m seven.

His good eye looked straight at me while the other one did a little jig. My stump was starting to throb again. The Solpadeine was wearing off and the pain was making its way up my arm. I stood on the door saddle and looked around the room. The only thing that gave it away as a bedroom was the bed. There was nothing else bedroomy about it. No posters on the walls, no racing car duvet cover, no alarm clock with footballs for numbers, no action figures, no colouring books. Just a single bed with a woollen blanket on top, a few plastic boxes, and a small mountain of unwashed clothes.

The cold was making my head hurt.

– Don’t you have any brothers or sisters? I said.

– Josephine used to live here but now she doesn’t.

– Is Josephine your sister?

The boy shook his head. He started peeling his orange or clementine or whatever it was. I put mine in the pocket of my hoodie.

– So you’ve no brothers or sisters?

He shook his head again.

– Same, I said.

– Who is Josephine?

– A woman. Do you want to play Battleship?

– Battleship?

– It’s where you have all these ships and you must try and sink the other person’s ships. I got it for Christmas.

– I know what it is but isn’t it too dark to see the board and the ships?

– It’s okay, it’s all on paper and you can just bring it close to your eyes.

I had no idea what he was talking about. The pain in my stump was piercing. I could feel wet coming through the bandage.

– Fine, I said to amuse him.

He jumped up and disappeared under the bed and re-emerged with a bundle of papers and two stubs of pencils with bite marks all over them. He handed me a sheet of paper and one of the pencils. The sheet of paper was divided into rows and columns. The rows were numbered and the columns were lettered, just like a proper Battleship grid.

– This is what you got for Christmas? I said.

– Yeah.

– Where are the ships?

– You mark them in yourself with the pencil.

– Oh.

– Daddy said this was better because I wouldn’t be losing the parts like the one in the box.

– I’m not sure I’ll be very good at it, I said, holding up my bandage. My writing hand’s out of action for the time being.

– That’s okay, I can do it for you.

– You’re going to mark in my ships?

– If you want.

– Won’t you know where my ships are?

– I’ll close my eyes.

– You’ll close your eyes?

– Yeah.

I laughed.

– What’s so funny?

– Nothing, Paddy. Nothing. Here, you mark in my ships.

I handed him my sheet. He closed his eyes and began scrawling x’s in the squares of the grid. Most of the x’s went outside the edge of squares, some were in two squares at the same time, and one or two were outside the grid completely.

– There you go, he said, handing me back the sheet. I marked in three destroyers and two little boats. We’ll leave the aircraft carriers for another day.

– Good idea, I said.

He put a great deal of effort into the positioning of his ships, far more effort than he had mine.

– Okay, he said finally. Youngest goes first. A1.

– Miss, I said, putting a messy left-hand dot on A1.

– Aw!

– Easy on, buddy. It’s only your first go. E5.

He put the sheet up next to his face, scanning for E5, using his thumb and index finger for triangulation.

– It’s in the middle, I said.

– I know, I know. Miss!

He giggled.

I crossed out E5.

– A2, he said.

– Miss.

– Not again!

– It takes time, Paddy. Just be patient. D5.

He scanned the grid again.

– HIT!

I felt an unexpected frisson of excitement.

– Mark it off, buster!

He marked it off and carefully pondered his next move. He was really thinking out his strategy, leaving no stone unturned. He ate a segment of his orange. It took him a full thirty seconds to say A3.

– Are you just going through the grid one by one?

– No!

– I think you are.

– No I’m not.

– All right. Anyway, it’s a miss.

He tutted and marked it off.

I called C5.

– Hit, Paddy said despondently. Sunk. Fuck it!

– What did you say?

– Sunk.

– No, after that.

– Fuck it.

– You’re too young for language like that.

– I don’t want to play anymore.

– Come on, don’t be like that. You’re really good at it.

– You’re lying.

– I’m not lying. Go on, call another one.

– A4.

– HIT!

– You’re lying again. You gave out to me for using bad language, well you’re just a liar.

– I’m not a liar! You got me!

– I didn’t get you. I made your ships, remember? I didn’t put one on A4.

– So why did you call A4 then?

– I said I don’t want to play anymore.

This was getting weird. He wiped away a snot with his sleeve and rubbed it all over the whites of Mickey Mouse’s eyes. The pain in my stump was becoming unbearable.

– I want to play something else, he said.

I didn’t get the chance to respond because just then the lights came on. Paddy squealed and clapped his hands. I looked down at my bandage. A trickle of blood was running down the length of my hand. Some had dried into the cuff of my hoodie. Paddy pulled a toy tractor out of a box and started wheeling it around the floor. I went into the hallway and saw that the front door was open. I heard my father and the man speaking in low voices outside in the yard.

– I’m very sorry, the man was saying. You won’t say anything.

– If they’re suspicious they might come out and inspect it themselves. There’s a saucy fine for breaking a seal.

– It could have been the wind. The wind gets up something awful around here.

– It’s not the seal that’s the problem, it’s what else goes on. If I had a pound for every one of these ...

There was a long pause.

– I didn’t do that if that’s what you’re suggesting.

– I’m not suggesting anything.

– I’d have no need to do it. Now that there’s only the two of us in the house. Besides, I wouldn’t even know how to go about it.

– It’s easy once you know how.

They were silent again.

– You won’t say anything? the man said.

– Don’t be bothering about that, my father said irritably. I’ll log it as a blown fuse.

– I don’t know how to thank –

– Don’t be bothering about that, my father said again.

He stepped into the hallway and stood there with his hands on his hips in the extraordinary new light. There was something immense and heroic about him. Something long ago, that had slipped or I had let slip from my memory. At that moment he didn’t belong to me; he wasn’t my father. He was everyone’s father. He belonged to everyone. He looked down the hallway to where I was standing. I lifted up my hand to show him and burst into tears.

*

They stood side by side in pathetic silhouette. Hand-sized moths thrashed around the porch light in mad aimless swirls. They were still waving as we rumbled over the cattle grid. My father drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.

– Pain means it’s healing up, he said. Pain means that things are getting better. As long as things are getting better that’s all that matters.

I took the orange – or the clementine – out of my pocket, and peeled it. I broke off half of it and gave it to my father. The only light was from the green of the radio dials and the corners of my father’s eyes. Outside, a darkness so complete it swallowed up the road, pulling the sky and the land and all other things living and dead into the unseen refuge of night.

From issue #14: autumn/winter 2022

About the Author
Aidan O’Donoghue was born in 1980. His fiction has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Stinging Fly, The Tangerine, The Moth, New Irish Writing, The Irish Times and others. In 2021 he received an Arts Council bursary to continue work on his novel and short story collection. He lives in Cork with his wife and two children.