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Aunt Ebba married Uncle Warren, a Dane, a really nice guy that let me help with the haying and run a pitchfork through my foot. I guess that I should say that a little different way. I ran the pitchfork through my own foot, while helping with the haying.
After all of you farmers quit laughing, remember it really hurt. When I pitched hay I put the fork into the hay with gusto and abandon. I just hadn’t learned where my feet were while doing this kind of work.
A famous guy once said, “How will you ever find your head if you don’t even know where your feet are.” Maybe it was the other way around: ”How will you ever find your feet if you don’t know where your head is.” Either way, I’ve spent a lot of my time on the earth trying to find my head and feet and trying to get them to work together.
So being in my head, forgetting my feet in the excitement and joy of getting to help the men with the farm work, is the reason I give for why I drove the long, dull, pointed pitch fork into the hay and through my shoe and into the top of my foot, missing the bone and going through to the soft, really tender, part of the bottom of my foot and into the wooden wagon, which I was standing on.
The expelling of air was everyone’s first clue that the city boy had forgotten that we were stacking hay, not spearing feet. I didn’t want to admit to the four people that were there that I had done this stupid thing, so I tried to nonchalantly, quietly, pull the pitch fork out of the foot. I pulled and instantly realized for the first time what the phrase “Hurts like hell” actually meant.
I’m still not sure, but I think that it would be safe to say that trying to pull the pitchfork out felt like something was being driven in from the top and the bottom at the same time. I then tried to move my foot and it was like trying to rip the turkey leg off the thanksgiving turkey, if the turkey was still alive. I could feel stuff tearing and my foot was sweating, all my blood was running out the bottom of my shoe. My world turned red and I was sure that my guts were also flowing down and out of the mammoth hole in the bottom of my foot.
My uncle stepped on my foot that “Hurt worse than hell” and with one quick jerk, a jerk that seemed to take about a half hour to get processed through my brain, pulled the pitchfork out of the wagon floor, out of my foot, and out of my hands without my foot moving at all.
When my uncle lifted his foot off of my foot, I almost fell off the wagon. For a few seconds the pain left, as he lifted his 250 pounds, almost all of which was concentrated on one leg, down through his foot to the top of my foot.
Lifting his foot actually let my foot expand to its near original size. Then started the hot searing ripped flesh. Raw screaming nerve endings, which re-remembered getting torn from the bundle of close packed muscle and blood vessels by the intrusion of a dull pitchfork tine.
The top hole and the bottom hole felt like burning branding irons were being driven in to my foot from both sides at the same time. My uncle commented, “That’s why we don’t work alone during haying.”
I jumped on one foot to the edge of the wagon sat down hard and took my shoe off. My father came over pulled the sock off, which had blood all over it. He grabbed my foot and squeezed, to bleed the poison out of it, as I screamed, feeling no mercy, reduced to whimpering like a child.
“I did that myself and it still brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it,” said my uncle Warren over the laughter of my cousins. “You should of seen me stepping on my own foot, while I jerked the fork out, and then it didn’t come on the first pull. I’d still be out there in the west field, a skeleton with a hay fork in its foot if I hadn’t of gotten it out on that second try.”
The dancing skeleton trying to free itself while the hay all blew away sent a little pain relieving smile over my face. The ice water from the drinking jug hit my foot and the pain trebled, as my father said, “Good thing you didn’t stick the pitchfork in someone else’s foot or you’d be feeling terrible now. There’d be two people feeling terrible you for doing it and the other person with the hole in their foot. This way there’s only half as much hurt and you get it all. Good thing we weren’t pitching manure we’d have to stick a hot poker in the wound to kill the lockjaw.” Knowing that it could have been worse seemed to make the pain subside somewhat.
I’d heard all about the lockjaw, the sure fire death that you got from mad dog bites and getting shit in cuts. Everything I’d read and a lot of stuff I heard started running through my head.
I wouldn’t be able to open my mouth. I’d starve to death, while people sat around and ate or if I was real lucky, I’d get the antidote quickly, take the shots with an extra long needle into the middle of my stomach and live. They said you had to take the shots even before they cut off the dogs head to look and see if it had the poison in its brain. The stomach shots weren’t a sure thing either. I’d heard you died crazy, with your mouth frozen shut and foam pushing out between your teeth and out through your nose, which kept you from breathing, except in gasps, as you were dying. When dogs got lockjaw they shot them. When people got it they knocked out their front teeth and feed them through a straw as they gasped for breath foaming and dying slowly. I had read all about it and besides one of my friends had a friend who got lockjaw and died. No one lived to tell about lockjaw.
The hay stacking continued with me sitting in the shade of the wagon listening to the stories of other haying and other pitchforks and ensilage cutters catching clothing and pulling poor old farmers into the blades, and giant snakes (we saw two that day) caught up on the tines of the fork to be thrown in the air and land on someone’s head pissed off and biting them in the neck and the guy dying, because the bite was too close to the heart and brain and it was a long trip to the doctor and the antidote.
We had coffee in the field, finished the stacking and returned to the house to collect my sisters and start for home, by way of Dr. Decaro’s clinic, which was still in the old house where my sisters and I were all born. I got a shot in the arm instead of the stomach and some green goo on the foot that emphasized my thumping heart. I sat quiet like a man my father would be proud of, and the silence was gained simply by concentrating on the red hot poker that wasn’t going to be used on my foot. After all the pain and stories about pain I crossed farming off my list of fun things to do.
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(Photo: Dan Lipinkski/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
- THE PARLOR: Farming is Not For Me by Mark Esping - March 4, 2023