Papa's thumbnail

Papa’s thumbnail
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — My grandfather’s hands fascinated me.

Papa, as we called him, put in fifty years at the Milwaukee Road frog shops in Tomah. He was a machinist, repairing switches and the huge steel “frogs” that intersected rail lines. When he arrived home after his eight hours, I would often follow him to the basement, where he labored at the deep double sink to scrub black grit out of the deep cracks in his hands. He used gobs of pasty soap speckled with grains of abrasive pumice. He ground away at his leathery flesh ‘til it glowed pink, but he never entirely purged the steel dust that had sunk roots into his creases and cracks.

The biggest attraction for me was his thumbnail, which had split some long time before, when a chunk of truant steel crashed onto his hand. The nail was broken lengthwise, extending inside his cuticle. It never mended together again. The fine ridge of skin that had grown into the crack in Papa’s thumbnail was as permanently dark as the metallic soot that filled the air around him at the frog shops and — eventually — his lungs, seeding the cancer that finally killed him.

I remember Papa now because he was a subtly complicated man, although outwardly he was just a manual worker with barely an 8th-grade education. He read the Milwaukee paper every day from cover to cover, as well as his exceptionally newsy International Brotherhood of Machinists newsletter every week and Benjamin’s Franklin’s Saturday Evening Post. Beyond these quotidian autodidactics, Papa was two things that lent him a bewildering complexity. He was a storyteller and a natural-born historian.

On Saturday, often with me in tow, he would climb into his Ford (he bought a new one every other year, in cash, from Norris Vernier) and proceeded to buy Grandma’s groceries. He could’ve gotten everything at the new Cram’s Supermarket across from Bernie Schappe’s genial real estate office. But if he did that, he wouldn’t’ve had a chance to swap tales over the meat counter with Mose, and flirt with his wife, at Woodliff’s, our neighborhood market. Nor could he have traded his weekly quota of lies and jibes with another meatcutter, his brother-in-law Bob Meinecke, down at Shutter’s, next-door to the Carlton Supper Club, run by a guy called Schnozz, where my Dad was the head bartender and my Mom — and her vivacious kid sister, Marce — waited on tables.

Papa would eventually reach Cram’s, where he didn’t know anyone in particular but still managed a five- or ten-minute shmooze with the cashier, or the produce manager, while I listened and learned the fine art of spinning a yarn and hitting a punchline. Before Cram’s, of course, Papa usually drove all the way up to Burnstad’s on Highway 16 by a motel and the Mobilgas station, where he knew a few folks and bought a few items for Grandma. On a good Saturday, he’d also hit the Cash Store and a hardware store, buy a few auto parts and pick up something warm and fragrant at one of the two bakeries downtown. He’d be talking all along. I’d be listening, not believing all of it, but drinking in every exaggeration.

When he talked to me, which he liked to do, he opened up the past like a great book of huge crinkled pages illuminated by innocents. He’d been born (he told me) before anyone in Tomah had laid eyes on a horseless carriage and no one could imagine an airplane. He revealed to me the swift and dazzling power of change that had swept through his life, from pioneer days at the turn of the 20th century, through a war that almost sucked him in (he was in uniform and on his way to Europe on 11 November 1918), through Twenties that roared and Thirties that wept — terrifying every working man and woman — and another war that brought captive Nazis to Camp McCoy (for Papa to talk to), and outer space and a thousand other wonders that had unfolded as he trudged day-by-day to the frog shops.

Papa described it all with a sense of awe and a warm humility, some of which clung to me. As a boy, he told me, he loved this new art form called motion pictures, whose funniest stars — Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy — were his soulmates. But the film that fired his imagination was D.W. Griffith’s eight-reel epic, Birth of a Nation. In Papa’s telling, I heard nothing about Griffith’s naked racism, his depiction of Reconstruction black men as rapine savages and the Ku Klux Klan as an avenging army of Christian rectitude. Papa talked, rather, about the vast scope and kinetic spectacle of Birth of a Nation, and about the sheer audacity of Griffith’s cinematic vision. Papa, a machinist with a grammar-school education, cut to the essence of Griffith’s masterpiece, a film whose extravagance inspired the breadth and grandiosity of Hollywood disciples like David O. Selznick, Cecil B. DeMille and the incomparable John Ford. Papa instinctively saw Griffith the way a film critic saw him, and he planted in me, I think, the seeds of analysis and skepticism that made me, eventually, the long-winded pain in the ass that I am today.

My Dad didn’t fall far from Papa’s tree. Although he wasn’t the same compulsive storyteller, he had a quiet, intricate and — I think — frustrated intellect. He absorbed, he remembered and, when pressed, he unspooled. Like Papa, he knew Tomah as a tightly spun fabric of personalities. His mind contained the chronicle of his community as expressed in the lives, quirks, conflicts and careers of its many people, scrolling back through all the 87 years that Dad lived. His death took from the town a trove of memory more dense, complex and dramatic than all the Roman volumes of Edward Gibbon.

Papa and Dad never went to college nor even dared consider the notion. Both revered the few townsmen in Tomah who had higher educations. They conversed easily among both the ignorant and erudite in Tomah, and they were respected — listened to — because their minds were busy and their wits were sharp. They never stopped learning. They encouraged their kids to study and grow, to learn all their lives, to see the humor that comes from pain, to watch the movies and peer beneath their surface.

I grew up with these two difficult, ironic, sometimes tormented forebears, as well as a host of aunts and uncles whose humble but tireless intellect intrigued and challenged me. Prowling the town, I harked to blacksmiths, paperhangers, scarred veterans and shopkeepers whose knowledge was not available in school.

No one among these white Midwesterners from whom I spring ever had an office job. But they saw a future without steel dust, dirty hands and brute labor. They encouraged their kids to learn more than they’d been able to, to start their careers later in life, to grow beyond Tomah and to aspire to those office jobs, to academia, to management and even government.

Dad and Papa, in the dictionary sense, were ignorant men. But they were articulate, literate and worldly in a tiny corner of an ever-changing world. They never deemed ignorance a badge of honor. They defied it every day of their lives and took pride in offspring — like me — who not only knew more than they, but flaunted it.

Question is, why am I thinking about this now?