Tuck, Sirius, Jarvis, Michelle, and TT made it to the workshop, and while Tuck, Michelle, and TT started bustling around and making noise as they argued about how to cut Eddie down from the cords and chains holding him to the door and tried to find the right tools to do so, Sirius remained utterly silent. Eddie noticed all this in his peripheral vision. For a long time Sirius stood motionless near the door, staring toward Darlene, and then, very slowly, in stark comparison with the activity around him, he made a path toward where Darlene lay, as if he were a deer hunter and she his prey. Eddie took note of Sirius’s advance on Darlene, his stunned reaction alone revealing to Eddie who Sirius was. Sirius had apparently lost the ability to close his mouth, but Darlene, despite her agony, could not prevent herself from chuckling when she saw Sirius.
Look who it is. Darlene laughed. She seemed to gather strength from his presence.
I guess I finally made it, Sirius said, his voice catching with self-consciousness and what sounded like despair.
You didn’t have to wait so long, Darlene said, like somebody about to kiss somebody. At this point Sirius knelt down to whisper to her, and Eddie could no longer hear their conversation.
Still, from his vantage point tied to the door, Eddie could almost feel the tenderness radiating from Sirius. Sirius had eyes nearly the size of strawberries, and almost as red, and when he looked at you, it felt like he pitied you, and maybe loved you like a relative. Anybody might have wanted to save Eddie, considering where he’d wound up, but Sirius was obviously ill-equipped for the job; a man of deep thoughts, spiritual sayings, and compassion—Eddie had heard from the crew that in his music, Sirius preached nonviolence, mercy, tolerance, and cosmic deliverance, like the second coming of Dr. King or somebody. Eddie thought he might like to know that sort of brother in his day-to-day life, to go to for advice and such. Darlene had frequently told him his father had some of those qualities—she went for that type. But when you’ve got to do some urgent work of the sort they were about to do right then, Eddie thought he’d rather have a no-nonsense fellow in his corner, somebody who wouldn’t overthink it.
But somehow in the confusion that dominated the scene, TT placed a pair of bolt cutters in Sirius’s palms and gestured for him to make an attempt at freeing Eddie’s hands. Sirius rose from his conversation with Darlene and moved toward Eddie, delicately testing the tool. After a few moments of paralysis, he worked the cutters into a bunch of different areas but couldn’t do more than snip little wounds into the sides of the chain and expose some of the sheathing on the cable. Then he tried using the bolt cutters to free Eddie from the hole in the door, but there was a long rusty metal guard running the length of it, which prevented him from making even a tiny slice.
Take the damn door off the hinges, Darlene wheezed.
But Michelle thought that would only saddle him with a gigantic piece of equipment and keep him grounded even more than if they hadn’t done a thing.
In a silent, creeping way, it became obvious to Eddie, though nobody breathed the words, that the easiest way to get him free—something that the others had probably started thinking about a long time before he understood it—would be for him to leave his hands behind.
Tuck kept saying, Now we could get you free, we could get you free. But for the first few times he said it, Eddie thought Tuck meant to encourage himself; it didn’t dawn on Eddie that perhaps Tuck wanted it to seem like Eddie had come up with the idea first. And when he realized what Tuck meant, and why he wouldn’t be more specific, Eddie’s head filled with a rage hotter than the blue flame at the end of a blowtorch.
He didn’t say anything for a long time as the others milled around, discussing options. Instead he tried to explain the complexity of the situation to himself in his head, and then by looking back and forth in a certain way between Tuck and Sirius B. Never at Darlene. Tuck and Sirius semicircled his dangling body anxiously, not so much keeping their distance as seeming to fear the next step; apparently neither of them could muster the energy required to move forward. A sympathetic tingle passed through Eddie’s nerves and veins, and he felt sharply that he shouldn’t take his fury out on them, as they were victims too, nearly to the same degree.
With the time we have, I don’t see an alternative, Sirius fretted.
Doctors can put em back nowadays, Tuck said. He had found the circular saw. He held it, unplugged, in his right hand, almost casually, as if he planned to use the blade to scratch an itch on his forearm. We’ll save em, he said, and then repeated the phrase.
Eddie’s anger rose even higher. More than anything else, he wanted, ridiculously, to show Tuck that he wasn’t holding the saw properly. Idiot, he thought. Sirius busied himself by gathering up a few of the longer pieces of the sheathed cable; Eddie tried to catch his mother’s eye, but she appeared to be having an intense discussion with Scotty—she wouldn’t look at Eddie or come close to him in a way that somebody might later connect with what was about to happen.
We’ll put em on ice, my man, Tuck said. Eddie listened to his voice for any undercurrent of payback. The songs of Willie “Mad Dog” Walker played loudly in his head.
Tuck plugged the saw into a plastic adapter that screwed into a light socket. He tested the distance between the end of its slack and Eddie’s position at the door, then tugged on the cord attached to the lightbulb and moved the whole operation when he found that it wasn’t quite close enough to do the job accurately.
I can’t do it, he said.
Do you mean you can’t reach, or you can’t do it? Eddie asked.
Can’t do it. Just can’t. Can’t even look at the doing of it. It’s too…He took a long frowning pause.
After all that, you’re going to go soft?
Go soft? I am soft, bruh, he said. When it come to something like this.
Sirius decided that the group should quickly make some rules about the procedure. He suggested that Eddie close his eyes so that he wouldn’t know who had done the job. But that didn’t pan out when Michelle said it would be obvious once he opened them again, and everybody else would know and give it away, so he’d find out immediately no matter what.
You should all come in close, Eddie said. Then it won’t be so obvious.
Nobody liked that idea.
At last Tuck found a way to loop the power cord from the circular saw over a nail sticking out of the door above Eddie. The saw swung there like a pendulum, like the border between Eddie’s life before and who knew what. Eddie would need only to raise his wrists toward the blades if somebody stuck the plug in and the power went on.
Darlene spoke up, voicing her hopes. Maybe the saw will cut through the chain and the chain will fall off? she said. But that went against what everybody else could see would happen, and what Michelle and Tuck had braced themselves to deal with. Their brows knotted together.
I hope so, Mama, Eddie said hopelessly, as his anger crested, like a fever breaking, and fear took its place. He stared toward his mother. Darlene took a very quick glance at him and their eyes met for an instant.
Looking back later, from the distance of St. Cloud, Eddie would say that he reckoned he’d done well. Best thing that ever happened to me! he’d say. How could I have become the Handyman Without Hands if I had hands? I wouldn’t give up that experience for anything in the world. It’s unique, it set me apart from any other Negro stranger, especially up in St. Cloud. I do believe that God called me to be the Handyman Without Hands. People who have everything and everything works, those folks don’t even notice that they have it. But set an obstacle in a man’s way and he can see his whole life differently—not that everybody in my position could’ve done what I did. But if you’re stubborn like me, and you have to struggle to do what other people seem to do without trying—hell, without even thinking about trying—it changes your thoughts and your behavior. People who get the special treats of life think it’s easy, think anybody can do what they’ve done. I’ve seen some rich folks focus so hard on everybody they think is above them and who gets more than they do that they actually think they’re on the bottom. I tell you, the bottom is crackheads like TT and Michelle and Hannibal and my mom, out in that boiling heat, hunting for a brown lime on a barren tree. No, there’s worse than that. But it’s so much worse that if you saw it, you’d quit the human race.
Sirius apologized, then began to sing a slow ballad that Eddie didn’t recognize—badly—until Tuck asked him to shut up.
Eddie closed his eyes, stiffened his wrists, and imagined what was to come. Immediately he forced himself to think of something else—his backyard in Ovis, a rare memory of his father watching him play in the sun on a breezy Saturday.
The solution everyone agreed upon, to protect the identity of the cutter and to reduce Eddie’s terror, was that he would wear a blindfold. Darlene knelt behind him, wrapping a sweatshirt over his face. I can’t stay, Eddie heard his mother whisper to him. I’m going to walk as far away from this barn as I can so I don’t have to hear anything, I’ll cover my ears and I’ll wait right outside with these rags once I get the all-clear. It’s too much.
But I’ll be okay. Tuck says it’s temporary and they’ll get reattached. And by then we’ll be out of here.
Right, she said. Of course.
His mother’s reassurance did not sound convincing, but he had to admit he hadn’t convinced himself of what he’d said either.
I reckon I’m a weak person. Darlene sighed. I get sick of myself sometimes. I just go along with life because I can’t think myself out of the things I get into. I can’t move on. I can’t do that to Nat. I owe him.
How could you be weak after working at Delicious?
Darlene thwacked Eddie lovingly on his back.
Seriously, he said. Weak? Carrying those Carolina Crosses all day?
It’s a different kind of weak, Eddie. It’s like the Lord has asked me to walk through a hurricane and get across an ocean but didn’t give me rubbers or a raincoat or a lifeboat. Or even clothes. She finished tying Eddie’s blindfold and he heard the sound of her hands hitting her thighs.
So what. Your feet get wet and you swim.
That’s okay if you’re tough inside. You share that with your father. But I take everything to heart.
I don’t know what you mean.
You’re going to think I’m crazy, Eddie, but it doesn’t matter if it’s a pistol-whipping or a sunset, I can’t stop feeling overwhelmed. I don’t want to lose anyone anymore, I don’t want to lose anything. Why does being alive have to mean always losing, always losing everything all the time?
You can take pictures! Movies?
No. I mean things nobody can replace. Most people don’t even try. It doesn’t matter to them. Or if it does, they know how to ignore it. I can’t. I need to talk to Scotty. She laughed. Scotty helps me handle all of this.
She danced her fingers down to the ends of Eddie’s arms and he felt a strange kind of pressure there. She promised to make sure they’d get him to a hospital first thing—this veiled touch would not be the last sensation he’d ever feel with his fingers—and he stretched his mouth skeptically, doubting her ability to supervise that journey. But before he could say anything, she used his shoulder to raise herself from the ground and soon the cooler air from outside tumbled into the space and her footsteps grew fainter as they crunched through the leaves outside. Eddie thought he heard her weeping but it also sounded like coughing.
He shouted after her, and her footsteps returned briefly to the door but neither said anything. Eddie’s heart leapt into his neck and choked him.
It sounded to Eddie like someone unsheathed the safety, squeezed the trigger, and the wave-shaped teeth on the circular blade emitted a low whir that soon blasted up to a high-pitched whine. With the saw held aloft, the person seemed to approach the barn doors with nearly ceremonial slowness, punctuated by a slight stumble and a recovery. At the edge of the door frame, the person holding the saw paused; Eddie imagined him making some technical adjustment. A voice he could not quite identify—he thought it was Tuck’s—shouted over the noise and asked about his readiness. Beneath the blindfold, the sleeves of the garment tight behind his ears, he closed his eyes and nodded, stoically barking the words, Go ahead, get it over with, hoping to have yelled it loud enough for everyone to hear him over the noise of the saw and through the thick cloth that covered even his mouth. He leaned his torso aside and held his wrists away from his chest to provide better access to the cutter. Tentatively, the buzzing teeth descended toward the cables and chains and cuffs that held Eddie captive to the doors.
Get me out of this, Lord, he prayed. Let me get free.
The first kiss of the saw buzzed against the hairs at the base of his left hand as the blade tore through the sheathed cable and uncoiled its copper and nickel wires with an insistent grinding noise. Cords snapped and frayed and the sheathing flew away toward Eddie and the ground where he had folded his knee underneath his body to brace himself. The unraveling cooled his hands and the circulation returned to his palms.
The blade had not yet pierced his skin, and the worker pulled back for a moment. Hope lingered—since the saw had destroyed the cable, perhaps it might cut through the chain and the cuffs as well, sparing Eddie the loss of his hands. But when the saw touched the metal chain, the pitch of the grinding immediately rose to an unbearable squeal, then a sickening screech that seemed to thread through him like a giant needle, and after a moment or two, the ferocious rotation of the saw stopped entirely. Then the machine made as if to start up, but stopped again with a defeated clunk. Eddie imagined some of its teeth curving in new directions, blunted or jagged. The chain, meanwhile, had not lessened its grip around his wrists, nor had the handcuffs.
Urgent muttering sprang up around him, voices of group members confirming the mutilation of the saw, trying to decide on an appropriate, expedient action. Eddie allowed himself a few moments to get comfortable moving his fingers again; some blood and sensation had come back into his capillaries, he stopped imagining that his hands would soon turn black and that severing them would make no difference anyway. In the darkness behind the sweatshirt blindfold, he opened and closed his eyes and could see no light. A deep shadow appeared dotted with ghostlike greenish lights and vague shapes that he guessed must correspond to objects he had recently viewed; or perhaps they formed a map of the stars in some unknown corner of the galaxy.
The voices around him did not utter complete sentences; instead they communicated with barely audible whispers and soft, nudging grunts, some of which seemed to mean agreement, and others disagreement. They spoke among themselves, someone manipulating the saw, possibly knocking metal tools against it. Eddie had ordered a replacement blade, he recalled, but UPS would take several more weeks to deliver it.
After a time, Eddie permitted his mind to wander. He pictured the days ahead with great fear, making a list of activities he assumed he would no longer be able to do. He remembered rotating a tiny screwdriver between his thumb and index finger to tighten the hinges on Elmunda’s eyeglasses, reassembling the circuit board on the Fusiliers’ computer, picking up grains of rice that he’d accidentally spilled on their kitchen floor, removing a staple jammed in the business end of a stapler. The many times he’d opened soda cans and held pens and cutlery and turned the pages of a newspaper whizzed through in his head like images in a flip-book; he grew more despondent at the thought of the myriad items whose surfaces he would never get to caress, starting with the female body, then his own body, angora cats, corn silk, the pointed hairs of one of the Fusiliers’ Persian rugs, a sack of seeds, cool running water. It didn’t comfort him much to imagine that he would still feel these things with other parts of his body; idly touching the bristles of a shaving brush like the one that had belonged to his father did not seem possible or desirable without fingers. Then he thought about the pleasures of the fingers themselves, about instruments he would never learn to play, about snapping and clapping and flipping the bird, about making silhouettes of animals on bright walls, about carrying and drumming and cooking, and about the sign language he would never learn—and as these losses mounted, he changed his mind. There had to be a way to leave Delicious without having to go through with this. Sirius himself had done it.
But as he turned with his shrouded head to tell the debating folks behind him to back off, the circular saw started up again. When he shouted, he could tell his protest sounded to them like anxiety; they merely patted his back and reassured him. Perhaps the sweatshirt muffled him more than he had previously thought—could they not hear what he was saying?
In another moment the broken blade stung Eddie’s skin just above the knot of his left wrist, and a burning sensation spread out from there, but in a second the spinning cutter came into contact with bone and made another high-pitched grinding noise before the hardness where the radius and the ulna came together gave way and shattered. The cut felt ragged to Eddie, who believed that a neat slice would improve the chances that his hands could be reattached, and he clenched his teeth against the horrific ongoing burn. The mechanical noises drowned out his shouting; at this point he knew that whatever came out of his mouth sounded to them like a response to the pain and shock, not a statement that he had changed his mind and that they should stop cutting.
The clumsy jabbing of the saw gave him the sinking feeling that the dirty job had fallen to TT, whom Eddie had watched perform all of the tasks How and Jackie assigned to him with a complete lack of artistry or subtlety, consistently bruising fruit and breaking open melons. After a few short moments more of burn and tear he felt his left hand hanging heavy from the skin and tendons that remained; he had grown faint from the blood loss and fainter still from the thought of blood loss. Someone jumped in to arrest his widening injury with a tourniquet made from a towel which quickly became warm and wet.
In the midst of the fracas, an unfamiliar voice entered the room, attempting to shout over the noise and direct people in some fashion. For a second the voice approached the same pitch as the saw and demanded an explanation for the current activity, but after a couple of moments it returned to its original volume and the focus around Eddie seemed to change. The voice, he now understood, must belong to Jarvis Arrow, the man who’d come with Sirius, and with a shudder of relief, Eddie assured himself that even if nothing else had gone well exactly, the timing of the escape would work out perfectly. He heard his mother’s voice as well, and what he believed to be her feet scrambling around the workshop.
The awkward stabbing of the saw continued and finally released his left arm; Eddie let it fall toward his flank, but before it could get there, a pair of gentle hands lifted it into a folded towel. His mother whispered encouragements to him, describing the way she was stopping the blood by tearing up a towel and attaching it to the end of his wrist with lengths of sheathed cable and rubber they’d saved from before.
You’re almost free, he heard her say. Almost free. Darlene ran out of the workspace again, pledging to return when the job was done.
But he would not be free until the bearer of the saw could scoot over to the opposite side—and repeat the excruciating performance. The pain of losing the right hand combined with what he already felt in the left; the trauma drained his head of blood and he began to hyperventilate. The bungling and the pain continued with the right hand, as before. The person with the saw turned it off and Eddie felt someone tugging at his forearm as if to loosen a stubborn connection, but the saw went on again, poking around and grinding into his fractured bones. Eddie passed out and then regained consciousness, then passed out again as he heard his mother, who had returned to the workspace, repeating, without joy or sorrow, We have to go. Right this minute. We got you free, so stand up.