A Good Half Hand

by Elizabeth Hadaway

In his sixth year of applying for the pension,
he wrote that they could not know anything
about the fistula
as it was at a place that they did not see
although he’d let the federal government
take a close look. I was in horspital
No. 8 at Nashville Tenn.
With measels and feaver, Had mumps in camp

I guess his messmates nursed him, too far west
for Whitman to have hovered by his bed.
Unknown cloth-wringer, bucket-emptier,
I know how dangerous mumps in a man
of twenty-two can be, how you nursed me
as well. And this genetic particle
you cooled and soothed thanks you, and if you caught
it and you had no children, if you drift
with no one’s lares, be mine, Mine want help.

If I prove that my horse fell and hurt my hip
will it be any benefit to me?
If not you will doe me a grait favor to say that it will not.
I am you Obedient servent

my great-great-grandfather, whose blue tattoo
was his own name, in hopes his corpse might come
back home, thought home was in Virginia where
he fought, eventually, for Mr. Lincoln.

I went through the lines in July 1863
as I have already stated

His anger thrives in me, something beyond
a trite Darwinian propensity
for fight or flight, more than environment
though in his ninety-seventh year he drilled
my mother, three, in her times tables, then
swayed out on his two canes to criticize
his grandson’s fence (which stands now, overgrown).
The grapes he foraged set my teeth on edge.

I want to hack through their wild vines, dissect
this anger. It’s a tangle:steep hill strung
with old foxgrapes among the hardwood, tough
enough to swing from (proto-bungee rush
that’s like a fit of rage, adrenalin
alive inside me), or to strangle in.
Vines choke. Since Freud is discredited
but useful, can’t Lamarck be? His giraffes
stretched out their necks to graze and had giraffes
with even longer necks, I want to say
that he was right. No, I’m no scientist.

Some kinds of work I can’t do.
I can’t cradle or mow, or chop a whole day.
I don’t think I have been more than half a hand
since 1870…I say 1870 and 1880
because those were the summers when the fistulas
were opened and I was not able to do anything.

His file ends with his widow’s death, the year
my father shipped to the Korean War.
I think. I didn’t ask Dad for details;
I didn’t want to open anything.

Did he receive an injury while in service?
Yes. I saw his horse fall on him …
His foot and leg swelled up …
and that same night he rode as hard as he could ride
from Russelsville to Strawberry Plains
with only on foot in the stirrup and no boot on.

My father taught me how to drive, I’d dread
the other cars out early: night shifters
or hunters coming home, deer on their hoods,
and dreaded his protection, thought that he
at any minute would be ducking fire
from forty years before and running us
into an oncoming, the mountainside.
He’d grabbed my uncle’s neck one time and forced
them both beneath the dash at some load sound.
No ground was firm beneath him, or for me.

Has he received medical treatment since 1865?
They are not a family who employ a physician much,

My father balanced whole zoos of balloons
above my bedroom’s curtains rods in case
the house caught fire. Alarms? We had alarms.
But if they didn’t work the heat would pop
my birds and elephants. I might escape.
Years later he would drop me off at work
and sit in his pickup across the street,
on guard in case a customer attacked.

I was a jumpy bookstore clerk, I keep
an eye on my escape routes when I teach
(night English, adjunct, at a business school).
I’ve never cradled. I may be the end
of all their griefs that found me to inhabit.

I think he is not fit to work at all,
but he does keep at it.

More of the story

A Good Half Hand from Fire Baton, a collection of poems by Elizabeth Hadaway published by The University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, AK.

Wiley Winton Roberts was born and lived in Grayson County. During the War of the Rebellion Wiley first “dodged around” until 1863 when he left Roberts Cove to join the Union army.Elizabeth’s mother, aunt, and uncles heard stories about the war from their great grand father and their parents. When her aunt Ginger got interested in genealogy and obtained a copy of Wiley’s pension application she found over 100 pages of documentation submitted in six different applications over xxx years that described Wiley’s entry into the Union Army, his injury and subsequent illnesses, and his disability following the war.These applications finally resulted in a pension of xxx a month being granted to his widow.

More valuable to his family was the information about his life and a demonstration of his stubbornness that was shown in those applications.The stories repeated by her grandmother and the words from the applications became the basis of this poem.

Also see “All Short-a Appalachia“