Bending the Twig

“You’re a lucky boy.”

Right.  Real lucky.  And rich.  And ten-and-a-half feet tall.  I glanced at my grandfather.  His eyes, inscrutable behind wire-framed bifocals, focused on the wing joint where his knife worked.

I ripped open the tender skin of my pheasant and stripped off its iridescent plumage, mulling the odd comment.  With the point of my hunting knife I dislodged a few pellets from the breast.  We sat on low stools in the backyard, cleaning birds after our Saturday afternoon hunt.

“Yep, you’re lucky,” Grandpa repeated brightly.  He was seventy-one, rheumatic but reasonably spry, still working for a living, still accurate with a shotgun.  Until that moment I had considered him to be level-headed.

I was sixteen.  My younger brother and I lived with our maternal grandparents.  Our two sisters were seventy miles away, living with an aunt and uncle.  Things were going fairly well for me just then, but calling me lucky was like calling the two dollars in my pocket a fortune.

“This one’s hardly shot up at all,” I said, slitting open its belly and catching a whiff of guts and blood.  I slipped my fingers under the ribs and ripped out the heart and fragments of lung, then the windpipe and gullet.  Had someone at that moment predicted that one day I would carve the corresponding organs from a cadaver’s chest and call the vital tubes by their more scientific-sounding names, trachea and esophagus, I would have fallen down laughing.

But I would eventually make my way to medical school and troop along with my new classmates into the anatomy laboratory for that first time, our nostrils alert to the unfamiliar air laced with formaldehyde, alcohol, and preserved human flesh, our anxieties concealed beneath shells of exaggerated confidence.  Standing before my cadaver, an elderly male gray as slate, I would take up my scalpel - and balk.  Though I was adept with my well-honed hunting knife, quick to cut and quick to finish, I hesitated before that preserved gray body, for I had been bruised by Death’s power, and that lifeless form recalled loved ones I had lost.  But life goes on.  I forced myself to press my keen blade into that cold throat - and broke the spell.  In the months that followed I calmly sliced through my cadaver’s remains with scalpel and scissors, sawed through his bones, cut out his silent heart and gritty liver, probed his rubbery brain, my knowledge expanding as he diminished.  But even though I’d learned much since that distant afternoon when my grandfather had called me lucky, I hadn’t yet grasped his meaning.