Marked Men

"They tell me you play the guitar," he said in a rather gruff voice.

"Yessir, I play a bit," I said. After all George and I had been practicing every day for about a month or two and we had mastered the C, Am, F, and G chords.  These chords were used in many early rock and roll songs.  Maybe we thought we would be the next rock and roll duo.  Anyhow, girls liked  rock and roll singers. On this day George and I had gone up to Mrs. McAllister's store for a Coke and a pack of Nabs when we saw old man Kelley. Mama had always called him that. I don't know why. She said he played at dances when she was younger and he was sitting on a nail keg by the stove

"Let me see your hands," he demanded.

"What?" I answered in surprise.

"C'mon, let me see your hands, palms up," he insisted.

"Okay," I said obligingly.  Mama had taught me to be respectful to older folks, Mr. Kelley was well over fifty, and to me anybody over thirty was old.

"You ain't no picker, boy!" he said. His  gold capped tooth caught the light and sparkled when he spoke.

I didn't know what to say, but I knew better than to argue.  (Mama taught me that too!) I just stared at this tall angular man with thinning reddish gray hair in faded bib overalls and chambray shirt.

"Maybe I could see your hands so I would know what a guitar picker's hands should look like," I said.

"Aw right," he said looking down at me over his sharp pointed nose with pale gray eyes. He held his hands out in front of me, and the first thing I noticed was that part of his middle finger on his left hand was missing.

"Sir, how'd you lose part of that finger?" I asked.

He lifted his hand and examined the place where once the fingernail and the end of the finger had been. "Every craft leaves its mark," he said.  "I build houses, and I lost that finger when I was putting the roof on old preacher Gadsdin's house.  Been a long time ago now."

Later, I started thinking about what he had said concerning trades leaving their mark, and I figured what he said was true. I remembered that I had seen a film one time about race car drivers, and each of them had a limp, because they had gotten some bones broken in a wreck on the racetrack. When I was a kid you could always spot a long haul truck driver by his arms. Yes, they would be big for muscling those big trucks around before the advent of power steering, but the left arm would have a suntan.  The right arm would not.  Men who did hard labor with their hands always had callouses, but pencil pushers did not.  When I worked in textile mills in my youth I noticed that certain jobs left their mark on the worker.  For example, spinning frame doffers were small quick men who developed a permanent stoop from their job.  My father was a cloth doffer in a cotton mill, and he had a huge overdeveloped muscle on the left side of his back. Years of carrying rolls of cloth weighing over  one hundred pounds caused the muscle to become enlarged.   Once, I shook hands with a swordmaker in Toledo, Spain.  I could feel that he was missing part of a finger.

Perhaps one of the most interesting marks I've ever seen was on an old retired electrician from a manufacturing plant. I was talking to him and some other older fellows once at an old mill village cafe. As he picked up his Coca-Cola in the small glass bottle I noticed his hands.  "What happened to your hand?"  I asked.

He slowly set down the bottle and began to massage his right hand with his left. There were two huge callouses on the first joints of his index and middle fingers of his right hand. "Well," he said, "I'll tell you. You see I worked in that mill over there for over thirty years. I was the company electrician. We didn't have all those fancy meters and things in those days.  If you wanted to know if a circuit was hot, you just stuck your knuckles to it. If you got a tingle, you knowed it was live.  And that's how I got those big callouses, checking for current!"

Every trade does leave its mark, but what does that have to do with playing the guitar?  Well, Mr. Kelley saw that I didn't have the mark of a guitar player.  My finger tips did not have callouses!