I can picture my grandpa’s hands in perfect color. The dark blue veins, the almost white scars, the purple sunspots, and the tan skin; strong, capable hands.
When you’re young you notice things and you’re not shy about asking about them.
“Grandpa, what happened to your hand?” His right hand was different, his index and middle finger looked like they were stuck together and they curled inward towards his palm. I grabbed it and held it up to him to show him what I was talking about.
“Well, when I was younger, about your age, a horse bit me!”
“Really?” I stood, amazed, staring at the large hand I held with my own little six year old hands.
“You’re supposed to hold your hand out flat when you feed a horse, Grandpa.”
He chuckled and reached into his back pocket. Looking around he secretly slipped me one of the $2 bills that he took out from the bank to give to his grandkids when they visited. I smiled up at him before I ran out of the house to go tell my brother. As I got to the door I could hear my grandma saying, those two fingers are the reason he didn’t have to go to war.
I didn’t realize at the time that he was joking. And I was too young to begin to comprehend what my grandma was saying; that this birth defect was ruled by the government as preventing him from properly pulling a trigger in defense of his country in World War II. As I ran out the door to play with my brother,I didn’t realize how those two fingers potentially saved my entire family.
*
Veronica Catherine Zahler met Cyril Hermus Walesch over the back fence, or at least that’s how they liked to tell it. They married in 1939 and lived in Osseo, Minnesota, a suburb of the Twin Cities. There they bought a gas station, or as my dad called it, a service station. When I picture it I see it in black and white. My grandma with a baby on her hip at the front counter.My grandpa, with a cigarette behind his ear, helping a customer fill up his tank.They had their first three daughters there: Marguerite, Judith and Mary Joe. I can see them running through my imagination, dancing around the service station, my grandma kissing scraped elbows and bruised knees telling them, it will be gone before you’re married, like she has told me when I’ve gone to her with the same kind of injury.
In 1958, looking for a change of pace, the Walesch family sold the service station and bought a hardware store in Becker, Minnesota. Walesch Hardware& Implement sold tools and farm machinery to the town with a population of 328. The family lived above the store and during that time added five more children to it’s ranks; James, Thomas, Annette, Jean, and my father, Steven. My dad took me there one summer when we were visiting. I was around nine at the time and even then I couldn’t imagine how all eight children plus Grandma and Grandpa could live in such a small place. It had been turned into an antique store, full of furniture, vases, and artwork that I wasn’t allowed to touch. I walk through the store, up the stairs, seeing ghosts of my aunts and uncles giggling, crying, running, and sleeping within these four walls. When I remember it I see it in sepia. The browns, and yellows, of the wood floors and walls holding in secrets and stories of my family’s past.
My dad was two years old when they moved from town to a farm on the outskirts of Becker. There on the seven-acre farm on the banks of the Elk River they added the last two daughters to the Walesch family: Karen and Katherine. By that time Marguerite, Judith, and Mary Joe had all moved on to start families of their own. It was at that farm where my grandparents raised the rest of their family. It was where James, Thomas, Annette, Jean, Steven, Karen, and Katherine walked uphill both ways in the snow to get to school in the winter, and picked strawberries on the neighboring 200-acre strawberry farm in the summer. When I picture it I picture it in the summer, with the white-washed house sturdy, surrounded by tall, green grass, casually bending to the breeze. I see my dad hiding in the cool, dark basement, lying in wait, ready to scare his two younger sisters. I see my grandma on her hands and knees in the dirt, weeding the garden, helping her corn, asparagus, and raspberries thrive. And I see my grandpa bent over his pickup with his boys by his side, tinkering and teaching them all about the intricacies an engine.
There were 53 years of memories, celebrations, losses, and life lived before I entered the story. I was born in 1992, becoming the eighteenth grandchild of Cyril and Veronica Walesch. I have never been to Osseo, Minnesota, and the Becker I visit now has a McDonald’s and a community center with an indoor pool and a slide. The place I associate with my grandparents is the two-bedroom condo in Becker that they moved into when they retired. I remember the little garden they planted on their deck. I remember running out to the garage to get a can of 7-Up. I remember sitting at the dining room table and no matter what meal was being served there was always bread and butter and Grandma’s famous cucumber salad. The secret is that you have to soak the cucumbers overnight, she would tell me when I asked her how to make them. I remember the container of Tinkertoys they kept in the closet for when the grandkids came to play, and the blue recliner that Grandpa used to sit in while he and my dad talked and Mom tried to help Grandma in the kitchen. Oh, Elizabeth you’re on vacation go sit down.
But most of all I remember my grandpa’s hands.
My grandpa’s hands held my grandma close when they danced at their wedding. His hands raised ten children, slipped countless grandchildren $2 bills, fixed cars, pumped gas, held a fire hose, and farmed the land. By the time my grandpa died in 2006 his hands had held twenty-five grandchildren and eighteen great-grandchildren.
One day at breakfast I asked my dad what had actually happened to my grandpa’s hands.
“When he was born his index and middle finger were webbed. The surgery to reverse it went wrong. That’s why they started curling in.” As my dad explains this, I look at his hands. He has middle and index fingers bent towards his palm, like I remember my grandpa’s being. “He told all of us growing up that he was bit by a horse too.”
“Why do you think he said that?
“I think he might have been a little uncomfortable. It was his right hand.” He extends his right hand towards me, and I reach forward to shake it; his fingers graze the inside of my palm awkwardly. “You know, he actually wanted to serve, he said that he told them that he could still pull a trigger.”
Written & self-published by Hilary Walesch
Hilary Anna Writing 