Toes by Danielle Kurtzleben

There was a local legend when I was a boy that Grandpa Gambell once caught a fish with one foot. Apparently, on a fine August morning in his younger years, Grandpa woke at 5:00 and found himself unable to get back to sleep. It was a whole hour until he really needed to be tending the chickens, and Grandpa wasn’t one to sit around with his coffee and newspaper (not that he ever got a newspaper). So Grandpa Gambell trudged out into the thick, dawn-misty woods behind the house and down to the barely-lit crick for some early-morning noodling. Standing hip-deep in that water, letting its chill rouse him from his sleepy stupor, Grandpa felt a barely-there tickle by his right ankle and, without really thinking, shot his right foot out and latched onto that fish – with nothing but his five right toes, mind you – and then reached under to retrieve a ten-inch carp. Not much of a fish, I suppose, but a one-footed grab is nothing short of stupefying. I don’t remember my parents much – they died when Emmy was just a baby – but one thing that stuck is Papa’s stories about Grandpa’s amazing grab…long-winded tales of how Grandpa was a hero throughout southwestern Missouri from then on.

I still remember sitting up at the Red Raccoon – the nearby diner – with Grandpa when I was 8. As I sipped my sarsaparilla, I would hear Grandpa tell the tale repeatedly, though in varying forms. Sometimes Grandpa said he did it while sleepwalking. Sometimes the Mayor of St. Louis came down and gave Grandpa the “key to the city,” whatever that meant. Sometimes there would be visitors at the Red Raccoon – travelers just passing through, someone’s relatives from out of town – and these visitors were all invariably skeptics. Overhearing Grandpa’s impossible tale, some of these visitors would feel compelled to speak up.

“Now,” they’d say, setting down their beer mugs and shaking their heads, “I’ve heard of noodling before, but I’ll be damned if a man caught and held a slippery little fish with one grab of his toes.”

No one ever blamed the skeptics, because none of these outsiders ever got to see what Grandpa Gambell’s feet actually looked like, which was in a word, monumental. This does not mean that they were particularly attractive, because who has pretty feet, anyhow? It just means that there has never been another set quite like them. Grandpa’s feet were, first of all, what I can only describe as lumpy – years of noodling had transformed them into a pair of thick, rubbery masses that had bulging muscles you never knew existed in a man’s foot. Furthermore, on the rare occasion that Grandpa’s feet were fully clean, one could see that the bottoms were entirely yellow with calluses – probably because, for as long as I can remember, he only wore shoes to church, around the pigs, and in the fields.

But then there were his toes, which were truly a sight. Whoever upstairs decided to affix such unnaturally long toes onto Grandpa’s feet must have been well over three sheets to the wind, in my mind. His second toes, for example, were fully the length of his pointer fingers. His third toes were nearly just as long, and so on down the line to his pinkies, which were still of a formidable size.

But whatever the explanation behind his unnatural feet, there can be no denying that they gave Grandpa a distinct advantage when it came to noodling. I was reminded of this when I was 12, and Grandpa decided it was time for me to get serious about learning the practice that had brought so much fame to the name of Gambell. Emmy and I walked up the lane after school one October day to find Grandpa standing outside the house with a pig-whip in hand.

“Emmy! You’re doing evening chores from now on! Jake needs to learn to noodle!” As Grandpa handed her the whip, little Emmy looked at me with nothing short of absolute fright on her face – she was nine, and had to handle both a 30-head swineherd and a whole chicken house full of nesting hens (some of the nastiest creatures on earth) by herself. Of course, at the time, I thought I was getting the raw deal. Maybe Emmy had to handle the livestock, but I had to learn noodling from Grandpa Gambell, southwest Missouri’s best noodler ever.

“Come on, boy! You have some learning to do!”

Emmy and I had for years now had our own fights in front of the fire at night over who was better inheriting those magnificent feet.

“Look!” I’d say, holding my foot up against hers, “My toes are longer!”

“Yeah, well, you’re older than me! When I’m older, you’ll see, my toes’ll be huuuuge!” And she’d wave her dirty little feet in my face.

Now, as I removed my shoes and socks, I said an urgent prayer to God that maybe the toe-inheriting part of me would kick in and extend mine by even a half-inch. Or maybe He’d make it normal for girls to noodle, so Emmy could take my place. All I knew for sure was that the prospect of spending so much time with Grandpa made me powerfully undeasy. Then, cursing my standard-length, downright stubby toes, I followed Grandpa down to the crick.

Standing hip-deep in the brown crick-water, I was reminded repeatedly of the shoes I was trying to fill.

“See, to really do good noodling, Jakey, you don’t need God-given gifts as toes. It’s allll in the trapping and how quick your-” He cut off abruptly, his body suddenly jerking and shifting and sloshing water around. He stared straight ahead, not really looking at anything so much as looking straight past it – the same intense look he got during the prayers in church. About five seconds later, Grandpa’s face unfroze into a triumphant smirk, and he plunged his arms down into that water, up to the shoulders, and came up with a madly fluttering carp. Looking satisfied, he sloshed to shore, continuing the lesson.

“See, it don’t much matter if you squish ‘em against the river bottom, or if you squeeze ‘em between your feet…” he paused and dropped the fish in the five-gallon pail he had brought. “Or even if you grab ‘em with one foot, like a guy I know.” Here he winked at me, dropping all his expectations on my chest with that one little gesture.

“You just gotta be quick and firm with ‘em.” And then he re-entered the river. “Quick ‘n’ firm, quick ‘n’ firm,” he rhythmically muttered to himself as he sloshed in.

I stood in my spot, struggling to just breathe, and pretending to care when I felt all those flittering tickles rush past my calves.

Emmy and I were always close. Back then, when the people in the towns were all enjoying their automobiles and radios, we and our neighbors were still without. Emmy and I were each other’s entertainment, I suppose. For a long time, the two of us spent nearly all day, every day together. We gathered eggs together in the morning, walked the two miles to school together with other kids from down the road, spent the whole day in the same schoolhouse, came home to do chores together, and in the summers played games of Annie Annie Over and Cowboys and Indians with the other kids. Some evenings, we would sit at the foot of Grandpa’s chair and listen to him telling stories about what it was like when he and Grandma Gambell were young.

“The thing that made your Grandma love me,” he would say (we heard this story a good dozen times a year), “was my toes.”

Emmy would giggle delightedly, her long mane of straw-colored hair glinting in the firelight as she brushed it – Emmy was always so proud of her hair. Never once did I see her cut it, though I assume she did; otherwise it would have reached the ground sooner or later, I suppose. As it was, Emmy’s long blonde hair fell past her waist, and brushing it out was her nightly ritual as we listened to Grandpa.

“Your feet?” Emmy would ask, running her brush in even strokes. “That’s silly! No one likes feet!”

“I’m telling you, it’s true! I put that ring on my fourth toe on my right foot and walked up to your Grandma and said, ‘Betty, marry me.’”

I laughed too. “So, how did she notice the ring on your toe?” This was how our little story-time worked – Emmy and I asked questions, fully knowing the answers all the while.

Grandpa winked. “Come on, Jacob. When you’re blessed with toes as stunning as mine, the girls can’t help but stare all the time. She noticed right away and just couldn’t resist. You best pray that, when it comes time for you to marry a biddy of your own, you have the Gambell feet, is all I’m saying.” Then he would rock back in his chair, smiling in a wholly satisfied manner, while Emmy brushed her hair and I laughed. This was how our nights were spent for almost as far back as I can remember, Emmy and I being steeped repeatedly in stories of farming and Grandma and, most importantly, the joys that come with possessing highly unnatural feet.

These story sessions did not happen every night. About one night a week or so, Grandpa would slip into a foul mood and stay out of the house all night. Getting up from supper, he would mutter, “I got some work to do. Don’t need no help. Entertain yourselves. Don’t come out and burden me.” I can still remember lying in bed on those bad nights, wishing I didn’t know what Grandpa was up to. Of course, I always heard. I would hear the feed shovel dragging across the gravel, the way Grandpa always did when going to the feed the pigs. I would wait a minute or so, and then put my pillow over my head – a tactic that blocked little of the noise. The hog screams, punctuated by the heavy “bong!s” of the scoop, sounded almost human sometimes, and this scared me. My dreams on these nights were the worst of it, though. I would fade out of consciousness, a pig scream ringing through my head like a bell, and find myself suddenly in a terrible state, convinced that it was Emmy screeching with pain. Sometimes I’d find myself in the schoolhouse yard, and the older boys would be pulling Emmy’s hair. Sometimes a horse was trampling her. Once – I remember this so clearly – she had climbed the locust tree in our front yard and gotten her hair all tangled up in a bough. My dream self stood stock-still on the ground, unable to so much as think as I looked up at my sister, swinging from the branches by her hair, wailing endlessly.

On my bad-dream nights – every last one of them – I snuck down the hall and squeaked Emmy’s door open. She was always lying peacefully, looking too contented to let anything so awful awake her. I was thankful for that.

But as soon as that day came when Grandpa decided to teach me, Emmy and I started to drift. Every afternoon, when Grandpa was done with the day’s plowing or planting or whathaveyou and I was home from school, he would take me out to the crick. And while we were spending all this time with our fishing, Emmy was left to her own devices back at the farm. It was kind of funny; Emmy stayed behind because she was a girl, but sooner or later, she handled animals better than any male farmhand around. I remember standing in that river, futilely splashing around, and imagining little Emmy back home, sorting off the big pigs into the buying-man’s trailer while enduring his awkwardness – no buying-man was used to dealing with 10-year-old girls in his work, after all. “How’d you get to be so good at this, little girl?” I imagined him asking with bewilderment as Emmy grabbed a hog by the scruff of its neck and steered it into the trailer. When the days were longer, daylight would stretch on until past nine at night, so by the time Grandpa and I got home from the river, Emmy, exhausted from her long evening of sorting and feeding and tending, would already be in bed.

And so this went on for years, me noodling and Emmy doing her work. At first, we were still as good of pals as ever, wrestling and chasing beheaded chickens after Grandpa had chopped them. But slowly and surely, we became more like room-renters than brother and sister. Our walks to and from school became quiet. On one walk home, I tried to force the words out of her.

“Why are you so quiet lately, Emmy?”

She looked down at her feet. “I’m tired lately. Got a lot of stuff to do, you know.” She took a breath. Then she continued, “We can’t all noodle all day, Jake.”

I felt a dull pain at the base of my skull – the same I felt whenever a particularly slow fish slithered away from my feet, or when I accidentally dropped an egg in the chickenhouse. “I’m really sorry, Emmy.”

She looked straight ahead, towards home, and picked up the pace a bit. “The pigs might have scabies. I should tell Grandpa that sometime.” We didn’t talk much for a long while after that.

When I was around thirteen or fourteen, Emmy became nearly non-existent, spending many of her free moments in her room. There was one night when I came home from noodling and saw her bedroom door open and lamp still lit. Walking by, I peered in, wondering what in the world she was doing to entertain herself now that we weren’t having our nightly bickering matches. She was sitting in front of her dresser mirror, brushing her waist-long straw-colored hair, a serene smile on her face. It was maybe the first time I had seen her smile in months.

I still don’t know why I did it, but I decided to snap her out of it. “Emmy! Stop that hair-brushing and come on out and play some poker with me! I’m bored!”

Her face dropped, and she sat down her brush and quickly affixed her hair up into a bun. She did come out and play poker with me, but it devolved – I don’t remember how, but it was much more quickly than usual – into yet another wrestling match. She was more brutal than she had used to be, manhandling me into a half-nelson, then digging her knee into my back and bouncing on it. “SAY! UNCLE!” She punctuated her bounces with her yells. “SAY! IT! SAY! IT!”

I took a breath, ready to surrender, but Grandpa, having heard our hollers, came scrambling in. “Hey now! Hey now!” Emmy wasn’t quitting, and tightened the headlock she now had. “SAY! UNCLE! SAY-AAAAAAAAAGH!” Suddenly her grip went slack and I slithered out from under her. When I rolled over, I saw Grandpa’s spindly toes tangled into her bun, pulling her head back, back, back. He looked down at her face, twisted in fury, and spoke.

His voice was dangerously quiet and calm. “Here I thought you were a responsible girl. I leave you in charge of all this work, and you go and besmirch my respect by being a jackass to your brother. Now.” He paused. “You say uncle.”

She glared up at him, her face purple either with rage or pain. “Uncle,” she whispered.

He let her go, reaching down to untangle his toes. “Get on to bed now.” And he retreated to his room.

By the time I was seventeen, my official noodling count was up to 49. Not even fifty fish in nearly six years. Emmy, meanwhile, was spending her entire waking life either in her room, in the animal barns, or cooking in the kitchen – a task that she had lately absorbed into her daily schedule, as Grandpa had become too busy to prepare food anymore. By that time, Grandpa was spending his extra time teaching his untalented grandson how to noodle at a barely respectable level. This also meant that I, too, spent all of my free time at the crick. I felt like a damn fool, but figured that I should just get used to the idea that I would be walking to the crick with Grandpa every afternoon for the rest of his life.

One night that spring, Emmy and I returned from school to find that Grandpa wasn’t there. Emmy might have been surprised, but didn’t show it as she slipped on her shit boots and wandered out to the chicken house to feed the hens. I followed behind, in the hopes of helping out, but found myself getting in the way of her specific systems of doing things.

She hoisted the bucket of feed onto her shoulder, dumping it in a steady stream down the upper troughs. Turning to me, standing there pointlessly, Emmy sighed. “Listen, how about you go cut up a chicken and pluck it. This seems to be a one-man job.”

I grabbed a fat hen and took her head off at the chopping block, then watched as the life petered out of her body as she tottered along the grass, bleeding like hell. By the time I was done boiling, plucking, and roasting the chicken, Emmy was inside and bathed, ready for her meal. I, personally, was kind of excited, hoping for a nice long conversation, discussion, argument…anything really, so long as we could be something else for one evening than Grandpa’s idiot pupil and hired hand. Emmy set the table, and I heaped cooked carrots and chicken onto our plates. Then, quietly, we bowed our heads to pray.

“Heavenly Father” was no sooner out of our mouths than the screen door squealed open. Grandpa shuffled his way in, a flask of bourbon in hand.

“You kids, you kids, you kids…” he muttered. “I’ve been up at the Raccoon all night, and I have concluded that you don’t have the first damn clue about the world, do you, you kids?”

Emmy and I looked at each other. Grandpa continued talking.

“Goddammit,” he said, gesturing with his flask, “this stupid world. Moving too damn fast for me. Too damn fast for us.” He stopped, tottered, continued talking. “Now, allll these other farmers are getting running water and automobiles and tractors of all things, and are flooding the damn market.” Glaring at us, he spoke deliberately. “You kids know what that means? No? It means that it’s costing me more to raise these goddamn crops than I’m getting when I sell ‘em!” He laughed sharply, pacing about loosely, as if the whiskey had lubricated his joints too well. “Do you hear what I said? All that damn plowing I’m doing, I’m paying to do this backbreaking labor myself! Me and my hard labor are all part of a damn dying breed!” Grandpa took a swig, and his eyes brightened.

“I got an idea! Our little story-times always used to cheer me up. Let’s go to the living room and I’ll set me down in my rocker, and you kids can sit at my feet, just like old times!” He rubbed his hands together excitedly. “Eh? Come on!”

Hesitantly, Emmy and I stood up from our untouched food and followed Grandpa into the living room. He dropped into his rocker and sighed heavily as he spoke. “Oh, a story, a story, a story…which story?”

I stared. Emmy shrugged.

“Don’t just shrug. I know you got a favorite!”

Emmy looked up appeasingly. “How about your favorite, Grandpa?”

He blinked, eying Emmy distrustfully for a moment. Then he smiled. “What a fine idea! Well, on a fine August morning back in aught three, I woke up at 4:30, unable to sleep, so I walked out to the crick, and it was still dark, mind you, and there was that thick morning mist that we get around here, and so I waded out into that water, and the first tickle I felt, I shot out my foot and caught that sucker one-footed, kids.” He took a breath. “Now, that’s noodling.”

I turned to Emmy, who was picking at her fingernails. I was trying to catch her eye, maybe see what she thought of all this, but I felt Grandpa’s heavy gaze fall upon me. “Jacob, I hope you’re listening to this. Because you are one sorry excuse for a noodler.” I stared at the floor, picking at a knot in the wood. “Jacob, I’m serious when I say that maybe you should listen close to my stories here…” he paused, searching me with his wobbling eyes. “Because it’s become apparent that all the teaching in the world isn’t going to make a damn difference with you.”

Emmy continued picking at her fingernails. “Grandpa, you are a downright bastard,” she said softly. It took a second for what she had said to sink into all our heads; even Emmy herself looked shocked. And just as her eyes widened in horror at what she had done, Grandpa’s foot once more leapt out at her hair. This time, he clutched a thick bundle of it, and quicker than I knew it was happening, wrapped that bundle of hair around his foot so he could hold on tighter.

“You see this, Jacob? Do you see? QUICK ‘N’ FIRM! Like I always tell you!” He laughed maniacally and yanked that hair back and forth.

Emmy writhed on the floor, madly swatting at Grandpa’s foot with her hands. I was stunned into silence. I will never stop regretting that I didn’t go help Emmy, though I’m not sure what I would have done, exactly, or what the consequences might have been.

“How you feeling, you little ungrateful bitch? Flapping around like an empty-headed fish, you are! Look here, Jake. I can still do this shit one-footed, and you can too! Go on and try it!”

Emmy, until now noiselessly grabbing for Grandpa’s foot, finally screamed. “I’M SORRY, OK? I’M GODDAMN SORRY! LET GO! PLEEEEASE!”

Grandpa immediately set his foot down and yanked his toes out of Emmy’s hair, audibly ripping out a few tangled wads in the process. “Get some sleep, kids. You got a lot of work ahead of you.”

Unsure of what exactly he meant, we watched as Grandpa shuffled off to his bedroom. After a few minutes of stony silence, Emmy got up and ate her supper. She was putting out the fire when I went to bed.

That night, I didn’t sleep. Lying awake, listening to the first crickets of the year, I thought for the first time about what should happen if I were to leave the farm and find work somewhere else. Leaving Emmy in the same house as Grandpa with no one to buffer their craziness seemed a recipe for disaster.

I was concocting a plan for escaping to the city on a train – I could be a waiter, Emmy maybe a secretary – when I heard the sound of bare feet shuffling along the wooden hallway floor. Clambering out of bed, I looked out and saw Emmy creeping to Grandpa’s room. I figured she was sleepwalking, and everyone knows you never wake a sleepwalker, so I followed her in.

The moonlight fell onto Grandpa’s bed between his open curtains, which swayed comfortingly in the breeze. Emmy, walking stiffly so as to not creak the floorboards, made her way to the foot of the bed. Tenderly, she blew out Grandpa’s oil lamp, still glowing on the nightstand.

I’m not sure when it was that I realized that this was not sleepwalking. Maybe it was as Emmy lifted the covers from his feet, folding them back over Grandpa’s passed-out form. Maybe it was as she took each of his second toes in either of her hands. But as she glared out from her placid face and wrenched her wrists forward, those two horribly distinct snapping noises filling my ears even more than Grandpa’s screams, I realized that she was doing this for real.

Right then, I prayed harder than I had ever prayed before or have since. I prayed first and foremost that Emmy sleep as soundly as she used to, back on those bad nights, every night for the rest of her life.

I also prayed then and there that God forget all about my prayer for longer toes. Possessing some unnatural trait like that, I don’t know; it just suddenly seemed like too much trouble.