published in the Binghamton Press and Sun Bulletin (10- 21- 2012)
The Dead Finger!
By Merlin Lessler
It’s that time of year again. Halloween! The second best
holiday in the year. Ask any kid. Why? Because, kids love to be scared! You
don’t have to be an old coot like me to know that. It’s been going on since we
lived in caves and dressed in animal skins. It’s inborn, inbred and invaluable.
Kids need it; it helps them learn to handle themselves in a real emergency,
whether they live in a cave or a high-rise condo. It’s why we pop our faces in
front of a new baby and say, “Peek-a-boo!” It’s impossible not to. They love
it; they wave their arms; a smile breaks across their faces, and a squeal of
delight issues from their lips.
Scaring kids has become politically incorrect, but the
politically correct crowd is wrong. They are fighting human nature and the kids
subject to their influence will find a way to get a dose of terror, in spite of
a movie rating system, the V-chip and other mechanizations crafted by a
bureaucracy hell bent on separating little Bobby and Suzy from the joy of
getting scared out of their wits.
I was lucky; my era
was loaded with scary things. We had full access to fairy tales; we had
unregulated Halloween traditions, steeped in the macabre, and we had movies
that kept us under the covers in a cowardly attempt to ward off Dracula,
Frankenstein and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
The greatest terror in my young life came at the hands of my
mother, her left index finger to be specific. She set up the situation with a
whopper of a tale, claiming she found a finger when she was a teenager. A
railroad worker severed his hand while repairing a railroad car, or so the tale
went. She was playing nearby and after the ambulance took him away, she found
one his fingers near the boxcar. She took it home and kept it in a box.
“The box I have in my hand right now,” she said, as she
pulled it from behind her back. “Do you want to see it?”
Of course I wanted to see it. I was scared to death, but I
had to look. “Go ahead and take off the cover,” she teased. So, I did. There
was nothing in the box except a bed of cotton.
“Where is it?” I cried. She reached in and removed the top
layer. There it was, a ghastly, sickly looking, pale finger with a deformed and
bruised nail. It was the scariest thing I’d ever seen.
“Breath on it,” she said, “See what it does.” I blew on the
box and the end of the finger slowly rose from the bed of cotton. I was terrified. I loved it. After a few
seconds it nestled back down. She put the top on and explained, “It can only be
out in the air for a few minutes; otherwise it will start to decay.” Then she
left the room to put the finger away.
She wanted to let me enjoy the scare, before telling me that
the finger was hers, dabbed with white shoe polish and pushed up through a hole
in a matchbox. I should have recognized it; I’d been there when she shut it in
the car door and crunched the nail a few weeks earlier. And, I guess I was
daydreaming at dinner that night when she told me it was her finger in the box.
I went to bed thinking about it, wondering if it was rising out of the box and
coming after me.
My father cleared up the mystery a few weeks later. He came into my room to tuck me in and found the covers over my head. He asked me why I was sleeping that way. “So the dead finger can’t get me,” I confessed. He laughed and then straightened me out, told me the truth. I continued to sleep with my head under the covers; the habit (and fear) had become ingrained. Eventually, I crafted my own matchbox coffin and used it to scare the kids in my fourth grade class. I ended up sitting at my desk, long after the dismissal bell, writing an endless string of, “I will not disrupt class or scare girls, ever again” Even as I wrote; I knew it was a lie. The dead finger would be back. How could it not be? Kids love to be scared!
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