Working Hand Jason A. Zwiker Mrs. Reese tied my left hand to the back of my chair and dropped the pencil in my right. “Now write,” she said. It just felt wrong and I told her that. She snapped the ruler down, said that writing with your right hand was the natural way and I better watch myself, mouthing off like that. We were supposed to be writing about summer. I wish summer could have been right then. I’d be in the field, working, and things would be fine. I needed to be there, especially now. Buck, Dad’s brother, wasn’t any good on the farm after his stroke. Putting up with Mrs. Reese all day made no sense when there was work to be done back home. In the field, I was of use. Ma says, “No. Study. Go to college.” She straightens my collar, tells me I’ll be President of the United States, that I’m just as handsome as President Kennedy. She thinks he’s wonderful, even if he is a Catholic. “Don’t you want to be like him?” I said, “No. I don’t want to live in the White House, wear a suit and tie. I want to farm, like Dad.” “You’re going to college,” Dad says. Buck’s son is in college, on the G.I. Bill, and I’m going too. I better just get used to the idea, Dad says. If I want it to be a fight, he’ll give me a fight. Can’t people ever just talk? Writing with my right hand makes me take it slow, work each letter out. What I want to say gets wiped away in my head. I can’t get it down on the paper fast enough. If I could say what’s in my head, I’d write about Buck. Before the stroke, Buck could wrestle a tire off the John Deere like it was a bottle cap. Buck and Dad used to sail across the barn rafters, chasing each other like squirrels. He gets so mad now. The stroke took his voice away from him, left him shambling. One whole side of him just hangs there like dried meat. The doctor gave him a pencil and some paper so he could write out what he needs to say, but it doesn’t work. It’s too slow, his face burning red, all fifty-five years of him shut up in there alone. Buck taught me to notice the beauty when seeds you planted first break ground. And now he can’t say anything at all. Frail green peeking out and soon they’ll fill a field; feed your family all year. And it is because of the work of your own hands that it happens. I’m writing so fast, trying to put it all down, that I don’t even notice until Mrs. Reese is on top of me how I’ve worked my left hand loose. How I’ve scooped my pencil up in it. How I’m only now beginning to speak.