That Could Have Been You Jim Heynen
The boys knew that on the farm danger was everywhere, sometimes the teeth of a spinning gear, other
times in the jaws of a growling boar. Danger could plunge from the sky in jag ed-edged hailstones or collapse
beneath them in weak timbers over a well. Hay balers didn't care what they b aled, and silage choppers didn't care
what they chopped. But mostly the danger the boys knew was in stories about what happened somewhere,
someplace, just out of sight, the next county, down the road six miles, somewhere else. The bull that crushed a man
against a gate. The woman who drowned trying to save her child from rushing spring floods. The man who broke his
neck falling from the haymow. The tornado that killed a whole family except the two-month-old baby who was
found in a lilac bush without a scratch on her.
The boys listened to the stories, and they didn't argue with the truth of them. They'd had their own fair
share of close calls. There was the eighty-pound hay bale that fell thirty feet and exploded in a green spray around
them, and the lightning that splintered a huge box elder tree right after they decided to run out from under that
very tree and play in the rain. Once a steel splinter from the corn sheller flywheel whirred like a table saw past their
heads. And they had their cuts and bruises. Knuckles that looked as if they'd been gnawed on by meat grinders.
Sprained ankles and wrists. Blood blisters that took toenails and fingernails off as they healed. Small concussions
that were good for week-long headaches. Wood slivers of all sizes that had punctured every part of their bodies.
And that's not even counting all the skinned knees and nosebleeds. The boys had plenty of bangings-around, but
nothing so bad that they weren't able to talk about it, maybe even boast about it, the next week.
In town on Saturday nights, the grown-ups would point out what terrible things had happened to other
people.
See those farmers with all those missing fingers? Cornpickers did that.
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