“I was lucky it was on the left hand,” Aunt Ingrid said. “It was lucky I lost it when I was young.” She graduated and became a teacher; later she married Uncle Eugene and moved to Napoleon and became a prize-winning knitter. When she wore gloves, she tucked the extra finger to the inside so that nothing showed but a neat little seam. Barclay and I as children used to ask to see her tiny knobbed stump which was pinker and harder than the rest of her hand. Did it hurt? we asked. Not a bit, she told us, not in the slightest. Now she’s eighty years old and lives in a retirement center in southern California, and last year she wrote that she has begun to experience a twinge of arthritis in her stump, just a twinge, nothing serious, she says, but a reminder that a finger had once been there.

Uncle Harvey, my mother’s oldest brother, lost his leg in the war in 1916. There are no firm facts about how this loss occurred, whether it was a bullet or a bomb or what, the leg was just “lost in the war,” mysteriously swallowed up in the smoking distances of Europe. He came home wounded, a man with a wooden leg and two canes to help him get around. After a few weeks of hobbling about on the farm, he took the train into Chicago and got a job as a machinery operator, and he worked at that for the rest of his life, a life that was long and alcoholic and that had a quality of deep distress about it. Whether it was the wooden leg that caused his distress I don’t know, but I do know that his mother, our grandmother, was never told her son had, in fact, lost his leg. He was lame, that was all she knew. She lived until the fall of 1942, this poor deluded woman, and then she succumbed to double pneumonia, still not knowing.