Chapter 3: Catching A Bone

https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/bufau1913_2017/downloads.cfm?archive=images&group=excavation&sn=151&CFID=e6996a08-ee92-46ae-b720-dde1d308ad45&CFTOKEN=0

   "Ouch!" Henry hisses, trying to stifle a cry after stubbing his finger stub into something hard in the hillside he's digging into.

"You okay over there?" calls the foreman from the next lot where he's checking the foundation measurements of a new home construction on Ware Court.

"Fine," Henry calls back, shaking out his left hand as he grabs a mattock with his right.

__________

     Henry's hand was anything but fine. The snapping turtle had taken the second and third phalanges of his left ring finger, leaving the bare bone of the fourth metacarpal that was still oozing two weeks after that fun-filled night at the point. It was a minor miracle that it was a clean amputation right at the joint line. Less serendipitous was the microbiome of a snapping turtle's mouth. The white tip of the bone peaked out of a tent of blackening skin exuding foul-smelling pus. The doctor at the Bound Brook Hospital had said to keep it dry and clean if he wanted to save the hand, but the bandage was turning yellow from within and reddish-brown on the outside from the hard clay of the only hill in the little town tucked up against First Watchung Mountain.
    The construction site was beside the Evergreens, the old LaFollette mansion built onto the top of an earthen mound overlooking the floodplain of the Raritan River to the south. The family has just moved to their new Piedmont Farms estate on the Watchung slope north of town and had started developing the land surrounding the old place.

__________

     "Aw, did nancy hurt her little finger?" chides another mason assistant sent over to help at the stubborn bank.

"You try digging with one hand," scowls Henry.

"My pleasure," responds the wiry sixteen-year-old swinging his pick one-handed into the packed earth of the bank. "I'll use the other to dig into some rich girl."

"The knuckles of my right hand are just fine," Henry shoots back. "Besides, what chance does the crippled son of an orchardist have with the daughter of a big shot banker?"

"Aw Hank, I was just joshing," sighs the teenager with a two-handed heave of a pick down into the hard hillside. "My grandparents came here to escape a vineyard in Bordeaux."

"The LaFollette orchard is no vineyard," Henry counters while using his bandaged hand to help shovel up the fallen dirt into a wheelbarrow. "We grow six different apples, Bartlett and Bosc pears, even freestone peaches."

"Speaking of jobs, I'm applying at the new chemical plant," the young digger pivots, reaching up to pull out a clump of purple-flowered plants growing just above their pit. "You should too, and, while your at it, try this on that stump. Grand-mere always used a Prunella poultice on cuts."

"Woa!" exclaims Henry, leaping in and catching a long bone that tumbles out of the bank along with the clod of roots. "What do we have here?"