Read The Hands for Free Online

full, at which time Harry went to the kitchen drawer, found a roll of twine and started hanging the bottles, like baubles, along the length of each of the branches.
    Now it was a giant wind-chime. No one really minded. Most evenings it made music. A few branches had fallen off and Harry had used more twine to reattach them. To him, the bottle tree was more than just decoration.
    He turned to face it, lifted his hand and cracked his stock-whip. A beer bottle dropped and shattered. ‘Yes,’ he sang, running towards the tree, looking at the broken glass sitting in ankle-high compost.
    â€˜Harry,’ he heard his father calling, from inside his shed.
    He gathered his whip and ran across the compound. Felt the temperature rise as he went into his father’s shed. Smelt a hot globe burning fine sawdust from the pine.
    â€˜Is that you smashing bottles?’ his father asked, looking up from the hand in his lap, clutching a piece of folded sandpaper.
    â€˜Yes,’ he replied, closing the door.
    â€˜I need your help.’
    Harry sat on a stool beside his father, placed his hand on the bench and spread it out. Trevor looked at it, and back at the piece of wood sitting in a singlet in his lap. ‘Right,’ he said, studying the two hands, using the edge of his sandpaper to help sculpt the knuckles.
    It wasn’t a hand yet, he thought. Whatever made a hand a hand, it still wasn’t there. There were fingers, with the right amount of curve; each fattened by blood vessels, and wrinkles, and nails he’d polish so finely they’d shine. There was the meat of the hand, with its tendons and more arteries and veins, and there was a thumb, of course, coming up past the bottom of the first finger. But it still wasn’t there.
    He’d followed the usual steps—chiselling, refining, sanding—but he hadn’t got the usual result. Like his wife’s and dad’s hand, sitting on the shelf above the unused fireplace. Seven hands, in all, and these were only the successful ones.
    He had five photos pinned above his bench: side views, finger-tip, wrist and palm. These were what he’d use for his sculpture. Mostly, apart from calling Harry in every few days to lay his small hand (sauce-smeared, his ring finger calloused from his pen) on the bench, to sit for an hour as he studied his fingers, felt them, moved them closer together, further apart.
    â€˜I’ve got a better idea,’ Harry said.
    â€˜What’s that?’
    â€˜Make ’em in clay?’
    Trevor didn’t reply. He used a pencil to lift his son’s fingertips, leaving the fingers curled like a claw. Then he said, ‘No,’ and pushed them down.
    Harry studied his father’s face. ‘You should measure the fingers and thumb.’
    â€˜Perhaps.’
    They sat together thinking separate thoughts. Trevor: how the little bits of fat in each finger bulged; Harry: how his father was slow and careful, content to wrestle with small things.
    â€˜You wanna be careful with that whip,’ Trevor said, without looking up.
    Harry just looked at him.
    â€˜When I was your age it came back at me.’ He showed him the scar, just below his left eye.
    â€˜You keep telling me,’ Harry said, moving his hand.
    â€˜Still!’ Trevor growled, returning to his pine hand. ‘Look, half-an-inch from my eye. Cos I was showing off.’
    â€˜I’m not showing off … I’m careful.’
    â€˜Good.’
    â€˜I could do this at the Show.’
    â€˜Why don’t you?’
    â€˜I might.’
    Trevor smiled. ‘You’ll make a good stockman one day.’
    Harry waited for more, his hand lifting and dropping.
    â€˜One day?’
    â€˜You’re still young. Patience.’
    Harry wasn’t happy. ‘Old enough to help with the muster.’
    â€˜Yes, but … school … that’s what’s most important now, eh?’
    â€˜But you reckon