Boy’s First Knife Leads to Others, All Sharply Edged in Memory

I think it was on my ninth birthday that I got my first jackknife.

It came in a small, narrow box, so I was not expecting anything very exciting. At 9 a person likes his presents big--bushel-size if possible.

Wrapped in light, waxy paper was a Boy Scout knife, thick with blades, the handle made of that familiar scored and corrugated bony substance. What is it, reindeer antler? It looked serious.

I had to use a pencil tip to pry open the main blade. One by one I tried the other blades: the small whittler, the screwdriver-bottle opener, the awl. One blade I never did get open.

Depressed at the notion that I would have to go through life carrying a pencil so I could get my knife open, I struggled with the big blade all morning, shredding both index fingernails and dripping 3-in-1 oil on my birthday pants.

By lunchtime I could open it just enough so that I could slip my belt buckle under the point and lever it up from there.

That afternoon I found myself in my room. I am not sure why. Was I being punished? I can’t believe I still took naps. Anyway, there I was, and I had my knife out.

The wood of my bedstead was quite soft, probably pine. My mother had bought it in France, and it was painted with birds and flowers and things. I carved my initials on the footboard, large.

Then, fascinated by the way the wood gave under my gleaming blade, I beveled the whole footboard, then the headboard, and started on the posts.

It was not particularly beautiful. It was thorough. The bed is in our attic, still beveled.

I have no recollection of the rest of that birthday. It has disappeared, like the day after I nailed the living room rug to the hardwood floor with my carpenter set when I was 6.

(I had heard my parents were having a dance that night--my parents! Dancing! And the only records I had seen in the house were “Vesti La Giubba” and the Victor Laughing Record!--and I had thought it would be safer for the guests if the rug were tacked down.)

My jackknife had a ring for a lanyard, but I preferred to keep it loose in my pocket. I might need to throw it sometime.

Meanwhile, I whittled a lot. Ivory soap animals. A ball in a wooden cage. A wooden chain. Don Harrington showed me how to carve a rampant lion. He was the best carver in school. He used a special yellow pine he got from somewhere, and he gave me a chunk of it once, but I never used it. I lost track of him later, and he was killed in the war.

The last day of my knife was the day Henry Coupe and I went for a hike across Wester’s pasture. Henry was the wild friend every kid should have. He lived in the City (that is, Utica, N.Y.). He was one of those kids who attract incidents like lint.

Deep in the pasture we found a dead calf, so dead its skin was leather. It smelled awful. Henry wanted to cut it open. We poked at it with sticks, then started jabbing with the jackknife. The distended skin refused to give. I leaned in on the knife point.

Suddenly it burst through. Horrible juice geysered up, all over my hands. The stink blew us back, gagging.

I wiped my hands on the corn stubble and rushed home to wash and wash. The knife is still there for all I know.

Another knife I let slide down the bank of the pond at the fox farm in the Adirondacks when I was fishing, and another one fell out of my pack on a hike, and another one went down the crack of a sofa in an airport lounge, but that first one is the one I remember.

As a solitary farm kid I never played mumbletypeg much. I didn’t even know all the moves for sure. I did finally learn it, though, at the age of 33, probably the oldest age of any practicing mumbletypeg player.

First, I have to tell you who Eddie Guida was.

He was a detective sergeant, the hardest-looking guy on my Redwood City police beat. He had cold, black eyes, bushy brows and a Rudolf Hess jaw. He was a head taller than me and liked to crush people’s fingers in his handshake.

One time he and Eddie Tennis were on night patrol and got arguing about how fast they could run. (Tennis was the kind of cop who, when told by a paranoid old lady that the reason she had called the police was that Martians were slipping under her doorjamb, nodded in complete understanding, went to his car trunk, brought out his hunting-rifle scope, a weird-looking thing, and carefully ran it all around the door frame, telling her it was a new secret device that would set up a magnetic field that Martians couldn’t cross.)

At 3 a.m. the two cops drove to the Sequoia High School track and set out on a 440-yard dash. Guida later told me that he was going so fast he couldn’t make the turn and crashed into the fence. I wrote a news story about the race, and he was my friend for life.

One Saturday afternoon Eddie drove by in his patrol car and saw me mowing the lawn. We talked, with him sitting in the car, and then he got out, and one thing led to another. And there we were, hunkered down on the grass to play mumbletypeg. I got as far as Elbows. I can’t imagine what the neighbors made of it.

There is always a knife in my life. For a long time I used the neat little black number my father had owned for years, with a blade that he had whetted down to a sliver. I foolishly loaned it to one of my sons, who lost it camping. I don’t think I ever told him how bad I felt.

A man always carries a knife, my father used to tell me. He probably meant a gentleman, which sounds slightly pompous. He was never pompous, but he was born in 1885.

At the moment I have a slim, lock-blade knife of plain steel. I keep it dangerously sharp.

The other day a couple of women at the office were trying to open a carton, and one of them looked over at me and said, “Ask him, he’ll have one.”

The other woman said, “Naw. A knife? What you mean?”

As though she had said a live octopus.

The first woman said, “He’ll have one; he’s that generation.” Meaning a geezer.

So I handed them my knife, and I wasn’t sure if I felt good about that or not.

Notwithstanding, I carry it every day, except when I am wearing the pants with a hole in the pocket. It reminds me just a little bit of my father. I still haven’t learned to throw it.