On the other hand, it’s possible that the severed-thumb incident did not so much actually change or shape Leonard Stecyk’s character as alter his own perspectives on it (if any), as well as others’ perceptions of him. As most adults know, the distinctions between one’s essential character and value and people’s perceptions of that character/value are fuzzy and hard to delineate, especially in adolescence. There is also the fact that a certain amount of situational setup and context to the incident Leonard Stecyk no longer recalls, not even in dreams or peripheral flashes. It had to do with cutting a sheet of drywall into lathes or strips for some kind of reinforcement involving the framing and hanging of a door in an interior wall. The band saw was set in a broad metal table with gauges and calibrated clamps to hold what you were cutting just so while you pushed the piece carefully along the smooth surface so that the band saw’s high-speed blade cut along the pencil line you’d drawn after measuring at least twice. There were, of course, detailed safety procedures as codified by Mr. Ingle in both the mimeographed Shop Rules and several stenciled all-cap signs on and around the band saw’s rear housing, which procedures Leonard Stecyk had not only memorized but tried helpfully to point out some instances of typos or ambiguous phrasing in the terse imperatives of, which had caused one side of Mr. Ingle’s big face to start jumping and crinkling involuntarily, a notorious sign that the man was just barely keeping his temper under control. The reality behind the surfeit of signs and yellow caution lines painted on the shop room floor was that Mr. Ingle operated under great felt pressure and constant borderline frustration and rage, since it was his responsibility if anybody got hurt, and yet at the same time many of the kids in the classes were either inept effeminate ‘mathlete’ pansies like Stecyk and Moss here or else long-haired delinquents in army coats that sometimes came to class smelling of marijuana and peppermint schnapps, and screwed around with rules and equipment they didn’t have the sense to respect the dangerousness of, including standing around watching within the clearly marked yellow line to the side of the band saw and its unshielded blade despite the clearly painted instructions on both machine and floor to STAY BEHIND LINE WHEN IN OPERATION, where all it would then take is a careless shove or even gesture where you waved one of your arms around when standing in the unauthorized side area; and in illustrating this at the top of his lungs for maybe the fifth time this quarter as the sad excuse for kids stood at the yellow line and watched him exaggerate a childish gesture, his right hand inadvertently made contact with the blade of the band saw, which just as quickly as Mr. Ingle had promised it could, took off his thumb and the surrounding material from the interdigital webbing down to the abductor pollicis longus tendon, also opening the radial artery, which caused a tremendous fan of blood-spatter as Mr. Ingle brought the red thing to his chest and toppled sideways, gray with shock and the paralytic reflexes of trauma. As was more or less everyone else in the class — gray-faced, openmouthed — watching from the yellow line as blood from the radial and also first volar metacarpal arteries shot rhythmically up and out and spattered even some of the taller boys’ khaki coats and the control panel of the drill press against which they bumped as they stepped reflexively back. This was not the slow welling of a skinned knuckle or the trickle of a punched nose. This was arterial blood under great systolic pressure, which shot up and fanned out from where the teacher knelt cradling the hand against his chest with the other hand and staring at the phalanx of boys, mouthing something that could not be heard over the band saw’s A# scream, some of the College Prep boys’ faces also distended in screams which could be seen but not heard, a few others at the extreme back peeling off around the drill press’s clamps and running for the classroom door with their arms up and hands waving in the universal movement of blind panic, the rest splayed against the nearest peer or machine with their eyes wide and minds in deep neutral.
… All but little Leonard Stecyk, who after only the briefest neural pause moved forward, quickly and decisively, came out around the group’s flank, punching at the band saw’s double-marked Power button with the heel of his bandaged hand as he swept around the back of the machine, looking neither right nor left in his apron and pressed white shirt, elbowing aside a large boy in a paisley headband who stood with his Keds’ soles in human blood — a boy who only days before had menaced Stecyk with a pair of blacksmith’s tongs behind the lathe’s peg-board tool display — and seemed instantly to be at the side of Mr. Ingle, implementing the first rule of on-site treatment for hemorrhagic trauma, which was simultaneously to elevate the wound and to identify the severity of the trauma using the five-point Ames Scale from Cherry Ames RN’s 1962 First Aid for Industrial Injury, which Stecyk had checked out of the public library as part of his standard preparation for the Autumn ’69 class schedule. Stecyk simply lifted the hand as high as he could, to about eye level, while Mr. Ingle knelt hunched and slumped beneath it. It cannot be overstressed how fast this all was happening. The thumb and surrounding base tissues were not completely detached but hung by a flap of dermis such that Mr. Ingle’s thumb itself pointed straight down in a parody of imperial judgment as Stecyk, ignoring both the blood and the high-pitched diminutives for ‘Mother’ that began to be audible as the band saw cycled down, removed with one hand first his slacks’ belt and then the metric-conversion ruler he carried in a special narrow pocket of the carpenter’s apron Mr. Ingle had ridiculed and — after running mentally through the protocols and determining à la Cherry Ames RN that digital pressure around the wrist did not alone control the bleeding — fashioned a deft two-knot tourniquet (w/just a hint of Edwardian flourish to the top’s four-loop bow, which was even more amazing given that Stecyk constructed the special knot with slippery scarlet hands that also supported a man’s half-fainting weight) that stanched the flow with only one and a half turns of the ruler, such was the memorized precision with which Stecyk had placed the tourniquet just at the crucial branch between the forearm’s ulnar and radial arteries. In the belling stillness after the saw’s blade stopped you could now hear the sounds of the pneumatic jack from the Intro Auto Mechanics classroom next door. It was also now, with the spray’s cessation, that Mr. Ingle lost consciousness, so that the last sight some of the taller boys at the flanks had was Stecyk cupping Mr. Ingle’s skull at the back like a child’s and gently lowering him — it, the big man’s head — to the floor with one hand while the other held the tourniquet in place at the upraised wrist, there being something both dancerly and maternal and yet not one bit girlish about the sight that reverberated within the souls of a few in strange ways for days and even weeks after they were shouldered aside and told to break it up and give the man some air by the Auto Mechanics and Appliance Repair teachers, who also were brisk and adultly unfrozen but did not try to move Len aside or ask the Home Ec aide to shoo him outside with all the others and their red footprints but rather stood like subalterns at either side of the man’s upraised arm with pendent thumb, awaiting instructions from the boy on whether they should wait for the ambulance or maybe try and put Mr. Ingle in one of their cheap but faultlessly tuned cars and rush him right to Calvin, speaking to Stecyk as more of a peer and being spoken to in return without deference or hesitation.