The Toe

I found it in the desert, west of town. I saw Fran driving the old blue truck, loaded down with tree limbs and dead branches, and then I saw her climb out and pitch the stuff off the side of a shallow arroyo. It was seven in the morning, and I was walking before the heat had a chance to start baking the trail.

The toe was severed clean, like a surgeon had sliced it with a very sharp saw. It was the big toe, with a yellowed nail and a hairy toe knuckle. The bone was surrounded by meat that had dried some. It reminded me of a steak I’d forgotten about on the counter a couple of weeks ago; the desert air had sucked out the moisture and left dried, raw flesh, rough to the touch and darkened on the edges like jerky.

It rested on the sand, next to a tree limb with leaves already curling from the approaching heat.
I wondered if toeprints were like fingerprints, and if the victim could be identified from the whorls on the pad of the appendage. Did Fran know she had a toe in her truck?

I liked Fran. I did handyman work for her and her husband Oliver about once a week. Painting, mending fence, cleaning the gutters – whatever they needed. Fran always told me I was “a fine young man, but too skinny,” so she fed me dinner often: fried chicken, thick mustard potato salad, green butter beans and apple pie. I’d be shoveling in the garden and she’d take my dirty hand in her frail, spider-webbed one, and tell me to stop and eat. Sometimes she would forget my name was Chris and call me Allen or Bill, but I never corrected her. She was in her eighties, after all.

I shrugged off my backpack and got a sandwich bag full of grapes. I sat on the sand with my back to the sun so my face would be shaded. An ant found the toe, and began chewing on the fresh end near the nail. I finished the grapes and put the toe in the bag.

I kept the rest of the hike short and on the way back, I looked down where the toe had been resting. A column of ants were milling about, probably confused that the meal one of them had found was gone.

I took the toe to Tom. He was the local sheriff, the only law enforcement for fifty miles or so. I figured a severed toe was worth reporting, but I wasn’t sure what Tom could do with it.

Tom didn’t touch it at first, just sat with his arms crossed and looked at it through the plastic bag. “And where did you say you found this?”

“On my hike,” I said. “You know the trail that goes west past the arroyo?”

“Did you notice any footprints, or anything unusual about the area?” Tom asked. “There could be a whole body up there.”

“Just the toe, nothing else,” I said. “I don’t think there’s a body up there.”

“I’ll have to check it out,” Tom said. “Do you think you could take me to the spot?”

I don’t know why I lied to Tom. It just sort of happened. I took him well short of where Fran had dumped her tree branches. I made him believe I’d found the thing about three hundred yards up the trail off the paved road. Tom knelt down and looked at the footprints on the path, mushed up and vague in the sand, and took a sample of dirt in the place I’d told him I found it.

Fran had me whitewashing the fence and moving paving stones that afternoon. Oliver, in his eighties himself, waited until the shade had found the front steps before he ventured out. He was dressed as usual in a white button down shirt and high-waisted pants with suspenders. The cane was new, though.

“Oliver, did you hurt your leg?” I asked.

“Just an accident,” Oliver said. “Can’t stay young forever.”

I noticed he had one shoe on. A white sock covered the other foot, and I could see the bulky outline of a bandage underneath.

Fran poked her head out of the door, and I smelled pot roast. “Chris doesn’t want you to start in on your stories, dear. He’s hungry. Come and eat.”

The potatoes were buttery and the carrots tender, but all I could think about was the big toe.

We finished dinner and Oliver and I sat on the porch while Fran cleaned up the kitchen.

“How did you lose your big toe, Oliver?” I asked.

Oliver drew in his lips and gripped his cane before him with white knuckles. “Did Fran tell you? I didn’t think she’d remember.”

“I saw her dumping tree branches out of her truck, and I found the toe. I gave it to Tom.”

“Why would you do that? What in the hell will Tom do with a thing like that?” Oliver asked. His hands shook.

Something metal clattered to the floor in the kitchen, and Fran screamed. I rushed in and saw Fran holding her arm, blood everywhere, and her carving knife on the linoleum at her feet. Oliver limped to her and pressed a kitchen towel into her wound. She cried and fought against him, and then Oliver began to cry. It was the most bizarre scene I had ever witnessed: Fran seemed not to be in pain from her cut, but terrified of her husband of fifty years, straining against his arms so that the veins showed in her neck, as if she didn’t recognize him.

“Shhh, honey, quiet, it’s me,” Oliver was shouting over her screams, tears on his cheeks.

After about two minutes, but what seemed like an hour, Fran stopped moving and stared at Oliver as if he had just walked in for his dessert. Her expression was calm, almost happy. We bandaged her arm and took her to the bedroom, where Oliver stroked her hair until she fell asleep. He led me out to the front porch. “If you tell Tom, if you tell anyone she lopped off my toe with the electric pruning shears, I will cut something off you myself.”

“What is wrong with her?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Could be Alzheimer’s or some type of dementia. That’s what our doctor in Flagstaff said. We didn’t catch it until the advanced stages.” Oliver paused, and closed his eyes. “The doctor thinks she’ll pass soon.”

“Pass? As in die?” I asked. I couldn’t believe it. She was active. She had cooked our dinner that night, worked in the garden all day.

“Chris, there’s a lot you don’t see. She’s moved those paving stones three times now. She forgets. She gets mad at me, and comes at me.”

“How about help? A nursing home or something? All these accidents…”

“That wouldn’t work. Now drop it. And like I said, if you tell anyone, I’ll take the pruning shears to you myself.”

Then Oliver sighed, big. I should have written down the words he said: “Every moment with her is a gift. The times she’s smiling at me, the times she doesn’t know who I am and the times she wants to hurt me. Sometimes around dusk she starts crying and she can’t stop, and the nights when I can comfort her, when she knows me, I hold her until she falls asleep. The nights she doesn’t know me, well, I just sit outside the bedroom door until she cries herself to sleep. When she’s out for the night, I sit on this porch and drink beer and watch the moon and I feel as lonely as anybody has ever felt. When she passes away – and she will, soon – I’ll sit on this god damn porch and drink beer and watch the moon and feel lonelier.”


I picked a time of day I thought they would like, when the sun was setting in the west and almost down and the stars were just starting to come out. The sand crunched under my hiking boots and I could almost hear the spiders wake up to start their nighttime skitters. Broken, tinder-dry branches formed a pile up ahead, and I took the paper bag marked “Evidence” out of my backpack. Tom had looked at me funny when I asked for the toe, but he hadn’t done anything to investigate the case and wrote me off as just a weird kid wanting a souvenir. The toe was defrosted from its time in the chest freezer at the sheriff’s office and almost exactly as I had found it a year before. I placed it on the sand near the branches, and said a silent prayer for Oliver and Fran, dead within two weeks of each other, lying in graves in the Rio Luna cemetery.
I don’t know why, but it felt right to let the ants pick the bone clean, to carry Oliver’s toe piece by piece to their hill.