Draw
I caught my palm on the timber. Sitting astride the shaving horse, pulling long strokes with the draw knife, a shard freed itself from the board, which was my morning's work, and lodged itself in my skin.
"Why've you stopped, boy?" said Mr Cooper without looking up from his bench.
"A splinter, sir. It's gone deep."
He stepped across the room and took my left hand out of the grasp of my right.
"A splinter?" He squinted at the black dot under my skin. "You'll have a dozen more before the week is out."
When I went to pick up the knife again, I fumbled it, sending it clattering to the floor.
"We'll have to sharpen that."
Mr Cooper took the knife across the whetstone and then across the strop. He made it look as easy as breathing. Then he offered the handle to me.
"Back to it."
With the breeze blowing on my back from the boatyard, beyond the doors of the workshop, I continued my labour, shaping the corners of the board, just as Mr Cooper had shown me. The scraping of the knife drowned out the shouts of the sailors and settled me into a rhythm. Every shaving which peeled away from the wood and fell to the floor was another way in which I had forever changed it. It was satisfying work, but with each stroke I felt the prick of the splinter beneath my skin.
When Mr Cooper's wife brought us each a bowl of soup, he inspected my work.
"Very good," he said, running his thumb along the grain. "A natural. Same again this afternoon."
Throughout the afternoon, I couldn't stop picking at the place in my hand where the splinter had buried itself. It itched. I let my finger flick over it, nail catching, scuffing my soft skin.
"Leave that alone, boy," said Mr Cooper when he caught me. "You'll do no good scratching it. You'll have hands like these soon." He held up his palms for me to see - all yellow calluses and pink scars. Then he put his practiced hands on the draw knife and showed me again what he'd taught me that morning.
By the end of the day, the flesh around the splinter was red and bulbous. In spite of squeezing it as hard as I could, the splinter would not burst from under the skin. It became redder and angrier and more painful. I was joined to the timber. I would carry it home with me until it grew itself free. A piece of my work ingrained in my body until it was completed.
The splinter had been joined by another wound, just as Mr Cooper had said. A small cut on my index finger, deep enough to leave a red blemish on the bare timber face. A maker's mark to match the one it had given me.