Chapter 1
Grit, Glue, and a Meat Grinder
I can only imagine how my folks spent the evening of June 16, 1966, in the waiting room of the hospital in Havre, Montana. I’ve often wondered. I picture my mother, Helen, wringing her large hands in her lap and quietly staring straight ahead, stoically facing down the emotions that could have gotten the best of her. My dad, Dave, is pacing back and forth under the buzzing neon lights, cursing as anxious farmers do. I was a couple of months away from turning ten and starting the fifth grade. Like all summer days for a Montana farm kid, it began as just another workday.
That afternoon Dad had driven from the farm into Big Sandy to pick up some feed, leaving Mother and me in the butcher shop to finish cutting, grinding, and wrapping a cow he had slaughtered, skinned, and broken down into large but liftable hunks of dark red beef marbled with fat. Mother never liked the idea of me using our shiny new electric meat grinder. But even as a nine-year-old, like most farm kids back then, I knew how to operate trucks, tractors, and power tools. And as so many parents do when confident children insist, Mother reluctantly allowed me to grind chunks of beef shoulder as she wrapped and labeled steaks a few feet away. I probably told myself that if I plowed through the butchering chores as quickly as I could, I’d have more time to horse around in the evening with Bob, my sixteen-year-old brother, whose idea of fun was to try to smother the life out of me whenever he could.
Dad had built the butcher shop the year before, between our red hip-roof barn and the little yellow house I grew up in. The shop was a twelve-by-eighteen wood-sided building with a twelve-foot ceiling and a sturdy wooden frame strong enough to support the weight of hanging beef. It was supposed to be small because of all the weight one needed to throw around; moving from station to station was efficiently designed to take only a few steps. The large walk-in cooler took up a corner, there were a couple of freezers, a scraping table, a saw, a scale, and the grinder. The shop, lit with three lightbulbs that hung from the ceiling, kept the warm air out in the summer and the cold air in during the winter. We covered the concrete floor with sawdust to make cleanup a little easier.
That afternoon in June I remember switching on the electric meat grinder. Something about the whirring of that machine put me into a kind of trance—maybe it was the power of the four whistling steel blades spinning inside. It’s funny how memory works, because mine did me a favor and blotted out much of what happened next. Today it’s only a blurry sequence of images and sounds. For a reason I’ll never be able to explain, I simply put my left hand into the maw of the meat grinder, and when I pulled it out a half second later, my middle three fingers were gone. There was no pain. I do remember blood splattering everywhere—on the walls, off the walls, onto the ceiling, all over me. The splattering didn’t stop as the grinder kept whirring, indifferent to my shock and Mother’s screaming.
Mother told me to hold my left hand with my right hand as tight as I could. I grabbed my left hand so tightly I could feel my own exposed bones pressing sharply into the flesh of my palm. We ran into the house to get the keys to the car, but Mother grabbed the wrong set and once we were in our ’65 Pontiac Bonneville, she had to run back into the house again. Before we left for the hospital, I asked if she had shut the grinder off. She had not, so in what must have been a fog of horror, she ran back into the butcher shop, trying her best to keep panic out of the equation. Bob was way out in the field driving a tractor, oblivious to the commotion, or so I thought.
I rode shotgun as Mother booked it to town, exactly twelve miles straight east down Kenilworth Road, most of which wasn’t paved back then. I braced both hands between my knees as blood dripped all over the floorboard of our new car. Mother saw Dad driving up Kenilworth toward us, returning with the feed and unaware of the whole situation. She flagged him down. Dad left his grain truck on the side of the road and jumped in the Pontiac and we sped to the newly built Big Sandy Medical Center. The bleeding had slowed a bit by the time I arrived, and the nurses put my whole left hand in a big pan of Betadine. Then they wrapped me up and we raced another thirty-five miles north to the bigger hospital in Havre for surgery. In Havre, the staff remained calm as Dr. Jim Elliott prepared for the emergency operation. He warned me I was about to “smell something like cat pee.” Right before the ether took me under, I thought, I wonder what cat pee smells like? And that’s the last thing I remember.
I’ll never know the words my folks might have exchanged with each other that Thursday evening in the hospital. I know there wasn’t any anger or blame, at least not in the waiting room.
I came to in a small hospital room, confused and unable to move. Mother and Dad were there, and they told me to stay put until I was ready to sit up. I couldn’t see my fingerless left hand at first, because it was wrapped in thick bandages. My hand was sore and warm and it throbbed intensely as if I were holding my heart between my two remaining fingers. But the worst part came a couple of weeks later when it was time to pull out the stitches. That’s when I discovered how tender the scar between my thumb and my pinky really was. When Dr. Elliott pulled those stitches out, even after he applied some local anesthetic, it felt like the flesh and bones of my left hand were being stabbed, crushed, burned, and pulled apart all at once. I howled as both Dad and Mother pinned me to the table and tried to keep me still. To this day, I can honestly say that the removal of those stitches was, by far, the worst physical pain of my entire life.
I wrapped my hand with gauze and bandages for the rest of the summer and into the first few weeks of fifth grade as I healed up. The scar hurt for months and remained tender to the touch well into my twenties. For more than a decade, every time I bumped my left hand against something hard, like a desk or the handle of a pitchfork, searing, aching pain would buckle me over.
All things considered, Dr. Elliott sewed me up nicely and he later told me that the wound was actually a fortunate one. He was a general practitioner, but his skillful surgery preserved full dexterity in my thumb and my pinky, which the blades didn’t touch. The fact that I still had full use of both of those fingers meant I would still have a powerful grip. Being able to lift, haul, drive, push, and twist things with both my hands after the accident probably saved my career as a farmer. But it forever changed my hopes of playing the saxophone. I had to switch to playing the trumpet and quickly convinced myself that playing the horn is easier without all those left-hand fingers getting in the way. I can play the piano too, so long as my left hand is limited to playing simple octaves.
My parents, wisely, never allowed me to feel sorry for myself. They certainly didn’t consider my missing fingers a disability. Other than playing the saxophone, I could do almost anything else. I take exception when news reporters write with fascination about my “mangled hand,” because I’ve never really seen it as a liability. Now there’s no pain whatsoever. The scar is calloused and leathery just like the skin on my right hand.
Nonetheless, my digitally challenged left hand has become an unexpected focal point in my political career. During rallies on the campaign trail, I wave at folks with my left hand and they often wave back with three fingers on the left hand tucked down, hang loose–style, in what feels like a gesture of solidarity.
During my first reelection campaign in the fall of 2011, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) ran an attack ad on TV that featured a doctored photo of me shaking hands with President Obama (apparently meant to highlight my affection for a president who never enjoyed much popularity in Montana). The image showed me grinning and grasping the president’s right hand with mine, and my five-fingered left hand reaching for an embrace. It didn’t take long for us to notice the GOP had cropped the picture with someone else’s left hand. Whatever message they were trying to convey in their ad got lost in the fact they had used a fake image—and it effectively reminded Montanans that we shouldn’t always believe what we see in TV attack ads.
Early in 2018 as I campaigned for a third term in the US Senate, I shot a TV ad in which I counted on my fingers the various bills I introduced that President Trump had signed into law. When we aired that ad in March, the president had signed thirteen of my bills. So I looked into the camera and started counting them. When I got to number eight, a bipartisan law increasing veterans’ disability and survivor benefits to keep up with rising costs, I held up my hands and said, “I’m out of fingers!”1 The ad was memorable because it was cute, but it was effective because it conveyed how important it is for me to actually get things done in the US Senate regardless of the political noise that consumes the news. The ad also summarized my work on behalf of America’s veterans—something I valued long before I got involved in politics.
Most of my bills President Trump signed into law dealt with veterans. In 2017, I became the ranking member of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee and made an earnest decision to quietly get as much done as possible with Chairman Johnny Isakson of Georgia, whom I considered a true friend in the Senate. Immediately after President Trump took office, Johnny and I got to work and hammered out numerous bills at the request of veterans and the service organizations that represent them. In our first year leading the committee, in addition to increasing disability benefits, we also passed legislation improving the VA’s Choice Program, giving the VA more authority to fire poor-performing employees and streamlining the hiring process for difficult-to-fill VA positions. We also removed the expiration time of GI Bill benefits, improved the process for appealing VA disability benefits, funded better care for rural and homeless veterans, and provided VA benefits to veterans who were exposed to toxic chemicals during classified missions. Yep, more than I can count on my fingers, but it really doesn’t matter, because there’s so much more work to be done.
I wasn’t the only kid who suffered a traumatic accident on our farm. My uncle Lloyd spent a month in a coma when he was about the age I was when I lost my fingers. In 1914, a tornado swept across the farmland west of Big Sandy and completely destroyed my granddad’s first barn. The cyclone also toppled the farm’s fifty-foot iron-frame windmill. That windmill fell right on top of Lloyd, pinning him to the ground and knocking him out cold.
All the old-timers told me that my granddad, Arnfred, was by far the strongest man they knew. He hoisted the whole windmill up and pulled poor Lloyd out from under it. Lloyd didn’t wake up for weeks, but he miraculously survived despite having no access to modern medicine or professional health care. Back then, getting to Big Sandy took the better part of a day if you were lucky enough to have horses, and Granddad had traded his team of horses for his brother Henry’s 160-acre homestead next door.
By the way, Uncle Lloyd lived another seven decades (he died in 1983 at the age of seventy-seven), and he farmed the family land for most of his years. Granddad put that old iron windmill back up when he rebuilt the barn in 1916. Both are still standing today, not far from the butcher shop where I still use the same meat grinder that took my fingers. There’s nothing wrong with the grinder. I have too much skin in the game to throw it out.
A creative reporter once asked if I had the hypothetical opportunity to have a conversation with a long-lost relative, who it would be and what we would talk about. I told her I would ask Arnfred and Christine Pearson, my mother’s parents, why they chose this particular piece of flat grassland twelve miles west of Big Sandy. Out of all the acres of land available across the West, why did they homestead here? It was Fred who picked out the place in 1912, apparently drawn to the lure of north-central Montana by the “Empire Builder” himself, James Jerome Hill.
James Hill, a Gilded Age railroad tycoon, saw a golden opportunity for himself following Congress’s passage of the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909, which doubled some homesteads to 320 acres, and the Homestead Act of 1912, which reduced the amount of time required to live on a homestead from five years to three. A shorter commitment to working the land meant that more homesteaders were willing to try their luck out West. Hill also built the Great Northern Railway, a privately funded railroad that sliced across the plains of northern Montana through the city of Havre (we pronounce it HA-vur), in what is now Hill County. Hoping to make a few extra bucks, though he already had millions, Hill turned to poor farm families across the upper Midwest and talked up the fertile soil, the wide-open lands, and the milder winters of north-central Montana. Of course, those hopeful families could reach this promised land only by taking Hill’s railroad.2
James Hill’s successful greener-grass campaign sounded pretty darn good to those farmers, many of whom were first-generation Americans born to Scandinavian and eastern European immigrants who’d settled across Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Dakota. The families lured to Montana by Hill’s convincing advertising campaign were called, derisively, “honyockers.”3 The word comes from another politically incorrect term, “hunyak,” possibly a combination of “Hun” and “Polack,” used generally to describe poor immigrants from Europe. Fred, the son of Swedish immigrants, and his wife, Christine, who’d come to America from Sweden at the age of sixteen, were among them. And they, like so many of their neighbors, were hungry for new opportunity and tired of the long winters of the Red River valley between North Dakota and Minnesota.
After Fred’s first visit to Big Sandy, he went back to eastern North Dakota, got Christine and his brother Henry and a few cousins, and to Montana they all came for a piece of the Empire Builder’s golden promise. As it turns out, James Hill sold most of his desperate honyockers a bill of goods. Granddad said when he first came to Montana, the native grass was so tall it would brush the underbelly of a horse. The loamy, alkaline clay soil of north-central Montana is particularly suited for growing grains, pulses, and alfalfa hay. But to cultivate the soil for dryland farming (farming with no artificial irrigation), you have to know exactly what you’re doing for a successful yield. Many honyockers had no clue. And so much for mild winters. They were often worse in Montana.
My grandparents and the other folks who homesteaded this part of Montana scraped out tough lives on their new land. Many of them lived in one-room shacks. In those days Fred and Christine slept in a rickety little home whose curtains flapped inside when the wind blew outside. They shared a single horsehair blanket and kept warm with a little stove. You can see why so many of the honyockers didn’t make it in Montana. Henry and the cousins eventually gave up and returned to North Dakota.
Fred and Christine stayed put. They rebuilt the barn after the tornado blew it down. They nurtured their boy back to health after he woke up. They figured out how to cultivate the finicky soil. When Granddad punched his first well into the ground, he didn’t realize he had hit a deposit of natural gas until he lit a cigarette and dropped a match, sending a column of flames forty feet into the air (he dumped a wagonload of gravel into that well to snuff out the flames before digging another one).
One afternoon while working under a wheat thresher, Fred rolled over onto a rattlesnake, which bit him in the back of his shoulder. Well, he thought, this is the end. But he knew that if he got up and ran for help, his heart would pump faster and circulate the venom throughout his entire body, increasing the chances of a painful death. So he stayed right where he was, alone under the thresher, motionless. He waited out the snakebite as the flesh on his shoulder snowballed and turned red, then black and blue. Eventually he ...
