BOX OF PAIN

October 08, 2026

by Rusty W. Mitchum

The other day I was walkin’ into the house, just as my wife Janet was walkin’ out. She had a box in her hands.

“What’s in the box?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “I was just cleaning out some old junk.”

“What junk?” I asked.

“Just some old junk. Nothing worth keeping, believe me.”

“Let me see,” I said.

“I’d rather not,” she replied.

“Why not?”

“Because, I said it was just junk.”

“Oh, okay,” I said nonchalantly, and I grabbed the box out of her hands.

“Give me that,” she growled, and then grabbed for it, as I held it up over her head.

“Not ‘til I have a look in it,” I smiled.

“Fine,” she said through gritted teeth. “But we are not keeping it.”

I brought the box down and looked inside.

“Wow,” I said. “I thought this stuff was gone. You can’t throw this away.”

“Rusty,” she warned. “It’s junk.”

“No, it’s not,” I said as I pulled something out of it. “Do you know what this is?”

“Popsicle sticks with tape on them,” she replied.

“It’s more than that,” I said. “It’s the splint from the first bone I ever broke.”

“Wow,” she said sarcastically.

“Yeah, I was playin’ with the barber chair while Daddy was gettin’ his hair cut in one of the other chairs. I had my finger somewhere in the mechanism when I pulled the lever on the side of the chair, and it reclined, trappin’ my finger in there and snappin’ it in two. Man, I hollered like a scalded cat. Daddy jumped up and ran over, and got me out, then whipped me for messin’ with the chair. Then he set my finger, grabbed these popsicle sticks. Slapped ‘em on either side of my finger and taped it up.”

“He didn’t take you to the doctor?” asked Janet.

“Naw. His philosophy was, ‘If it ain’t bleedin’ and you can’t see guts, it can’t be hurt that bad.”

I looked into the box again. “Looky here,” I said. “It’s my old cast.”

“That thing is nasty,” Janet said.

“This was my very first cast,” I said, ignorin’ her comment.

“Of a long line of casts, I’m sure,” she said.

“I got it when I broke my knuckle on the head of a boy named Robert.”

“Fascinating,” she said sarcastically.

“It wasn’t a real fight. We staged the fight to get out of P.E. ‘cause they were fixin’ to have timed trials on how many pushups, sit-ups, pull-ups, and junk like that you could do. If you got caught fightin’ you had to sit out for three days, so we figured that we’d stage a fight and get out of it. Pretty smart, huh?”

“Brilliant,” she mumbled. “Did it work?”

“Naw,” I hit him upside the head, the coach saw me, and then we had to run around the track for the next week. We’d probably still be runnin’ but after about a week my hand had swelled up the size of a football, and then I had to go to the doctor. He X-rayed it, said it was broke and they had to put me to sleep, re-break it, and then set it. Then he put it in this cool cast. Look what somebody wrote on it ‘Break a Leg’. Hah! Funny, huh?”

“Hilarious,” she sighed.

“Hey look,” I said, as I pulled out a second cast. “This is the cast I got put on my hand three days after I got the first cast off.”

“Three days?”

“Yeah. This kid named Jimmy called me a name in shop class and we went out back and had it out.”

“What did the teacher say?”

“Heck, he was the one that sent us out back. He didn’t want us fightin’ in shop class. We might fall into the band saw or somethin’. He was really safety conscious, you know.”

“Yeah, sounds like it.”

“Yeah, Jimmy was a big kid, but he couldn’t fight worth a hoot. Anywho, I won, but I broke my knuckle again.”

“Yeah, sounds like you won,” she said.

“This time they couldn’t fix it, so they just wrapped it up in this cast, and that’s why I don’t have a knuckle there,” I said, as I put my fist up to her face.

“Amazing,” she said, still with the sarcastic tone in her voice.

“Look at this,” I said as I pulled out a large X made out of tape.

“Let me guess. You wore that to Malcolm’s funeral?”

“Funny,” I said. “I had to wear this back when I broke my nose.”

“Another tale of woe, I suppose.”

“You see, we were playin’ hardball in the old garden. That’s what we called the field between Coy’s and my house, on account of Uncle Ray used to have a garden there. Anywho, Robert Baggett was pitchin’, Donny Green was battin’, and I was catchin’. We didn’t have a catcher’s mask, and Donny fouled the ball and it hit me right on the nose. It laid it over on my right cheek and flattened it out. Man, I was a mess. Mom ran me up to the Dr.’s office. He deadened it, and stuck a rod up my nose, and he pushed it back to where Mom thought it looked like it did before the baseball crushed it.”

“He did this while you were awake?”

“Yeah, when he pushed my nose back to the center of my head, it sounded like when you crunch up crackers to put in your chili.”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Janet said.

“I had to sleep between two five-pound bags of sugar taped on either side of my head to keep from turnin’ over and re-breakin’ it. Anywho, he put this X on my face to sort of keep the nose in place. I asked him to get me a tin nose, but he didn’t have one.”

“A tin nose?”

“Yeah, you know, like Lee Marvin had in Cat Ballou. That would have been really cool.”

“Brother,” she said. “Why would you want to keep this stuff, anyway.”

“Are you kiddin’? To remind me of the good times, of course.”

“Those were the good times?”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “The best.”

“I wonder what the bad times were like,” Janet said.

“They were horrible,” I replied. “Most of them involved homework, and stuff like that.”

She just shook her head.

“Hey,” I said, lookin’ back into the box. “My old eye patch.”

“You had an eye patch? I know I’m going to be sorry for asking, but for what?”

“For my eye, silly.”

She narrowed her eyes until they were just slits. “Why did you need an eye patch?” she asked through gritted teeth.

“Oh, well you see, we were havin’ a sweet gum ball fight and I got hit in the eye. They weren’t green sweet gum balls; they were the dried-up ones. Anywho, I caught one in the eye, and it sort of stuck for a second ‘til I pulled it out.”

“Gross.”

“It didn’t poke a hole in my eyeball or nothin’; it just left a bunch of junk in it. Mom picked out the big pieces, and went up to Skillern’s Drug Store, and got me this here patch. I wore it for a couple of weeks.”

“Didn’t people look at you funny?”

“Yeah, it was great. I looked just like a pirate. In fact, when my eye got well, I didn’t tell Mom, 'cause I wanted to keep wearin’ it. I’d spend hours lookin’ at myself in the mirror. Man, I looked cool.”

“You are so stupid,” Janet said.

“Let’s see if it still fits,” I said, and I put it on.

“Well, what do you think? Don’t I look like Captain Kidd?”

“More like Captain Crunch,” she replied.

“Arrrrr,” I said in my pirate voice. “Hey Lassie. How would you like me to shiver ye timbers?” Then I raised my eyebrows up a couple of times.

“I’ve got a better idea. How about I re-breaky your nose?”

She just can’t take it when I’m romantic.