I have kept a small essay about Uncle Thomas Brighton's pocket knife in my files for years, moving it from folder to folder as I reorganised the family papers. The piece began as a note scribbled during a long afternoon at my desk, when the Brighton photographs were spread across the table and the radiator was ticking. I am publishing it here so that the knife has a permanent place in the family record, and so that any reader who has ever held a small inherited object can find a companion in these words.
The essay is short, but the knife is not. It has lived in a kitchen drawer, in a tin of old buttons, and for a while in the pocket of a coat that belonged to my father. Each time I came across it, the essay in my head grew a little longer, and each time I tried to set it down on paper I left out something I had meant to say. What follows is the version I am willing to let stand, with a clearer order of events than the original draft managed.
Many of the readers who find this page arrive from Sydney, where Loni's sister keeps a small circle of family friends who follow the site. The knife is part of the same continuous record, and it belongs to anyone who has ever stopped to look at a small object and wondered whose hand once held it. The distance between a Midwestern farmhouse and a flat in a Sydney suburb has not made the object any harder to see, only more worth describing carefully.
Uncle Thomas Brighton was the younger brother of my grandmother, and the two of them shared a stubborn streak the rest of the family learned to work around rather than argue with. He was born in 1898, the year the family moved from their first farm to a second one near the edge of the county. He worked as a carpenter for most of his life, and he kept a small shop behind his house where he mended furniture for neighbours who could not afford a proper tradesman.
The pocket knife was not a gift. He bought it himself from a hardware store in town during the winter of 1923, paying in cash because he did not yet have a bank account. The price was two dollars and ten cents, which he remembered exactly for the rest of his life and mentioned every time the subject came up. The knife was a two-bladed model with a bone handle pressed into a gentle curve at the factory, and the larger blade bore a maker's stamp that has since been bought and rebranded three times over.
I can describe the knife without looking. The handle is roughly the length of my thumb from knuckle to tip, and it sits in the hand the way a well-worn hammer sits in a carpenter's grip. The bone has darkened to a deep yellow, almost the colour of weak tea left in a cup too long, and the two small pins that hold the spring in place have a dull shine from years of use. The larger blade is a little over two inches, and the smaller one is barely an inch and a half, which made it useful for sharpening pencils in the shop.
There is a nick in the spine of the larger blade, near the point, that Uncle Thomas always said came from a nail he had been trying to pry out of an old door frame. The spring is still firm, though it takes a small effort with the thumbnail to open the blade now, and the sound it makes when the blade locks is a thin, clean click that I have heard since I was small enough to sit on his knee. The knife has not been sharpened in decades, and the edge is more of a memory than a working one.
Uncle Thomas kept the knife in his right-hand trousers pocket from the day he bought it until the last week of his life. He had a small leather pouch sewn for it by a neighbour who did leatherwork, and the pouch rode against the seam of the pocket so that the knife would not slip out when he bent over a bench. The pouch wore out twice, and the second one he replaced himself with a square of harness leather and a few stitches of waxed thread, done by hand on a quiet Sunday afternoon.
The knife was always in the pocket. It went with him to the shop, to the grocer, to the post office, and on the long Sunday drives he liked to take through the county in the old Ford. It went with him on the train when he visited my grandmother in the city, and it was the first thing he checked when he stood up from any chair. The habit of touching the pocket was so constant that my grandmother used to tease him about it, and he used to pretend not to hear her, and the two of them would go on that way for the rest of the visit.
There is no single story that explains what the knife was for. It was for everything. He cut string with it, opened letters, trimmed the wick of a kerosene lamp, and pared the end of a pencil before he started a drawing of a piece of furniture he was designing. He used the small blade to dig a splinter out of my thumb when I was seven, holding my hand steady on his knee and telling me a story about a fox while he worked, so that I would not flinch.
He cut apples into rings for the grandchildren, laying them out on a plate with a little lemon juice to keep them from browning. He opened paint cans with it when the can opener was missing, and he scored a line down a board before he broke it across his knee for kindling. Once, during a storm, he cut the twine that held a loose shutter in place and then lashed the shutter back with a piece of wire from the fence, and the whole repair took him less time than it has taken me to write this sentence about it.
My grandmother gave me the knife in a small envelope about a year after Uncle Thomas died. She did not say much when she handed it over, only that he would have wanted it to go to someone who would use it, and that the rest of the family would not have known what to do with it. I thanked her, put the envelope in my coat pocket, and did not open it for several days because I was not ready to see the knife again.
When I did open it, the knife was exactly as I remembered. The leather pouch was still in the envelope, the blades were folded shut, and the bone handle was warm from being held in her hands. I have carried it myself for many of the years since, and it now lives in a small wooden box on the shelf above my desk, where I can see it when I sit down to write. I take it out on quiet evenings, open both blades, and the sound of the spring is the same as it always was.
Many of the visitors to this site read it from Australia, where Loni's family lives, and the distance between a Midwestern farm and a suburb of Adelaide or a street in Fremantle is not a small one. I have thought about that distance while writing this essay, and I have come to the conclusion that the knife is the sort of object that travels well. It does not depend on a particular landscape or a particular season, and the kind of pocket knife that lives in a Brisbane workman's trouser leg is much the same as the one that lived in Uncle Thomas's pocket.
Australian readers have written to me about their own family knives, and a few of those letters are tucked into the same box where the Brighton knife lives. One correspondent from Ballarat told me about a penknife her father had carried in his overalls for forty years, and another from a small town outside Hobart sent a photograph of a knife that had been used to open bags of charcoal for the family barbie. Those letters are part of the reason I have decided to publish this essay at last.
The original draft ended with a sentence about time, and how objects are a way of measuring it. I have removed that sentence because it sounded like a thing a younger writer would say, and I am no longer a younger writer. What I want to say instead is simpler, and it is the thing I most often forget to say when I am writing about family. The knife is not a symbol, and it is not a relic, and it is not a piece of evidence.
It is a small, ordinary tool that a man carried in his pocket because he needed it, and that another man has carried for the same reason. That is the whole essay, or nearly so. There are details I have left out, because they belong to other people, and details I have left out because I do not remember them clearly enough to set them down. The Brighton family is full of objects that could be described in this way, and I expect to write about more of them in the years to come.
If you would like to read the original handwritten draft of this essay, it is kept in the family papers folder alongside the Brighton photographs. The folder sits on the second shelf of the cabinet in the hallway, and I have asked Loni to make a scanned copy available to anyone who writes to ask for one. The knife itself is not for travelling, but the words about it are, and I will send the scan to any reader who would like to read the older version alongside this one.