Awl

A tool for piercing holes. Particularly in leather. A simple metal shaft. A knob of wood for handle, polished by its fit in the sinewy cradle of a leather-worker’s 
palm. Likely the tool with which Louis Braille blinded himself as a child in France. An accident in his father’s saddle-making shop in the early years of the nineteenth century. Braille later invented a system of raised dots as a means of reading and writing for the blind. We don’t know much. Whether he was in the shop with his father or snuck in alone. Whether it was damp and rainy or whether the sun shone and brought to life the floating dust that always hung in the workshop air. Maybe it was just a little poke in the eye. A small tool, a small slip of the hand, a small injury. How a little fumble ends in blindness. It was decades before general anesthetic or antiseptics. Perhaps the doctor they rushed him to believed in the value of “laudable pus” in a wound. I don’t want to picture it. As a child, playing in his father’s saddle-making shop, did Louis Braille already know the names of the parts of a saddle—cantle, pommel, stirrup, tree? Did he know the smell and feel of each grade of leather? Of all the tools—punch and pincers, gouge and groover, chisel and awl—he chose awl. Likely the last thing he saw, a shine of metal galloping toward his eye. Is it accident that my tool for pressing hand-punched Braille is so much like a blunt, very small awl?