FRIDAY IS PAYDAY, part 2 of 2

One road begets another.

Cigarette smoke trails Joe. He’s a two-legged chimney heavy-stepping to the smaller mill, where the trimming and drilling is done. He’ll be on his trimming machine at 6:59 a.m. sharp, a rotating heavyweight semi-blunt blade trimming, squaring off each piece of slate to a uniform size.  Trimming slate sounds like the squeaking of ripped Styrofoam and the sharp shatter of china colliding.

I worked in that mill, too. But I stole a few minutes on the way over each morning before riveting my feet in front of my drill press—This is my drill press. There are many like it, but this one is mine. We all scattered when the whistle blew, away from the slender heat and the idle chatter—some to the pit, some to the heavy equipment, the Ackerman’s, Clark’s, and Caterpillar’s, and none to the shelter of the small paint-stripped trailer that glistened as the Taj Mahal might if it were built on rubble rather than sand. Sultans of varying degrees hunkered in the trailer, running numbers, and I received my thin pay envelope each Friday there.

As did everyone else.

There was Henry, bundled head to toe. It was hard to tell what he weighed. In the pit, Henry read the grain of the stone, calculated, and dynamited the slate from its primordial cradle. The great chomping hydraulic shovel, always hungry, separated the takings, destined for the topside, from the rubbish. If you cleaned Henry up he could pass for a Castleton College professor. Maybe it was the pipe he always smoked and the ragged I-don’t-give-a-damn beard, graying. I never saw him in tweed, though.

There was Red, lean, and hard. He said he was part Iroquois. That didn’t merit him anything more than his nickname. What else would we tag him? He climbed on the pile of mastodon-sized chunks of rock that came off the equally paleolithic dump trucks and broke them down. He rode a jackhammer for hours, a sledgehammer, and a two-foot chisel, too. No one wanted that job. And no one messed with Red.

There was Vern on his forklift, shuttling slabs of slate from Red to the larger mill. His homegrown skunk weed helped numb time, barely. Thin, scorching hits, seeds aplenty, carried in a battered Sucrets tin. That was Vern, always grinning. He looked as if he walked in from Appalachia and had a still to tend when he got home. A lot of us hustled to Vern when the noon whistle blew. Minutes were precious when you are back on the clock in thirty.

There was Diane. She was a sawyer. In quarry slang, that meant she ran one of the two large diamond saws that sliced large flat slabs of slate to manageable chunks for the workers downline. I don’t recall Diane wearing a pink pussy hat. She did wear Carhartt, fat rubber gloves and rubber boots up to her knees—again, the water—and orange Uline earmuffs to dampen the incredible screeching when the blade kissed the rock. We didn’t have an HR department, and there was no glass ceiling for Diane to smash. She was just there to earn money for milk, sneakers, and propane. She had three kids at home.

There was Edgar Lee. All hundred and twenty pounds of him, also a sawyer. His teeth were yellow and black, jagged, and his gums are swollen red, and he talked incessantly and smiled a lot. He had never been to a dentist. Greasy coffee, chain-smoking, shivering, gift of gab—that was Edgar Lee. No one ate lunch with him. He passed around homemade cookies. Everyone declined.

There was Lloyd, an anomaly—a quiet and genteel man, who started working with his back late in life. He had some college in him, a former desk job, too. He was a splitter, which meant he sat all day and cleaved the suitcase-sized slate into quarter-inch panes with a hammer and chisel. His hair, thinning, and always cut neat, was as white as the snow that capped Sugarbush Mountain. His work clothes were spotless on the way in and not so much on the way out. Lloyd had no kids and lost his wife a while back. I think he got more out of frolicking with our mongrel horde than he did from his paycheck. Everyone needs family.

There was Ralph, Johnny Winter with pigment, and there was Rick, our foreman, who always carried a clipboard hugged high and tight to his chest. It was more for show than anything else—he bounced when he walked. Rick was mostly Tigger, occasionally Tiger, when Bedford, who owned the place, meandered through to check on production, and pick up a check. We always resented that white that Nissan pick-up. The fact it was foreign, deepened our contempt.

Ralph and Rick were former high school teachers who migrated to the Vermont woods to escape, to live deliberately, a little Walden Pond, a little homesteading. They built their own places, composted, chopped wood, grew marijuana, and ate a lot of venison and perch, and lentils. My Dad liked them. They were hippies to him. He was an old-timer to them. They became friends and shared a beer or two from time to time—Ralph came to my Dad’s funeral, the last time I saw them both.

Everyone was equal up on the hill, but only if they pulled their weight.

There was Keith and his porn mustache, always in good spirits, as thin as the push broom he used to keep the mill floor clean. His accent was pure Vermont—maple syrup and green mountain boy. He was all the Vermont hamlets, from St. Albans to Bennington, rolled into flannel and steel-toed boots. Keith was married, had a couple of kids, and stretched $9.00 an hour about as far as you could. He didn’t graduate high school—I would help decipher the packing slips and outgoing orders for him. We never talked about it.

There was Joe. One of the hardest and hardest working men I have ever seen. He started work one minute before the whistle and stopped one minute after. He was paid by the piece, and his trimming machine was in perpetual motion. He was the machine. Until it bit back, trapping his right hand between the blade, and the leveling bar. A rickety stack of slate, fresh from the splitting floor, fell into the back of his legs and forced his hand forward into the trimming machine. Imagine King Kong slamming your fingers in a car door. Rick hustled him off to the emergency room. No one wanted to look inside that glove.

Joe was back about three weeks later trimming essentially one one-handed. He winced a lot but never complained, and he made quota. Fuck.

And then there was me. I was a tourist, really. I did summer stints at the quarry and now I was doing a thirteen-month stretch, hunkering down, and saving money for grad school. Earn it, save it, and give it to Syracuse University—it made more sense then. I worked a two-headed drill press and inserted nail holes into each piece of roofing slate. It was loud and wet and monotonous. I had a radio and a rigid routine. It was oddly hypnotic. I would fill pallet after pallet, band it all up, and push it into the yard for shipping. From Henry to me, slate-making came full circle.

I still recall leaving the quarry for the last time, one in a long line of cars racing to the gate, kicking up dust and loose gravel. Hay bales rolled like giant sleeping bags, dotted the lurching fields off to my right, having released their green to early fall-winter brown.  Soon enough a blanket of white would lay all to sleep.

Weeks later I was in a classroom for the first time in more than a year. The girl seated in front of me, hair still wet from the shower, smelled sparkling, wholesome, and sweetly fragrant.  And there I was, warm and dry and clean, hermetically sealed under an artificial sky, pining for the smell of kerosene.