102 Work poems

Here was no place for illumination the cotton dust thick window-strained light. The metal squall drowned what could not be shouted everything geared warping and filling. Though surely there were some times that he paused my grandfather thinking This is my life and catching himself before he was caught lost wages or fingers the risk of reflection. Or another recalled in those reckoning moments remembering the mountains the hardscrabble farm where a workday as long bought no guarantee of money come fall full bellies in winter. To earn extra pay each spring he would climb the mill's water tower repaint the one word. That vowel heavy word defined the horizon a word my grandfather could not even read.

The three men now stood satisfied, arms crossed, joking among themselves, but only moments before they hadn’t been laughing. It had taken all three to bind the struggling man. First, to limit his movement, they had duct-taped his wrists together behind his back: for that, one man had held his legs and another had pinned him, one hand on each shoulderblade and one knee on his head, at his left temple, grinding his right cheek and eye into the dust and straw and dried shit that formed the floor of the barn. First they bound his wrists, then his ankles. Then it got easier. More tape over his mouth, wound all the way around his head, three full loops, much more than was necessary, which was one thing they were laughing about, the two bigger men making fun of the smaller one, who had done that part of the binding. Then they’d bound him down on the mattress, again with the tape. The bound man continued to struggle, but once the tape denied him movement he felt as if he were thinking clearly, as if his panic had lifted, resistance become mere obligation. He thought surely the tape would run out, but they had another roll, just in case. He noticed the new order—head first this round—when it came to the mattress. One man would lift one end just off the dirt, enough for another to wrap the tape, which cursed coming off the roll in what the man construed as sympathy, all the way around the mattress in loops that included his head and neck, then the same process at the other end, all the way around the mattress and his ankles. They couldn’t figure how to get the tape around his torso because it was so near the middle of the mattress. The bound man found himself wanting to help, but of course he couldn’t speak, and anyway they didn’t need his advice. His hands bound behind his back and against the mattress meant his feet and head, and most of all his neck, were plenty to keep him from getting loose and grabbing one of their guns. The bound man’s life didn’t pass before him in summary, exactly, but he did see things now that in all these years he hadn’t noticed. The wiring, for instance. He thought it must have been his own father who’d wired the barn with that odd blend of pride and makeshift half-competence that showed up in all his father’d made, himself not least. One bare bulb bragging from the highest joist about its white porcelain fixture, but better, really, at casting long shadows than at lighting the place, though if the three men would just leave him alone, he thought, he’d be able to count up all the birds’ nests and speculate on where swallows had built before there were barns. The wire ran from switchbox to fixture in straight lines and right angles, through half-inch galvanized surely intended for plumbing but good, too, for frustrating the rats. It was the short man, the one who’d done all the taping, who then poured kerosene across the mattress and over the man, soaking his clothes, making sure to splash some into his eyes. No one else noticed, but he spelled out fuck with the kerosene. Or anyway swung his arms in that pattern. That was when they could relax a little, the three men, and start their joking, once the kerosene was poured. One tall man slapped his forehead: “You brought matches, right?” “Matches?” the other replied, furrowing his brow and patting his pockets, and both laughed out loud. Even the short man smiled. Barns burn, it turns out, just the way you’d think if you thought about it, hay fast and hot, siding lighting the roof and the flooring of the loft, all the slender strips of wood, with the few parts not tinder— the frame, the beams and joists—starting last and lasting longest. But that’s not what the mattress-bound man’s great-great-grandfather had thought about, its someday burning, as he built the barn. He had a daughter to worry about, and a wife big with what he thought might be a boy. And weather, and a dozen cows. Plenty to fret more immediate than which fuck-up would later taint his bloodline and preside over the decay, finally inviting the sacrifice, of what he had built to last. Barns burn like bonfires built for the burning, stacked just so by one mortal for the next. They burn best at night, whether or not communicants travel up and down billows lit silver from above, red from below. And whether or not three men have stopped among sycamores on the rise just opposite and turned for a moment to admire their handiwork.

Slade was pulling minnows out of the dry river the day we met. Puddles, more or less, was what was left. But what could live wanted to and tried, treading narrow circles, a glide of brittle fins. He wore those rubber boots, though the sun was an anvil, and very little wet; he smiled, I remember that, his nickel smile right at me, his fingers letting fall the small fish muscles into a bag filled with yellow tap. I didn’t ask his name, or what it was he thought he was doing, but we talked, I listened as he taught me to relax the hand just enough. They can smell, he said, the oils our pores release when we tense to catch. You have to believe it, he said. You don’t mean any harm.

They pay us time and a half and don’t dare catch us drinking: we don’t insist, don’t pass a bottle, but each sips a private pint, all sitting in the narrow room with our backs to the center, each facing his work—router, stain tray, buffing wheel, drill press— and with that sweet taste echoing in our bones, we watch our hands make what they always made —rosewood handles—but now we smile in delighted surprise and Marchesi brings envelopes that record a full day’s work though it’s still noon, processions still fill the streets, choirs, loudspeakers bellowing Hallelujah: and we change into our finest clothes in the locker room, admiring each other’s hat brims, passing bottles freely until all are empty, and at last we separate in the brilliant street, each in the direction of a different tolling bell.

Their authority did not unfold from ironed white shirts and thin ties or from the funereal seriousness that struck their acne-splashed faces but because they stood heir to our native faith in light. So we followed the thin white waver of beams they pointed down aisles to seats we never thought of refusing. It was the first job I wanted, especially after birthday outings far from home showed me the glowing outfits worn by big-city ushers, their get-ups a blend of doorman and military dictator, as gaudy and fine as the plots of movies my Saturdays were swallowed by. None of us knew, as they took us into the artificial light of the cinema, that they walked the path of the pin setter, the blacksmith or elevator operator, professions reduced to curiosity by wandering time. Only in the quick steps of floor salesmen, the slim backs of hostesses bringing us to our tables, do they remain, the artful flutters of their flashlights lost in dark we are left to find our own way through.

In the ditch, half-ton sections of cast-iron molds hand-greased at the seams with pale petroleum waste and screw-clamped into five-hundred-gallon cylinders drummed with rubber-headed sledges inside and out to settle tight the wet concrete that, dried and caulked, became Monarch Septic Tanks; and, across the ditch, my high school football coach, Don Compo, spunky pug of a man, bronze and bald, all biceps and pecs, raging at some “attitude” of mine he snipped from our argument about Vietnam— I mean raging, scarlet, veins bulging from his neck, he looked like a hard-on stalking back and forth— but I had started college, this was a summer job, I no longer had to take his self-righteous, hectoring shit, so I was chuckling merrily, saying he was ludicrous, and he was calling me “College Man Ryan” and, with his steel-toed workboot, kicking dirt that clattered against the molds and puffed up between us. It’s probably not like this anymore, but every coach in my hometown was a lunatic. Each had different quirks we mimicked, beloved bromides whose parodies we intoned, but they all conducted practice like boot camp, the same tirades and abuse, no matter the sport, the next game the next battle in a neverending war. Ex-paratroopers and -frogmen, at least three finally convicted child molesters, genuine sadists fixated on the Commie menace and our American softness that was personally bringing the country to the brink of collapse— in this company, Don Compo didn’t even seem crazy. He had never touched any of us; his violence was verbal, which we were used to, having gotten it from our fathers and given it back to our brothers and one another since we had been old enough to button our own pants. Any minute—no guessing what might trigger it— he could be butting your face mask and barking up your nostrils, but generally he favored an unruffled, moralistic carping, in which I, happy to spot phoniness, saw pride and bitterness masquerading as teaching. In the locker room, I’d sit where I could roll my eyeballs as he droned, but, across the ditch, he wasn’t lecturing, but fuming, flaring as I had never seen in four years of football, and it scared and thrilled me to defy him and mock him when he couldn’t make me handwash jockstraps after practice or do pushups on my fingertips in a mud puddle. But it was myself I was taunting. I could see my retorts snowballing toward his threat to leap the ditch and beat me to a puddle of piss (“you craphead, you wiseass”), and my unspading a shovel from a dirt pile and grasping its balance deliberately down the handle and inviting him to try it. Had he come I would have hit him, There’s no question about that. For a moment, it ripped through our bewilderment, which then closed over again like the ocean if an immense cast-iron mold were dropped in. I was fired when the boss broke the tableau. “The rest of you,” he said, “have work to do,” and, grabbing a hammer and chisel, Don Compo mounted the mold between us in the ditch and with one short punch split it down the seam.

I still see those men haphazardly standing around the comps’ floor, mostly silent, lost in their latest urgent jobs, looking up and down as if nodding yes from what they call their composers’ sticks as they set inverse words and lines of each page that could be taken for Greek scripture, declaring: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was made cold type and the Word was coldness, darkness, shiny greyness and light—and the Word dwelt amongst us. * Oh, I know these men would laugh this off. They’d say, if they simply didn’t throw their eyes to heaven, that they were just ordinary characters trying to keep the devil from the door, and with luck have enough left over each week to back a few nags, and go for a few jars. But they can’t say anything or set anything now. They are scattered from that place that’s not the same any more and many have left any place we know of in this life, calling to mind the old names for printing: The Mysterious Craft or simply The Mystery. * I set them up in another city, another country that’s as far away in distance from that city as it’s far in time. But they are still composing, cracking the odd joke above their sticks and galleys on some floor of some building that is eternally busy inside me even when I’ve forgotten that I’ve forgotten them; forgetting the world behind the word— every time I read the word world I wonder is it a typo and should I delete the l. * Now again I hanker to know the quality of each letter: the weight, the texture, the smell, the shiny new type, the ink-dark shades of old, the different types of type, the various sizes within the same font, the measures in ems, picas,  points and units. I’d set the words up, making something out of all this that stays standing—all set as masterly as the words those men set that reveal something of the mystery behind and within these letters and the wonder and the darkness, but with the lightest touch. * And the umpteen ways things can foul up are beyond telling. Maybe the type is off, or the typesetter may not be up to the work, if only out of a hangover setting an ! where there should be a ? or a b where there should be a d, or miss aspace or a line or dingbat. And the proofreaders don't catch the error, passing the copy on as clean, or the make-up man fouls the assembly page, or the stoneman errs as he fastens the page of cold type and furniture with the chase, turning the quoin’s key. * Not to speak of the evil eye cast by fellow composers ready to knock the words of others, or the bosses writing on the composition:Kill. Old Shades, keep my words from such eyes and fretting about that pied world and let me go on regardless. And even if I foul up and the stewards are right to set Kill on my last page and my words are distributed and thrown in the hellbox, the real achievement will be that I tried to set the words right; that I did it with much labor and not without a font of love. But that said, * grant me the skill to free the leaden words from the words I set, undo their awkwardness, the weight of each letter of each word so that the words disappear, fall away or are forgotten and what remains is the metal of feeling and thought behind and beyond the cast of words dissolving in their own ink wash. Within this solution we find ourselves, meeting only here, through The Mystery, but relieved nonetheless to meet, if only behind the characters of one fly-boy’s words.

I seam towels for Dundee over in Georgia, a non-union sweatshop with a dozen rows of them blue glass windows all around. Some of ’em says it’s like a church. Been there fourteen years, since just before me and Hubert said vows at Devotee Baptist. We’ve been divorced since eighty-four. Seems he had another woman on the side. Yessir, I been cold and warmed my hands at the motor of my jury-rigged machine, been Florida-hot and deaf from the fans that don’t do a damn bit of earthly good, for me at least. I’m right fleshy, as you can see. Been so hot I’d get the hives and swell up like sourdough rising, but I hardly miss a sick day, you understand. I hate the feel when another woman’s been sewing on my machine. Substitutes will break a needle or jack the floating bobbin out of line. They don’t give a hoot. It ain’t like they got a steady station or reputation to uphold. This working’s almost a moral thing, Preacher Wilkes would say, like marriage, and every thread has got to be caught in the hem’s edge so the whole towel won’t ravel first time some salesman in a motel or shoe clerk in his own home after a sweaty day dries off from a cold shower bath. You see, I know it don’t take no giant brain to sit behind a Singer machine and stitch hour after hour, but I’m proud just the same. I’m regular as a clock, and I don’t dare fiddle with another worker’s machine. Some nights I lie in my bed, once was my mother’s, and watch the gas flame jump beautiful blue as the mill’s windows and wonder how many skins have been wiped dry on my towels, and whose. It gives me a blushy pride right on the edge of sleep. I’m over here tonight with my sister Lily and her husband, Buddy, supposed to be having a fine time instead of talking my whole life at you. This country and western band, specially the drummer in a blue silk shirt, makes me want to eat a hot pig’s foot, drink beer, and shake my tail. Let’s show ’em a thing or two. You ain’t married just now, are you?

1 Scribe out of work At a loss for words Not his to begin with, The man life passed by Stands at the window Biding his time 2 Time and again And now once more I climb these stairs Unlock this door— No name where I live Alone in my lair With one bone to pick And no time to spare

Retired from other trades, they wore Work clothes again to mop the johns And feed the furnace loads of coal. Their roughened faces matched the bronze Of the school bell the nun would swing To start the day. They limped but smiled, Explored the secret, oldest nooks: The steeple’s clock, dark attics piled With inkwell desks, the caves beneath The stage on Bingo night. The pastor Bowed to the powers in their hands: Fuses and fire alarms, the plaster Smoothing a flaking wall, the keys To countless locks. They fixed the lights In the crawl space above the nave And tolled the bells for funeral rites. Maintain what dead men made. Time blurs Their scripted names and well-waxed floors, Those keepers winking through the years And whistling down the corridors.