Stories of Erskine Caldwell (52 page)

“Walt Brown, eh?” Nate said, glancing around at the men in the store. “Walt Brown signed the letter, and he calls himself the Yankee Dowel Company. I wonder what he could be up to now?”

A knowing wink passed from man to man around the stove.

“He used to be the Eastern Barrel Hoop Corporation,” someone said, slapping his hands on his knees and having a good laugh with the other men, “but I ain’t heard much about that corporation since wooden flour barrels went out of use. Walt’s been doing his durndest trying to sell me a load of barrel hoops to stake tomato plants with. He thinks up the queerest notions to get rid of his hoops of any man I ever saw. Who ever heard of staking tomato plants with barrel hoops, anyhow?”

It was several minutes before the crowd stopped laughing at Walt. He had been up to some crazy schemes in his lifetime. Only a month or two before that, he was all excited over a plan of his to make a new kind of wooden clothespin at his mill. Now there was something else up his sleeve. The trouble with Walt was he was always letting somebody get the better of him when it came to business deals. He got along all right as long as he stuck to his lumber business, but whenever he tried to branch out into fancy woodwork he was always licked from the start. Everybody thought he had learned his lesson after losing a lot of money in the barrel-hoop deal, and believed that he would stick to his planing and stop trying to get rich by taking up fancy doweling. Apparently, though, he was going in for it again.

“Sure,” Nate said, “I know Walt Brown. But what’s your name, and what do you want to see him for?”

The man looked at Nate and then at the crowd around the stove before he said anything. He knew the men would not tell him how to find the mill until he told them his name and business.

“I’m Bullock,” he said, “from over at the Falls. I buy and sell wooden products.”

Androscoggin Falls was a town forty-five miles northeast of Liverpool. There were several shoe factories there, with a dozen or more mills turning out wooden products of various kinds.

Nate slapped his hands on his knees and winked at the men around him.

“So you’re a Bullock from over at the Falls, eh? I don’t guess you give milk then, do you?”

Everybody in the store broke out laughing again. The man from the Falls could not keep from laughing either.

“No,” he said, suddenly getting red in the face and looking angry. “No, I don’t give milk, but I’m a damn hard butter when I get wild and loose.”

The crowd took it all in without a sign. The men knew Nate had run up against a man every bit as sharp-witted as he was. Nate looked at Bullock very hard for a moment, but he had nothing to say to that answer.

“Come on outside,” Nate told him, “and I’ll show you how to find Walt Brown’s mill.”

When they were out in the street, Nate offered him some smoking tobacco and admired his automobile. It was not long before both of them were laughing and telling each other jokes.

Bullock said finally that he was in a hurry to find the mill and get back to the Falls. Nate told him to take the upper lake road three miles to East Liverpool. Walt’s mill was at the end of the lake where the State road crossed the stream.

It did not take him long to go the three miles in his car. When he reached East Liverpool, he walked into the mill and found Walt operating one of the wood-turning machines. There were five or six other men working in the plant with him.

“You’re Walter Brown, aren’t you?” Bullock asked him.

“I’m the one,” Walt said. “What do you want?”

“I’m Bullock, from over at the Falls. You sent me some prices on cider-jug handles last week. I came over to talk business with you.”

Walt brightened up immediately. He shut off the machine he was running and took Bullock to his office in the house across the street.

“That’s a fairly good price you gave me on fifty gross,” Bullock said. “I’ve got a chain store begging for some right away, so if I were to double that number could you shade the price a little?”

“Well, I guess maybe I can,” Walt said. “And I guess maybe we can do business together.”

Walt was very much excited over the prospect of getting a big order for wooden handles. When he had sent Bullock the quotation the week before, he had not expected it to amount to anything. Some people said his prices were too high, and that his plant was too far away from the railroad for him to get much business without offering f.o.b. shipments like the rest of the mill men. It cost a lot of money to truck twenty-seven miles to the depot.

Bullock signed the order for a hundred gross of the jug handles and gave Walt shipping directions. He knew he would have to pay trucking costs in addition to the freight, but he had figured all that into the cost before he left the Falls. Even then he was getting the handles cheaper than ever before, and he was pleased with Walt’s price. The wooden jug handles had been costing him from fifty to seventy-five cents more a gross from the mills at the Falls.

When he was about to leave, he happened to see a stack of barrel hoops in the mill. He asked Walt if he turned out hoops too. Walt explained that it was some leftover stock he had been unable to sell because people had stopped buying flour in barrels as they used to and bought it now in sacks instead.

Bullock went in and looked the lot over. Walt watched him break one of the hoops over his knee to inspect the grain in the wood. Bullock’s business was dealing in wooden products on commission, but he had not had a hoop to pass through his hands in more than three years.

“I can’t do anything with barrel hoops either, these days, but I’ll tell you one thing I’ve never been able to get enough of.”

“What’s that?” Walt asked quickly.

“Blueberry crates,” he said. “I can’t get enough of them. I could have sold five hundred only last week to a man over in New Hampshire if I could have got my hands on some. The blueberry-crate business is better this year than it ever has been. Everybody wants crates this year to ship berries to market.”

Walt thought a while about blueberry crates and walked around in circles. He had made almost everything in wooden products during his lifetime, but a blueberry crate was one thing he had never thought of. He knew he could do it, though, because his machines would turn out practically anything.

“I can make blueberry crates,” he said.

“If you can make delivery of them by the end of this month I can use them,” Bullock said. “I’ll pay the ruling price on them at the time you make delivery, too. That’s a better deal for you than setting a price beforehand, because the market will be up when the season opens. I’ll take as many as you can get out in that time, too. But they’ll have to be ready before the end of the month, because after that the season will be too far advanced.”

Walt went to his office to get an order blank for Bullock to sign, but when he came back to the mill Bullock had gone. Walt did not like that, because he never wanted to make up an order when it hadn’t been signed for in advance. In that case he could not bring suit to collect if the man refused to take the lot. But Bullock looked all right, and he talked as if he meant to take them. In the matter of blueberry crates a signed order did not mean much anyway, because if a man decided to cancel an order all he had to do was to claim the crates were not up to standard specifications.

Walt went ahead with his plans for making the crates anyway. But first he started getting out the wooden jug handles and had his men begin work on them right away. They would finish that job in a few days, and in the meantime they could begin getting the machines ready for the crates.

He went to the village the next morning to buy some nails with which to put the crates together. He had made a sample crate the night before, and with the weight of the nails he used he had figured out an estimate for the entire lot.

When he reached the village he went to Pat Hobb’s store and told Pat he wanted some crate nails. Pat talked awhile about the road money, and how it was being wasted by putting in a gravel fill by the North Schoolhouse. Walt was on the town road commission but he did not have much to say. He was in a hurry for the nails so he could get back to the mill.

Pat went over to the keg and picked it up. There were not more than ten pounds of nails in it.

“How many do you want?” he asked Walt.

“How many have you got?”

“About eight to ten pounds, maybe twelve.”

“I want all of those, and I’ll need a lot more besides.”

“But I can’t sell you all I’ve got, Walt. Suppose somebody else came in and said they wanted some?”

“Good God, I can’t help that,” Walt said. “You’ve got them to sell ain’t you? Well, sell them to me. I’m the one that wants to buy them.”

“I couldn’t do that, Walt,” Pat said, putting the keg on the floor again. “I wouldn’t have none left if I sold them all to you.”

“Good God,” said Walt, “ain’t you in the selling business? What do you keep store for if it ain’t to sell?”

“I know, but somebody —”

“Good God, Pat, don’t make me mad. You can get some more nails, can’t you? I’ll want a lot more myself before I’m done buying. Why, do you know how many blueberry crates I’m going to make?”

“No,” Pat said. “How many?”

“Ten thousand.”

“Ten thousand blueberry crates?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Good God, Walt, that’s a heap of blueberry crates. I never heard of a man making ten thousand of them before. What are you going to do with them?”

Walt did not know just then, himself. When he had said
ten thousand
it was done to impress Pat, so he could get all the nails he wanted, but when he began to think it over he was not sure that Bullock could take that many. It would take a lot of quart baskets of blueberries to fill that many crates, and there were other mills making crates too. But Walt knew he could never back down now. Pat would tell Nate Emmonds about it, and that would make Nate take back a lot of the things he had been saying about Walt and his wooden-products business.

“I’ve got an order from Bullock over at the Falls for that many. Maybe more, too.”

Pat remembered Bullock’s coming into the store and asking for Walt a few days before that. He would tell Nate about the big number of crates Walt was making as soon as he came into the store again.

“I’ll take what nails you got there, Pat,” Walt said. “And I’ll be back in a few days for a lot more. I’ll need a pile of nails to put all those crates together.”

“All right,” Pat agreed, “you can take them. But I know I ain’t doing best. Somebody will be sure to come in and ask for crate nails and I won’t have none at all,”

“You order some right away. I’ll be in again soon for two or three kegs full.”

Walt went back to the mill and got to work on the crates. The wooden handles for the cider and vinegar jugs would be ready by the end of the next day. After he got them off to Bullock he could put all his men to work on the crates.

Everybody in town had heard about the large number of blueberry crates Walt was going to make, and by the middle of the following day men began coming in to ask Walt for a job helping make them. Walt took on fifteen new men and went to work. By the end of the week they were turning crates out at the rate of a thousand a day. The stack in the millyard got higher and higher, and it was not long before crates were piled twenty feet high in every available place.

The piles of crates attracted the attention of a man passing through East Liverpool in his car late Tuesday afternoon of the following week. He stopped, turned around, and drove back to the mill where Walt was. Walt was too busy to stop work.

“What kind of crates are those?” he asked Walt.

“Blueberry,” Walt said without turning around.

“If you had said raspberry, I couldn’t have told the difference. Raspberry crates are exactly like those. And I ought to know, because raspberry crates is my business.”

“What do you want?” Walt asked him. “I can’t waste time talking when I’ve got work to do.”

“I want to buy those crates,” the man said. “I had just started on a buying trip to get raspberry crates for my customers. I buy and sell wooden products on commission, and if you’ll meet my offer halfway we can do business. I’ll take all the crates you’ve got and haul them away in my own trucks starting tomorrow. You’ll sell them to me, won’t you?”

“Nope,” Walt said, “I won’t sell them to you. And those ain’t raspberry crates, either — them are blueberry crates. And anyway, they are already bargained for, I’m making them on order.”

Walt could not understand why the man called them raspberry crates. If he had learned the business of making crates before he jumped into it, he would have known that blueberry crates had to be made up in bundles because most of them were shipped several hundred miles down East on the coast, while raspberry crates were usually nailed together at the time they were made because they were used in this section of the state and it was cheaper and a saving of time to truck them to the fields directly from the mills. A distance of fifty miles was all that was necessary at times to change the name and use of a crate.

“This is the first time I ever saw blueberry crates put together at the mill. All the blueberry people I know want the parts shipped to them in bundles, and then they knock the crates together right in the fields where —”

“When you’ve been in the wooden-products business for as long a time as —”

“Then you’re not going to sell me those raspberry crates even if I —”

“These blueberry crates are already bargained for. And if they was raspberry crates I wouldn’t sell —”

“I’ve got to be going,” the man said. “I can’t waste my time standing here talking all day to a blundering fool.”

“If you don’t get going I’ll have to waste some of my time looking for a piece of four-by-four to start you off with.”

The man knew he could never persuade Walt to sell the crates, no matter what name he called them by, so he went back to his car and drove away. He had been dealing with mill men in that section of the state for thirty years, and he knew that whenever one of them talked as Walt did there was never anything but time and temper lost in trying to buy something from him.