The Most They Ever Had (3 page)

Routinely, he worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.

“I told him, ‘You might as well put your bed down there because you spend more time there than you do at home,’” Theresa said. “And I told him, ‘You might as well have your funeral down there, too.” But in that surrounding silence, the roar was music. Here, you could put your hands against the side of the red-brick mill, day and night, and feel it hum.

The gossipers said this time it wasn’t enough, that this time the company really would shut them down, and all of it, their pay, their insurance, would vanish. But the company told them no, their jobs were safe, said Sonny and other workers here.

“It was hope people was reaching out for,” said Delorise Keith. “They made us believe.”

Benny Buse, a fifty-one-year-old head overhauler, reassured the workers under him as his bosses reassured him. “People were buying things left and right,” he said.

Two bosses told Sonny his job was so safe he could buy a house, a new car.

“Aint nothin’ to this shuttin,’ down,” one boss told him.

“Just people runnin’ their mouths,” another boss claimed.

“They told me I could retire here,” Sonny said.

If all it took were guts and muscle, they would run these brand-new machines into smoke and washers.

They believed it on the loading docks, where the air smelled like hot brakes and diesel fuel, where eighteen wheelers brought in thousands of tons of ginned, dirty-white cotton. The tow motors did not crawl across the docks but raced. They believed it in the opening room, where men armored as if they were going to war cut the bands off five hundred-pound bales, so many, so fast that it sounded like a never-ending volley of artillery. They believed it as they pushed cotton with their naked hands at machines designed to grab, chop, and fluff with spinning steel blades, blades that could slice a wrench in two. They believed it at the carding machines, where the separated cotton became a fat coil of yarn, and in the spinning room, where those coils were spun into thinner, tougher threads. They believed it in the office, in the break rooms, and in the parking lot, where men gathered around new and like-new pickups and cars, nothing fancy, just proof of their optimism, their faith.

Sonny and Theresa bought a new car, the red Pontiac.

“We can go anywhere in the world in that, baby,” he said.

___

Theresa sings about heaven in a way that makes you wonder if she has already seen it. She was two when she started singing in church, so little that her grandfather, the Rev. Huse Garmon, had to hold her up high, so people could see her. “I could sing before I talked,” Theresa said.

Her daddy, Donald, also a veteran of the mills, played guitar and sang in a group that traveled from camp meetings to Indian reservations to high school gymnasiums, delivering the gospel with a little music, to make it go down easier. Her family formed its own group, the Garmon Family, and was famous in the little churches and brush arbors. Their signature song was “The Eastern Gate.” Theresa sang the high notes, and her mother, Nancy, used to smile at how long her baby girl could hold them in the air.

Then He whispers ‘peace,’ be still now
and the winds must obey
Then burdens are lifted away

But their bread always came from the mills. Sonny got on at the Jacksonville mill in ’74. She followed him inside three years later. She will never forget that first day, and the mist. She walked into a room that seemed filled with gnats, a swarm of white.

There were no warnings, she said. Few people wore masks.

That first year, she was in the hospital with pneumonia. “I’d never had any trouble with my lungs before then,” she said. She missed so much work—more than ninety days —she automatically lost her job. The mill rehired her, but in one year she developed pneumonia twice more. “Antibiotics is about all I got,” she said. She would be bed ridden, get better, and return to the mill. “It kept getting worse and worse and worse.”

Sonny stood helpless, watching his mother’s story play out, again.

He asked her not to go in sick.

“She was working herself to death,” Sonny said.

Theresa knew. Like Sonny, she had seen this tragedy before in her own mother.

“Mama worked for sixteen years in the winding room of a mill, a mill with no kind of filters,” Theresa said. “The doctors kept asking, ‘How long has she smoked?’ But she didn’t smoke.”

On a Thursday morning in February 2001, Theresa woke coughing and fighting for air. “Do I need to take you to the doctor?” Sonny asked.

“No,” she said.

She had coughed through the morning before.

Later that morning, her daughter called. Theresa could not lift it, but knocked the phone off its hook. All her daughter heard was moaning. Theresa’s mother went to her door, knocked, and then started to beat it. She called Sonny at the mill and told him he needed to come home. They found her on the floor, barely breathing, burning with fever. They rushed her to the hospital, where doctors found her heart was racing and her potassium levels had dropped dangerously low. She was unconscious for two days.

Her doctor told her she almost quit breathing and that if her family hadn’t rushed her in when they did, she would be dead. “They ran all kinds of tests because they were afraid I had brain damage,” she said. “I went so long without oxygen.”

After going in the hospital in February 2001, “the lung doctor wouldn’t let me go back in the mill. [Mill managers] called me and said there wasn’t nothing they could give me. They said they were sorry. I killed myself for twenty-one years. I looked like a skeleton with skin over it.”

She has permanent damage in her lungs. To breathe, she uses a nebulizer four times a day and inhalers charged with medicine. “I still have bad days,” she said. “My lungs will never get any better. It limits the things you can do. You can’t run with your grandkids like you should. I used to mop the whole floor.”

She sings, still, but it is different now. In December of 2004, Theresa and her father sang at a small concert outside Jacksonville. . Her father is blind now, but still plays guitar, “can still whup the fire out of it,” she said. About fifty people gathered, eating hot dogs, chili, and hand-scooped ice cream. The Garmons sang their standard, the one the people always asked for.

If you hasten off to glory
Linger near the Eastern Gate
For I’m coming in the morning
So you’ll not have long to wait

The high notes died in her chest.

___

Sonny and a crew of overhaulers were working on a stalled machine in March, 2001, when they saw their boss moving toward them across the floor.

“He was running,” Sonny said.

“Well,” the boss said, “it’s true.”

It happened every day, these rumors.

It peeled the skin off a man.

Sonny just went back to work.

“Get out of here,” he said. “We’re trying to do our job.”

chapter two

floria’s dollar

She does not talk a lot. When she does, her stories are plain and small. Her story, for sixty years, was written in books that had no words, only numbers, of the miles of yarn she spun. It is rich people, usually, who live on in biographies, in the pages of the social register. Working people live on in ledgers. The idea that anyone would want to know about that, about such a life, puzzles her. “It was all there was,” said Floria Fortenberry. “I’d do it again, if it was all there was.”

Yet there is, deep in her past, a small legend, not from the mill, but the cotton itself. When she was in her thirties, standing at the start of an endless row of cotton, she told a boss man she could do a thing he said could not be done, and raced the hands of his watch for a single dollar bill.

Floria never called it a legend.

It was just something that happened one day, in the red dirt.

Like a lot of people here in the foothills, her life was bound to cotton from the start. She was born just before the Great Depression, as men in suits flung themselves from windows on Wall Street, and picked her first cotton before she could see over the stalks. “I was six, that first time,” she said. She was Floria Wright then, and picked beside her mother and father, Minnie and Jim, on their small farm.

She married Clayton Fortenberry on December 27, 1944, when she was seventeen, and they had three children. Clayton worked construction and factory jobs, and Floria worked in the mills in Blue Mountain and Jacksonville, to help out.

She did not pick cotton for a living then, in the 1960s. She did it to make a few extra dollars for school clothes or baby clothes or little luxuries. “I wanted my kids to go as nice as anybody,” she said. “Once, I made enough to cover a couch.”

The people who know her, members of her church, say she is a fine person who reads her Bible and lives it. She does not need a legend, even a small one, to mark her time on this earth, any more than she needs a big car, or a gaudy hat.

“We were tough, I guess,” is about the most she will say. Then, for just a second or two, a disease in her lungs—caused by asbestos—takes her breath away. People who know her say a bad cold can almost kill her.

“I am smothering, I believe,” she said. “Sometimes I need prayer.”

But she hates to complain.

“Just don’t put nothin’ in there,” she said, “that’ll make my children ashamed of me. We’ve come a long way since then.”

It happened in the middle 1960s, at the end of an era—an era not fading into antiquity so much as it was being gnawed away. The big, mechanical pickers, like giant, chewing pests, had arrived in the red-dirt fields of the foothills, tearing through the fields, leaving the cotton dirty and half picked, ripped into scrap. Pickers of flesh and blood, seasonal workers who picked to make a little extra cash, were obsolete. The future ran on diesel, and it didn’t even pick clean.

___

Floria was one of the best, the fastest. Her hands moved in a rhythm, one reaching for one open boll as the other, in a smooth mechanical motion, eased another boll into the sack. She could pick three hundred pounds in just one day in a time when some people were glad to pick one hundred, and her cotton was clean, without twigs and brittle leaf. When you sighted down a row she had picked it was green-black, empty, without a scrap of white.

Her mind, when she picked, was free of daydreams.

“I thought of the money,” she said.

She did not think about washing machines and new bedroom suites and kitchen tables. She thought about that little bit extra, a boy’s shirt, or boots, or a notebook. She liked to crochet when she was sitting down, because otherwise it was just wasted time, and as she picked she would calculate how much yarn she might buy, and what she might make with it.

“A dollar,” she said, “was a whole lot.”

She concentrated on stripping every stalk clean, on filling her sack the fullest in the least amount of steps—one boll, a million times.

“I thought about making all I could.”

But no matter how careful you were, it would always stick you. She would reach for a soft, white boll of cotton only to feel the bur, a needle-like sticker on the nut-like shell, lance her fingers or slip under the quick of her fingernails.

“They would break off under the skin,” she said.

You seldom quit long enough to dig them out. Some of the old women would carry a sewing needle stuck in their bonnets, or a big safety pin on the collar of their dresses, and at the noon break or at quttin’ time they would gently try to lift them out.

“It’d fester if you didn’t,” Floria said.

It could be burning hot in the afternoon, but picking time came as the summer was dying, and in the gloom of the early mornings a cold dew soaked the fields.

“You worked wet, up to your neck,” she said, “and cold.”

The dew made the bolls slick, and made her sure, deft fingers clumsy. “My hands would bleed,” she said.

The pickers gathered discarded guano sacks at the side of the field and piled and burned them. “It was the only way we could warm our hands,” she said.

Snakes, Copperheads and rattlers, hid in the stalks. The wasps and yellow jackets came out of holes in the red dirt, and the old women would daub a little wet snuff on the sting, to ease it. The cotton stank of poison. The mill workers could even smell it in the bales.

But sometimes the cotton was so tall it seemed as if she barely had to bend over to fill a sack, and she and her friends would find a watermelon vine, a gift, in the field, and they would break it open right there and eat it with their hands.

The farmers paid a sliding scale, from a handful of change in the worst of times—in the Depression, the people worked for what they could get—to two dollars for one hundred pounds in the 1950s and early 1960s. To ease the tug of the sack, some workers daydreamed about a better life, not some great wealth on earth but something finer, everlasting. Old women sang about it as they dragged their sacks across the clay.

I heard an old, old story
How the Savior came from Glory
How he gave his life on Calvary
To save a wretch like me

Flora did not sing as she worked, but she listened. The songs swirled around her and over her, with a sweetness that cut the dust and kept the devil of self-pity and laziness underground.

Oh victory in Jesus,
My Savior forever
He sought me, and bought me
With His redeeming Blood

Some people prayed as they picked. Beatrice McCurley, a big woman who would get so full of the spirit in church that she would shake the hair pins from her head, would straighten up in the rows and begin to speak to Jesus in the rising dust.

No one was quite sure what to do then, in the middle of a field, when a woman was getting right with God.

“She’d just break out praying, and we stopped and listened,” Floria said.

He loved me ‘ere I knew Him
All my love is due Him
And plunged me to victory
Beneath the cleansing flood

___

The big truck came to get them in early morning. At the field, they climbed out into a chill, moisture beading on the bolls. The air always smelled of snuff and Juicy Fruit and the lunches they carried to the field in brown-paper bags: fried bologna sandwiches with mustard, leftover biscuits filled with cold potatoes and fatback, peanut butter and saltine crackers. A few sipped cold coffee from glass jars and fed their babies from bottles full of diluted canned milk.

The old women picked in impractical dresses—they owned no pants, considering such dress un-Christian—and carried yesterday’s wounds on their shins, fine, razor-like slashes of the briars, now dried into thin, red lines. They wore bonnets and used wooden ice cream spoons to fill their lips with snuff before they slung on their sack. Old men rolled one last cigarette. They smoked it down to a nub, wet their thick fingers and pinched it out, leaving the shreds of paper and tobacco to blow through the field.

The younger women, like Floria, picked in pants and sneakers and wore long sleeves to keep stalks and burs from cutting them up. She always picked beside her friend and sister-in-law, Jewel, sometimes with their children. But on this day the children were in school, leaving Floria and Jewel unencumbered.

That day, the sun rose on a field owned by a farmer named Naugher, an honest, hard-working man who never acted as if he was better than them. He did not sit in the shade or the cab of his truck, figuring his profits. He picked in the cotton beside them. He paid two dollars for every one hundred pounds, the going rate, and some of them would work all day for that.

This field was different from others they picked. Its rows went on, it seemed, for miles. Naugher called the pickers around him to give them their sacks, and to make them a promise that, in all the years men and women had picked his field, he had never had to keep.

“I don’t expect y’all to finish a row and back,” Naugher told them. “But if y’all can finish one row out there and back, before quitting time, I’ll pay y’all a dollar extry.”

The pickers didn’t say a word. It was like being promised a slice of the moon if you could knock it down with a rock.

Then Floria, perhaps the most quiet among them, spoke up.

“I can do that,” she said.

She did not mean it to sound like bragging; it’s just that ideas are not real, maybe, until you hang them on the air.

She weighed one hundred pounds, more or less, and worked chest-high in even short cotton.

Naugher had seen big men fail, men who moved as if they had wheels under them, and picked as if they had three arms.

“No,” Naugher said to her, not mean, just matter of fact. “You can’t.”

He turned and walked away.

Jewel looked at her friend.

“Floria, we can’t…”

“Yes, we can,” Floria said.

They entered the field about six thirty, side by side.

Quitting time was when Naugher said it was.

They worked fast and steady. It did no good to rush faster than their hands could strip the bolls so their hands had to fly over the stalks to keep pace with their feet. They barely talked. They ate cornbread and buttermilk at dinner, the noon meal, stopping just a few minutes. By the afternoon, Jewel was already bone weary, trying to keep up. Sweat soaked them. Red dust and black specks of trash, from the stalks, slicked their faces.

If Floria was hurting, or exhausted, it was invisible to Jewel.

“I can’t do no more,” she said.

“Come on,” Floria said.

She dragged her friend along by force of will.

They made the turn in the early afternoon and headed back. By late afternoon, the cotton wagon still looked like a toy on the horizon.

The light was dimmer now.

“We…won’t…never…” Jewel said.

“Come on.”

The other pickers watched from behind them.

They did not cheer. This was work, and they did not cheer work.

Naugher watched, a puzzled look on his face.

Who would kill themselves, for one dollar?

“Slow down,” he yelled across the rows.

At about four-thirty, the two women staggered up to the cotton wagon.

Naugher did not say a word, just weighed them in.

“There was just this look on his face,” Jewel said, “like he still didn’t believe.”

The scale spun to the truth of it. The two women, together, had picked more than six hundred pounds of cotton—at two dollars per one hundred pounds, they made six dollars each, and a little change. They had picked more than three times their weight.

Floria had picked 329 pounds, “the most I ever picked.”

Naugher peeled two more dollars off his roll, and gave it to them.

He still did not say anything, at least not that anyone can recall.

But they did catch him smiling.

When they had all weighed in, the pickers climbed back on the big truck and rode it out of the field. When Floria got home there were clothes to wash and children to hush, and supper to fix. The dollar vanished, as all money does.

___

The machines took over the fields, steel arms spinning, threshing, their mechanical mouths sucking the cotton up in big gulps. The pick sacks rotted in the barns.

But the lives of the people of the foothills were still wrapped in cotton, in the mills of Jacksonville, Piedmont, Blue Mountain, Leesburg, other small towns and wide places in the road.

Not just anyone could do this work, and some people didn’t last a day. The machines snatched the hair from some peoples’ heads, ripped the clothes off bodies, and did worse—not every day, but enough to scare the timid people away.

Floria was not frightened by the machines. She worked steady, smart, and without accident. Her mind did not drift. It focused on the work. Disaster waited, for the dreamers.

The poet Ron Rash wrote of it:

Lost wages or lost fingers
The risk of reflection

“I saw a man get his fingers cut off,” she said. “I been tryin’ to think of his name. They picked ’em up, put ’em in a can.”

She ignored the heat. “It was hot, real hot,” she said of the mill, “but you can get used to anything.”