Weeds in Bloom (9 page)

There was a rumor that persisted about those
two. Seems that Buck and some other loggers were in town one evening to sign on with a new timber company to skid rough spruce down off the mountain to the pulp mill. All the men signed the work docket except for one. Buck didn’t know how to sign his name.

So he didn’t get hired.

That was the very night, so the story goes, he pounded on Miss Kelly’s door, apologized, then begged her to teach him how to use his left hand to write his name.

Maurice Dillard.

He’d balked at writing the Maurice part, so Miss Kelly told him that signing on as M. Dillard would do. And if this proved inadequate, she personally would speak to the company foreman on Buck’s behalf.

Buck, fortified by his newly acquired talent (plus a few swallows from a jug), signed the docket the very next morning when the crew was being assembled. With a bit less ease than he’d lifted the mule, using his good left hand, he picked up the pencil stub, wet the lead tip in his mouth, made a few warm-up circles to be fancy, and signed:

M. Dillard

It took him over a minute, but Buck completed
his scrawl, slapping the pencil down with triumphant finality.

The foreman, a stranger in these parts, eyed Buck’s messy signature and then promptly made a major mistake. “What’s the
M
stand for?” he asked.

“Mildred,” hooted a lumberjack, a fellow of wit and the brains of a Chiclet.

Several others laughed.

So, a fight broke out. Needless to say, Buck Dillard started it, finished it, and enjoyed every punch and kick from beginning to end. By the time the dust cleared, the docket of able-bodied workers got shortened by several names. To make matters worse, the company paymaster couldn’t hear (or think) too well, and Buck’s first paycheck was made out to Mildred Dillard.

All the paychecks were cut at the company headquarters. It was corporate policy to print in a first name as well as a last. As a result, there ensued a week-after-week brawl on paydays, with Buck playing a major role.

It took Miss Kelly to straighten it all out by writing an explanatory letter to the company. Future checks were issued to M. Buck Dillard.

Peace was restored. Buck promised Miss Kelly that he’d ease up on drinking and try water. Surprisingly, he did.

From then on, a cleaned-and-dressed capon
ready to stuff and roast got delivered personally to Miss Kelly every Christmas by a very beefy delivery boy. When she died, the same giant of a man carried her coffin in his arms, as easy as a child would tote a favorite rag doll inside a shoe box. I was there and saw it all.

The scar on his face was wet and shining, but inside Buck Dillard perhaps a deeper scar had healed.

M
ILLS
.

You name almost any kind of a mill and I can tell you, in detail, what working in such a place is like.

If you ever go touring in Vermont or the Adirondacks and arrive at a certain town where most of the menfolks (and even some of the women) are missing fingers, you can wager you’re in a paper mill town. Now I can’t say for sure that a paper mill is the worst place on earth to work, but it has just got to be rotten close. Especially if it’s some old relic of a man-killer that should have been torn to the ground half a century ago.

In a paper mill, there are massive machines, chemicals, steam, and the dispositions of some of the foremen, whose lives are every mite as miserable as those of us in the crews.

A paper mill is noise, wet, heat, danger.

Add to this the raw reality that there’s no chance to escape. For almost all of the men and women, it’s a way of life. And, to paraphrase the
Porgy and Bess
ballad, the living
ain’t
easy.

Let’s presume that you are intelligent and, if so, you have an inquiring mind. Then you are in for an industrial treat to visit a papermaking mill, take the guided tour that almost any congenial management will offer, and walk through the place. One end to the other.

Paper is basically two things. Wood and water.

I know the papermaking process because, as a lad, I cut my teeth on a Warren Winder. Personally, I have filled every job you can name in an old-fashioned paper mill, from woodhook to freight gang. I have unloaded soda ash in the chemical mill and helped to handle the raw clay. They gave us respirators to cover our noses and mouths, but they weren’t worth a hoot. We inhaled the white dust with every breath. Slow death. Coal miners die from black lung. Our lungs were dying white.

Ask any worker who’s survived a paper mill about lancing a digester in the chemical mill, the section of the mill that prepares raw wood pulp to become eventual paper. I worked digesters all summer one time. My work partner was a man whose
name was Gates. In his day he had been an excellent athlete.

In his day.

By the time he turned thirty, he appeared middle-aged. At forty, old.

Unloading soda ash or clay and stoking a digester (a cooker that reduces tiny pieces of wood to loose fibers) are not the worst mill jobs.

The worst is the chipper room.

Logs arrive, usually by railroad but often locally by truck, and are unloaded by woodhooks (a nickname for mill lumbermen) onto conveyor belts, and then into barkers. There are two kinds: a stream barker fires jets of water with incredible pressure to peel off the bark; a drum barker is a slowly rotating cylinder, ten or twelve feet in diameter, through which the loose logs are sent, pounded, and relieved of their hide.

From there to a chipper room.

One by one, the chipper-room operator must feed large logs (weighing sometimes hundreds of pounds) into the chipper blades, which are capable of reducing these spruce monsters into wood fragments the size of a poker chip.

In seconds.

The noise is intense.

There’s only one noise comparable, that of a severe Florida hurricane.

Chipper-room noise has a way of beating and pounding and hammering a man into submission, robbing him of awareness. Finally he tunes out, hearing only the chipper. In a few years he will hear nothing at all, not even the voices of his wife and his children.

Paper mills shut down only on Sunday. During the six-day week, they run all day and all night. On shifts. If your relief man doesn’t show up (a lot don’t), you are, by union rule, obligated to remain on the job for a second shift.

This is necessary. The mill has to run.

But after hours and hours of deafening chipper-room noise, during which you actually do become deaf in self-defense, the extra shift leaves you an unfeeling, uncaring, unhearing mute. After work, the chippers would sit outside on a bench, saying nothing. We were a row of warm corpses. Our children could have been slaughtered before our eyes and our reactions might have been nonexistent.

We were men turned wooden.

Like the chips.

Every working day, a paper mill runs twenty-four hours. Today that means three eight-hour shifts. But years ago it was only two. The day tour was eleven hours, and the night crew worked thirteen. There were no rest periods. The paper
machines that produced the finished product in huge rolls never stopped; we ate whenever we could grab a bite of a sandwich, on the job, in this mayhem of manufacturing, where only a demon without a soul could survive.

My co-workers were mostly decent guys.

Many of the foremen were good too. And the machine runners (senior types) were dedicated papermakers, honest professionals who would rip a swatch of paper off a roll, hold it up to a light box in the testing laboratory, and marvel that they’d produced one beautiful sheet of paper on equipment that deserved to be retired half a century ago.

When there, I got plenty of good advice from the old mill hands and woodhooks. “Now’s the time,” they said. “While you’re young, get out of here, boy. Scoot yourself away while you’re able and you still have ten fingers. Don’t spend no lifetime in a dang paper mill. It’ll own ya. It will eventual rob a soul.”

While dispensing such worthy guidance, the longtimers pointed at me with hands that were missing fingers. So few hands were complete.

Winter came. All during the winter months we worked inside, in temperatures above one hundred degrees. Way above.

Then, when the shift whistle blew (if your relief
man came), you escaped from the heat to walk home in sub-zero weather. It was enough to cause a man to cuss if his partner’s truck wouldn’t start. Get home, wash, eat, sleep, and then travel back to the paper mill for the next shift.

Somehow we did it.

No one had to inform us that we were
men
.

Sometimes at night when I was too tired to sleep, I’d lie awake, my mind composing poetry. Not fancy or fine. Yet I sort of wanted the world to know how it was, the way we lived, worked, wasted, and died.

I wrote me a poem:

T
HE TIMBER COMPANY THREW US A PICNIC
.

On a summer Sunday in 1949, beside a mountain lake, scores of us lumberjacks and woodhooks assembled to eat, get drunk, fall off a rolling log into icy water, cuss, fistfight, and throw axes at trees. Or at each other. Some would duel with chain saws.

Yet intellectually, a day that changed my life.

A stranger came.

Few knew or cared why this gentleman appeared. He was a football scout for small colleges, looking for linemen and recruiting mindless brutes. Naturally he spotted me, very young and weighing 230. My shoulder-length hair was blacker than a crow’s wing and held in place by a single lace of rawhide. After the stranger told me his name, we shook hands. No one else bothered to
greet him, but I was younger and more curious.

When he asked me if I ever considered going away to a college, I told him no. College was for the sons of wealthy men. My pa had butchered hogs.

Scholarship money, the stranger informed me, was scarce. But, as a war veteran, I might apply for funds under the G.I. Bill and be educated. Perhaps even graduate. Following that Sunday, I never saw or heard from him again. Before leaving the picnic, however, he gave me a document to be filled out, signed, notarized, and mailed. I asked what it was. Prior to answering, he glanced around at all of my brawling, swearing, puking companions.

“It’s your ticket out of the sewer.”

Weeks later, a thousand miles from home, wearing my new nineteen-dollar suit from the Wultex factory in Troy, New York, I had enrolled. The suit was the only one in my size. Wultex didn’t carry many suits in a 50 long.

You could call it my Going Away Suit because so many people looked at me, flinched, and said, “Go away.”

Nonetheless, I was a college student. But I enjoyed no social life. No dates, even though many of the coeds looked so pretty. So clean. Like new pennies. Sometimes, from behind the protection of all of my hair, I secretly stared at them. My suit amused
them even though I wore it every day. A black-and-white salt-and-pepper tweed with subtle red flecks. Stiffer than burlap.

Nobody else had a suit like it. At least not in Florida during a steaming September.

All I did was sleep, eat, go to football practice, and then limp home to a shower, supper, the library, and into bed at ten o’clock. Next to no one knew my name. Needless to add, I faithfully attended all of my classes, although the subjects assigned to us were so easy. New football boys took a lot of courses together.

They called us Baby Beef.

In town, I met a friendly guy whose name was Cranberry, a free spirit like me, and we started hunting for snakes together. It felt good to spend time with him; in a swamp, I didn’t wear my suit. Just old Army pants and combat boots. Bless him, he accepted me for what I was.

Late at night, whenever my aching body was so bruised that the pain prevented sleep, I
wrote
. Mostly about snakes, critters, the people back up north in Vermont, kin, folks I missed. Farm animals. A few favorite hymns. And the smells of Mama’s kitchen. Even spring manure that turned brown to green: one has to be farm-raised to appreciate the awakening fragrance of fertilizer.

When I read one of my pieces to Cranberry, the one about a yellow rat snake that he and I kept around for a pet, I received quite a shock.

“Let my father read it,” he told me.

“Who’s he? A snake charmer?”

“Oh, he’s sort of famous. He writes the
Buzz Sawyer
comic strip and teaches classes in creative writing at the college.”

“Here?”

“Yep. Go see Dr. Edwin Granberry. He’s a little ol’ bald-headed geezer, sort of looks like a buzzard, but plenty okay. You’ll like him. Everyone does.”

So, wearing a leather thong around my hair, my abrasive suit, my only necktie (also out of the Army), I rapped on Dr. Cranberry’s door in Orlando Hall. He smiled, said he’d heard about me from his son, and we shook hands. I stood and scratched my Wultex while he read what I’d written. Read it twice. Finally he peered at me over half-moon glasses and snorted a comment.

“
You
wrote this?”