Rudolph trollied the gantry crane from the die car to his work bench, stopping near the huge spotting press to let Charlie, his work partner, move out of the way. “The chains are manmade,” he always said of the crane safety rule about carrying a load over anyone. Weak link, weak chain…if only the affairs of men could be so easily understood. The spotting press bottomed out, an apprentice making one of thousands of hits necessary to spot a die to its finish, hit after hit, grind after grind, shift after shift, day after day, month after month, like the lives of men, every little episode adding up to a lifetime.
As he stood waiting, Rudolph harrumphed to himself over the inferior tool room here at GM. Back home before the war, ninety per cent of these die makers would have been fired for their slowness or incompetence. But, ha, he laughed to himself then: this big, slow meandering industrial machine of America had been good enough to defeat Germany.
Rudolph was talking to himself again. He didn’t like doing that, but more and more there were discussions occurring in his mind. He had hashed most things out again and again, always coming up with the same conclusions: that he was becoming an old man, that his children and grandchildren and soon to be great grandchildren were doing well, and that he was a very rich man with the machine shop that he ran in Cranston and the seven-day-a-week job here at the stamping plant. He could retire, but there was something inside him that would not let him walk away from such easy money as the factory provided. He had known hunger. His family had been hungry after the war and during the transition to the new world, first to Canada and then to Ohio, USA. In every instance it was his status as a tool and die maker that had allowed him to provide both for his family here and his relatives left behind.
And now, after all the tragedies that war had visited upon the Motherland and the world, time after time, age after age, as if to prove the stupidity of man, this new war, this Vietnam, was happening. And it was making him a wealthy man beyond belief, this war in Vietnam. And wasn’t that what wars were about? Money? He felt the one ounce gold coin in his pocket, his “just in case” coin that he had carried for twenty years, just in case a calamity should occur and separate him from home and family one more time before death. His wife and children and grandchildren also all carried a one ounce gold coin at all times, at least they said they did, but he knew they sometimes found his gold coin plan amusing and left the gold at home. Let them think what they like—the day, God forbid, might come when an ounce of gold bought a tank of gas to flee to safety, or bread to stave off starvation. He had seen it and lived it. In the safety deposit box, along with lots of cash, were two hundred ounces of gold.
He would be ready if and when this land of plenty was plunged into the darkness of war or famine. And wasn’t that his role as patriarch now that he had seen the greed and evil of men destroy civilizations, countries, and the lives of man? To be ready in case of darkness of war so that his offspring could survive? What he knew about the pitiful and precarious state of mankind was simple—given the right conditions, lack of food, clothing and shelter—men became animals, and their savagery was unequaled in the animal kingdom.
His daughter had been on the outskirts of Dresden after the firebombing. The little girls and all the young women had been hidden away as well as possible from the Russians, while the older and wiser females fared as well as possible through the rampant and brutal rapes. She had never talked about it, but he knew. Just as his time at the camps was something his own mind kept hidden from him, his daughter’s mind must also have hidden the horrors from her and her generation. Indeed, to go on after a war, one must attempt to put those things of the war behind and bury them forever.
He had watched the beginning of the war in Vietnam, studied its tactics and needs, and taken the gamble and invested in the huge automatic lathes and boring machines, turning out shell casings twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to be used to kill the enemy in Vietnam. The government contracts were lucrative and profitable beyond belief. His shop had gone from thirty employees to over three hundred since 1964. In the last few years he had managed to save, after taxes, several million dollars.
Finally his way was clear, and Rudolph trollied the crane to his work bench. He set the 20,000-pound die shoe on the steel horses, walked to the bench, and poured himself a cup of coffee from his thermos. Then, sitting on his metal stool along the wall, under the huge set of blueprints for his job, he closed his eyes. The wars were never far from his mind, even after all these years. He had been only a boy for the first one, seventeen years old, and ready to die like a man, but he knew, all through the year he spent in the trenches and fields of war, trembling and cold at night, fearing death, that he was no different from boys of all nations sent to fight and defend their countries in the name of God and patriotism, when in fact, the reasons they were fighting were usually money, pride, narrow self-interest.
Rudolph sipped his coffee and remembered his childhood friend Wilhelm whom he had held dying in his arms shortly before the end of the first war. Why was his mind forcing him to see these long-forgotten pictures of cruelty and pain, he asked himself, starting yet another conversation within. Had he not put to rest the hunger and violence and the mindlessness of war many years before? Had he not suffered enough of war than to sit and think about it? Thankfully, his mind generally shied away from memories about the second war, a war in which his wife and one of his sons had died. His time at the ovens was something that he was able to mentally retreat from immediately, what he had done too ghastly for even the mind of a killer such as himself to ponder. His family did not know what he had done during the war. And even now, here in America, he knew that if his presence could ever be connected to the camp, he would be tried for war crimes.
He stood up to pull himself away from these thoughts and began unhooking the chain from the die shoe on the horses. His partner Charlie had gone to wash up for lunch, and he sat back down, suddenly tired. His American wife had been after him to retire, and he had begun thinking a little about it. If the company knew how old he really was he would have to retire anyways. But he couldn’t stand to be around his bumbling fool of a son-in-law, who ran the plant for him. He really could not hurt something as profitable as the business, but Rudolph hated to watch inefficiency and stupidity at work, and could never keep his mouth shut. Better that he stay here at the fender factory to pass his days.
He thought of his grandson William, probably the best hope to carry on the business. The boy was a good mechanic and studying mechanical engineering at university. Rudolph remembered with amusement that when the boy was home from college last summer, he and some friends had organized a march against the war in Vietnam. They marched in the Fourth of July parade, bravely carrying their homemade signs. Rudolph could have been proud of him were it not for the absurdity of what the boy was doing—protesting the war that was paying for his college and all the nice things he took for granted, protesting against the spoils of war, the shell casings made in the machine shop of his grandfather.
Rudolph leaned back against the prints, twenty sheets of them making a cushion for his head, and dozed off.
Chapter 5.5
A Dead Son