Weeds in Bloom

  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.

  Paper

  MILLS.

  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:

  PAPER MILL

  Winter wind sinks mercury

  To zero. But inside

  A paper mill, the temperature

  Can nearly roast your hide.

  Night-shift men on hungry

  Boilers fire steam. And when

  The viper hiss comes up, you believe

  You’ll never breathe again.

  Mill machines are starving. Mean

  Enough to take their toll

  Of men. And try to boil your heart—

  Before they cook your soul.

  Paper men. We wear our soaking

  Rags about the place.

  Old in body. Old in mind.

  And older in the face.
br />   Our hands are missing fingers and

  Our hands are missing thumbs.

  Some hands are just enough to hold

  The coffee. If it comes.

  We’re demon men. Our backs are soaked

  In work. We have no will,

  Only resignation that

  We can’t escape the mill.

  Paper mills are foul holes,

  The darkest of the caves.

  Machines are lashing masters and

  They truly beat their slaves.

  Watch! When winter morning steams

  The ground, and know full well …

  That Satan is our foreman

  In the paper mill of Hell.

  Dr. Granberry

  THE 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?”

  “Yes, sir, the whole bit. If it’s no good, you can blame your son, on account it was his idea I’m here, not mine.”

  “Why don’t you sit down?”

  “My knees hurt.”

  “Football?”

  I nodded.

  Dr. Cranberry made a sour face. “I don’t cotton to football. And I never much liked anyone who played it.” He smiled up at me like a pixie. “Until now. What else have you written?”

  “Poems. A few songs. Most of my regular stuff is about the outdoors because that’s all I know.”

  He grinned. “A professional usually writes about what he knows. Nothing else. So you’re off to a roaring good start.” He stood. “What courses are you into?”

  I told him, and again he frowned, yet his eyes narrowed as though in deep professorial cogitation. “Would you please do us a favor?” he asked.

  “Sure. Glad to, sir.”

  “There are tests I want you to take. An entire battery they give up in DeLand, at Stetson University. Do you have means of getting there? Any transportation?”

  With a grin, I hoisted my thumb. “I’ll hitch.”

  “No you won’t. I’ll carry you in my car. We’ll first arrange a time. These exams will tell me what I want to know about you. Not academic. More for mental agility and capacity. One can’t really study for them.”

  “Tough?”

  “Not for those with brains.” He cracked his cagey little birdlike smile. “I’d bet the farm on you.”

  After the tests at Stetson, I waited for weeks, didn’t hear a word, and presumed I’d flunked. But then I spotted Dr. Cranberry waving at me and hollering my name. Excited about something. Yanking me into his tiny paper-littered office, he could hardly speak.

  “Robert,” he said at last, “what I suspected is now proven. My boy, you’re a moth destined to be a butterfly.” He held up a manila folder. “I swiped your file from administration. Your schedule.” As if in some rapturous rage, he tore my records into pieces. “Goodbye to these mush courses. You’re going to take philosophy, psychology, science, logic, math, world history, languages … and every single literature and theater course available. Plus a ton of outside reading.” He paused for a breather. “Sit down!”

  I sat. My knees screamed.

  “Robert Newton Peck,” he said in a more contained tone, “tell me what you’ve done in your young life. Right now. But make it brief.”

  I told him: Farm work, helped Papa kill hogs. Then a machine gunner overseas. Came home to a sawmill, paper mill, freight gang, and lumber camp. Now a defensive middle guard. Unknown. An unheralded substitute.

  Tiny hands reached to cradle my ears and hold my head as though he feared to drop it. “Rob,” he said softly, “all your life, people made you into nothing except a beast of burden. They looked at your oxlike frame and thought ox. Well, they’re all mistaken. You’re no mule. From this point on, we’re going to employ your mind, big fellow, not just your muscles.”

  “Am I dreaming?”

  “No. This is your first icy plunge into reality. Give us four years, my boy, and you won’t believe how you’ve grown by graduation.” He squinted. “Must you wear all that black hair so long? I
f you plan to do much hitchhiking, you’ll frighten a motorist right off the road. You look like Geronimo.”

  For four bits, I bought myself a brush cut.

  A number of us had to quit football because of injury. For some reason, my weight dropped by over forty pounds. Coach warned me that if I didn’t finish the season, I wouldn’t be in the team photograph, or attend the banquet.

  I told him that I’d already heard them eat.

  Our college discontinued football. Too expensive. Between snake hunting (for profit) and the G.I. Bill, my tuition got paid. I didn’t ask the college for a dime. But four years later I wore neither cap nor gown because I had a chance to ride north, for free, a day before commencement. Dean Stone understood after I explained that no one in my family could afford to come and see me graduate.

  College senior, on a bench that Papa built.

  He mailed me my diploma in a tube. And it’s still inside, rolled up. I never had it framed for an ego wall. Because, for a number of years, I couldn’t even afford a wall.

  A year at Cornell Law School exhausted every penny of my G.I. Bill, so I escaped to New York City to become a songwriter. Or a comic. I had twenty-four songs published (none famous), plus a few radio jingles, and then stumbled into advertising in 1954.

  Except for corporate success, nothing much happened until 1973 and A Day No Pigs Would Die, my first novel. Eventually over sixty more, and I’m still writing.

  Returning to my alma mater to be honored, I was so pleased that a kind and dedicated Dr. Cranberry, who taught me how to write, was there. As he sat beaming in the front row, I couldn’t look at him for fear of tears. Needless to say, I mentioned his name, reminding the audience that I’d dedicated a book to him in gratitude. Also one to Dr. Wilbur Dorset. And to Miss Kelly.

  Afterward, Dr. Cranberry gave me a very special volume from his collection, The White Goat’s Kid, a short story of gritty determination that bore meaning to us both, and personally signed it:

  To my prize, my treasure,

  Robert Newton Peck.

  I’m so proud of him I cry.

  As I bear-hugged the frail little gentleman, we both did.