Peace, p.27
Peace, page 27
“I don’t think there’s anything I could say that they wouldn’t like. Anyway, a person’s got a right of free speech, doesn’t she?”
“Not really—not if you mean the right to tell the truth, or what you think is the truth, or the right not to speak. Free speech means you can talk about the government as long as you’re not against it—don’t want to overthrow it. But what I want you to talk about is yourself. How long have you lived in Cassionsville?”
“About fifteen years. We came here from Hylesport when I was twelve.”
“When did you come to work here?”
“A year after I got out of high school.”
“And you’ve been here ever since?”
“Yes, I’ve been here ever since—I mean, I go home at night, and I go on vacation and things. You know what I mean.”
“Do you like it here?”
“I guess so. You get used to the people after a while—you know how it is. And everything. You wish something would happen and it doesn’t, but you know your way around. It’s home, in a way.”
“It’s dull?”
“Everything’s dull after a while.”
“Does the cold bother you?”
“Not very much. You get used to it. For us in the office it’s not like it is for the men who have to work in it all the time. In the winter we don’t dress much different from everybody else; in the summer I wear light clothes in, then change into these in the ladies’ locker room before I come in here. We had a woman here once that wore those gloves without fingers all the time, and that started bothering me after a while—seeing her type. But she left after two years.”
“What do you do here?”
“Type and file. Keep the records of the warehouse—you know, how many boxes in and what lot, how many out and what carrier took them.”
“How many cartons of juice would you say you’ve booked in and out since you’ve been here?”
“I haven’t any idea. A jillion, but I really haven’t any idea.”
“Can’t you make a guess?”
“I don’t know. I could try to figure it out, but it wouldn’t make any sense. Have you seen where they unload them off the conveyor? I go in there sometimes when there’s a message for one of the men—his wife’s sick or something. Or where they put them on the railroad cars or the trucks. There’s a hundred cans to a box, and so many boxes you can’t believe it, and it goes on like that all day long. I don’t know what they do with it, but people can’t be drinking it all—they just couldn’t be.”
“I’ve been to other factories,” the reporter said. “I know what you mean.”
“You think of a woman with a family—she goes to the supermarket, and how many does she buy? One or two cans, maybe five if everybody in the family drinks it for breakfast every day. That’s what I think. Then I stand by tl ? conveyor and watch them unload, and I try to think of all the families and there aren’t that many people in the world. Just while you stand there—you know, while you say which one’s John Boone and somebody says the man in the checkered shirt and you say Mr. Boone and he says just a minute and you say you’ve got to come to the office, they want you on the phone, it’s an emergency—just in that time they load enough for the whole city of Chicago.”
“Do you buy the juice yourself?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you?”
“I asked if you bought this kind of juice yourself—for your own family.”
“We use the dried.”
“Why is that?”
“You’re going to laugh at this....”
“Go ahead. Make me laugh.”
“It’s my hands. We feel—you know—we owe it to the company to use the product, but whenever I reach into the freezer at the store to pick some up, the cold makes my fingers hurt. So I get the dried, the powder.”
“Does your family like it?”
“There’s just my husband and me.”
“Does he like it?”
“He’s used to it. You know. I don’t think he thinks much about it. Juice, coffee, one egg, and toast. That’s his usual breakfast. He reads the paper while he eats, and I don’t think he thinks much about it.”
“Do you plan to have children?”
“That’s funny. I mean, excuse me for laughing, but it is funny. No—not this late. We wanted some at first but I don’t think we’ve talked about it for four or five years.”
“Suppose you had a child, a daughter. What would you want for her?”
“I don’t know. A real nice childhood.”
“After childhood.”
“Well, it wouldn’t make much difference, would it? What I wanted. I would want her to get married, and she probably would, and then it would be between her and her husband.”
“Would you want her to live here?”
“Yes, so I could see her; if she got pregnant or sick or something, I would come over with pies. When I used to think about having children, that was one thing I used to think of—when they were grown I could bring them something when they were sick, and maybe straighten up their houses.”
“Do you think this is a good place to bring up children?”
“Well, it’s not any worse than anywhere else. I mean, it’s not good, no.”
“Can you elaborate on that?”
“Well, when I used to think about children I used to remember how nice Hylesport was when I was little but that’s terrible now, since the refinery came in. My mother used to tell about growing up on a farm. They didn’t have much money, but they weren’t poor. Do you know what I mean?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“They didn’t have much money, but they didn’t need much —you could even pay the doctor in chickens then. They had land and plenty to eat, and they didn’t need fancy clothes. For Thanksgiving her father used to kill a deer. That was one of the things my mother always used to tell when she talked about the farm, her father shooting a deer for Thanksgiving. I put little paper turkeys on the table for Joe and I, and I get a turkey out of the freezer.”
“I see,” the reporter said. I noticed that he had stopped taking notes a long time before.
Dan said, “If you’re finished now, Fred, Mr. Weer and I will show you the canning operation, where all those cartons you saw in the freezer come from.”
We took him back into the coldhouse instead of going outside and entering Building B in the usual way, walking up the conveyor with him, stepping over the boxes as they came down. He said, “I’m surprised you made this high enough to stand up in. Wouldn’t it have been cheaper if you’d just made it as high as the boxes themselves?” I told him men had to be able to get into the conveyor housing to make repairs and clear jams. He said, “I feel like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn and die,” and then we were out, and into the noise and bright lights of the packing room.
“Those are the case packers,” Dan said. “You might be interested in the way they unfold the boxes, which we receive flat, put the flaps down, and glue them.“
“They make the cans line up like little soldiers, don’t they?”
“That’s right. At the same time they’re getting a box ready, they’re forming the cans into five layers, with each layer a four-by-five array of juice cans. If we follow the production lines on up, right up here, you can see the seamers. They put the lids on the filled cans, and we use the same type of seamer that they use for beer. Each of these machines will seam thirteen hundred cans a minute without spilling a drop. It’s hard to visualize, but if one drop were spilled from each can as it went through the seamer, you’d have enough juice to make a nice little creek running out of the machine.”
“I can’t hear you.”
Dan took him by the arm. “Here, step back from the machine. Is there anything else you’d like to see here particularly?”
“I’d like to interview one of the operators.”
I said, “I doubt that you can. Most of these women today are Latin Americans. They don’t speak much English.” As I spoke, they were watching me with dark Indian eyes, and I wondered if they could understand what I was saying.
“Puerto Ricans?”
“And Mexican-Americans. When I was younger, I used to design the filling machines, and I was in and out of here all the time; the girls were all English-speaking then—girls just out of school and young marrieds, mostly. Now you can’t get them to do this kind of work, so we recruit these people and bring them in. Most of them only stay a few months.”
“Why can’t you hire local people?”
Dan said, “Lazy. Just plain lazy. It’s too hard for them, sitting on a stool watching one of these machines.”
I said, “This is a pretty ordinary can-filling line, actually. You see the men down there unloading the empty cans and putting them on the conveyor. They go through an inverter and a blowout to make sure they don’t contain foreign objects, then under the filling machines where they’re squirted full of liquid juice. Over on the dry side, the same juice is run into spray towers. They work just like your lawn sprinkler at home, except that the spray falls a long way through a countercurrent warm-air stream that takes the water out. We store the powder in bins. In the peak season—that’s late summer and fall—the making and drying operations run three shifts, the packing rooms two. The rest of the year making and drying run two shifts and packing one.”
“Which kind of juice sells best? Dried or frozen?”
“Frozen has always been the leader, ever since it was introduced. Lately dried has been gaining on it, though. We used to be about 75 percent frozen and the rest dried, but now we’re 60-40. We’re planning now to introduce a new product—liquid juice—to take some of the pressure off the drying towers. It will be packed in plastic fruit, and treated with preservatives and gamma radiation to prevent fermentation. We’ll put faces on the fruit, and a child will be able to hold one right over his glass and give it a squeeze to get juice.”
“Sounds good.”
Dan said, “We have to go over to the next building to show you the making operation, but I’m afraid there’s not much there for you to see. Mostly stainless-steel pipe.”
When he had seen the reactors and pumps and heat exchangers in the Making Building, we took him to the back of the plant to show him the unloading operation, and the crushers. “Now I’ve seen the whole thing,” he said, watching the gray-brown tubers tumbling down the chute.
Dan told him, “That’s right. Most of these are from Maine, now. They plant quick-growing varieties and get their crop in very early—they have to. Here the harvesting season has just begun.”
Someone said, “Those are my potatoes,” and we all turned to look. He was an elderly man in a sweat-stained hat; he dragged his left leg as he climbed the steel ladder to stand on the platform beside us. “Those are my potatoes,” he said again. “Grew ’em not thirty miles from here. My farm.”
The reporter said, “You don’t work here, then.”
“Don’t work here. I guess you could say I work for them here—work as hard as anybody, and get my pay once a year. Can’t telephone and say you’re sick either, on a farm. Or retire with a pension. I’m seventy-one years old.”
“Have you been a farmer all your life?”
“Yes, sir. Born right there in the room I sleep in now, and helped my dad until he passed on. Raised my family on the farm and live there yet.”
“You’ve seen a lot of changes, then,” the reporter said.
“And been against every one of them—is that what you want to hear?”
“No, I was just thinking that this area must have been very different fifty or sixty years ago.”
“Some ways, yes. Some ways it’s more like it was then than it used to be.”
“That’s interesting. How is that?”
“Well, there wasn’t so many people then—that’s one thing. Now the town’s a whole lot bigger, but when once you get outside it, there’s a lot less. Farms are bigger, and there’s a sight of land in soil bank and so on that’s not used and no need to live there. Even so, I could show you a many a farm a man was proud to own thirty years past, not in the soil bank, where nobody’s living on the place now, and the meadows all growing up in trees. Naturally one reason is the streams don’t run like they used to. This place here—and the others like it up and down the whole valley—pump the water up out of the ground; you do that and the streams don’t run. Farther back south and east it’s mine tailings. Colors the water red and kills everything. My own farm—when I’m gone it’s gone. Had three boys and none of them want it.”
“Where is your farm?”
“Over towards Milton. When I was a boy, there wasn’t anything anybody could have that was better’n a farm, and we felt sorry for anybody didn’t have one. If a doctor or a banker could marry a widow that had a good one, they’d stop what they was doing and work it. I tell you I loved my dad, but when he died I had a hard time to cry, just thinking at the funeral that the farm’d be mine now. But the boys—don’t none of them want it. You know what did it? Those.”
“Potatoes?”
“This here plant opened up and the price went right through the top of the silo, so everybody growed them to sell here. Well, the first thing that did was to turn what had been a interesting business into one that wasn’t. And the second thing was that people didn’t have gardens anymore, or keep chickens, but just bought what they needed with potato money. Then they started to go down, as any fool could have told they would, but people wasn’t used to growing anything else, and wasn’t set up for it anymore, and was a little bit afraid they’d forgot how to do it, so they stuck with potatoes. Naturally when everybody grows the same thing, and on all their land, you have a lot of disease —but then that brings the price back up, and so they stick with it. I guess I haven’t explained myself, but it’s my observation that when a boy grows up watching all that, he don’t like what he sees.”
When the reporter had gone, I asked Dan to come up to my office for a drink. “Over the rocks,” he said, “and no water. It seemed like it went all right didn’t it? But you never know until you see the story in print. This is good Scotch.”
“I’ve been thinking,” I said, “that I ought to be drinking schnapps, or something of that kind. The Weers were a Dutch family. With your name you should drink brandy, I suppose.”
“Or Irish whiskey. I’m Irish on my mother’s side.”
“I should have guessed it. You’re a good talker.”
“She was a Doherty, so I’m entitled to carry on about the ould sod.”
“Tell me an Irish story.”
“You mean a joke—”
“No, a story. The kind one Irishman tells another, or a woman tells her child. Not something someone wrote in New York for television.”
“Are you serious?”
“Certainly I’m serious. I have twenty minutes before I have to leave to see my doctor, and for the first time in quite a while I know what I want to do with twenty minutes. I want to hear an Irish tale.”
“I only know one. Do you know of the Firbolgs? They were the most ancient people that ever were in Ireland. Before they came, there was no one there but the wolf, the red deer, the birds, and the sidhe. You may think you know what the sidhe were, but you do not, for there is no word for them in any tongue today.”
Miss Hadow came in and asked if I wanted to contribute to the flower fund for Miss Birkhead. I told her not to interrupt me like that in the future.
She said “I’m sorry, Mr. Weer—in Mr. Scudder’s office I just come in and go out whenever I please.”
“What hospital is she in?”
“She’s dead, Mr. Weer. Didn’t you see it? It was on the board when you came back: ‘Employees will be saddened to learn of the death of Helen Birkhead Tyler, long-time secretary to A. D. Weer. She is survived by her husband, Ben, and two children.’ I wrote it myself.”
“Order a bouquet in the company’s name. Anything up to a hundred dollars. And on the card—I mean the notice on the bulletin board, not the one you send with the flowers—you might add that she was the secretary, at one time, of J. T. Smart, the founder. She was proud of that.”
“She was proud of being your secretary, too, Mr. Weer. Anyone would be.”
“That’s enough of that. Order the bouquet, and shut the door.”
“For they were not men and women, as some say, nor gods, nor fairies—there is no other name for what they were. They were not the leprechauns, no more than a man is a plow, for the leprechauns they brought into being to work for them. They were not fairies, no more than a woman is a rag doll; the fairies were the toys of their children, and that is why the few of them that are not broken yet are so sad—the children of the sidhe are no more. They could not die save of time: no spear could kill them.
“Now, it so happened that one of the sidhe—his name was already forgotten when Ireland was joined to Britain, and Britain to France, but he was very powerful—had children three, two sons, and a daughter, who was the eldest. And he loved them with all his heart, so that it saddened him to think that someday they must die, for he knew that the sidhe would pass from Ireland, and from the world, and should his children not pass with them? He thought upon this, and in time the thought came to him that it would be well if those children were to be alive forever, and free and beautiful, as they were then. And so he thought upon it, what thing there was in the world that lived forever, and was beautiful, and free. Now, his house was by Lough Conn—that is a lake that is in Ireland. And at last it came to him that each year the wild geese came to Lough Conn, and to the other lakes that were about; and that though as it might be this goose died, or that, the flock never died, but was beautiful and wild and free, and returned to Lough Conn each year. When he thought that, he knew it was time to act, and he called his children to him and said, ‘It is for the love of you that I give you up. Deirdre, when you are all as one, do you watch over your brothers.’ Then at once there were no longer any children there, but geese too many to count, and these at once flew away. But every summer they returned to Lough Conn, even after their father died.”
