Men in the Making Read Free Page A

every second what the motors and blades are capable of. You don't wear loose-fitting clothes and you don't take a drink at lunch. You don't work at a station before you've been trained and certified. When you're on the line, you don't think about your wife's nice plump ass and you don't worry about little Johnny's grades. You concentrate. I did it for ten years before I made plant manager, still do it when I'm out in the yard. There's rules and, as they say, you follow them so you can clock out and make your way home to play "This Little Piggy" with your babies without coming up short any piggies.
    Something else you don't do—you don't clear sap build-up from between a pulley and belt when the conveyor is running. I've seen it tried and there's only one possible outcome: the belt doesn't slip and the pulley won't stop and the pillowblock bearings won't let loose of the shaft. It's one shoulder socket versus a forty-horse motor and the arm is coming off. Period. Every time. No question and no excuse.
    I didn't know this Lonnie Neiman well, but I know what he didn't know. There's only one way to clean the debarker. That thing's a bad SOB, a real widowmaker, and you've got to respect it. You disconnect the power line. You call the electrician and have him cut the juice completely. It's something you'd expect everyone would know, but you've got to watch the new guys. They'll sweat their rears off, they'll
yessir
and
nosir
you to death, but when it comes down to it, they're just too damn eager, too revved up to slow down and think. The boys say Lonnie was like that, a whole mound of red ants in his pants. It's hard to believe, such a lack of common sense, such outright stupidity, but you can't tell his mother that. You can't say,
I'm sorry something awful, ma'am, but the boy was just too dumb to stay alive.
You can't even say for certain what the hell he was doing in there, except you have to figure that, with a kid like Lonnie, less than a year out of Blue Mountain High and just three weeks on the job, he was probably trying to go the proverbial extra mile, trying to make an impression. Well, if you ask my line foreman, Big Red, the kid did just that.
    So did the debarker.
    Imagine a porcupine turned inside out, a big mother with three-foot-long steel quills. That's what a debarking drum is like. An enormous pipe, fifteen feet in diameter and lined inside with hundreds of these quills. Load it with a dozen or so twenty-foot-tall, forty-year-old Arkansas pine trunks, turn that sucker on, get it rolling good, and thirty seconds later you've got naked trees, fresh and clean as an Eden stream. Step back, blow the bark and sap out the discharge vents, smell that rich, sappy-sweet smell, and keep on keepin' on. Now, load that killer with one six-foot-tall eighteen-year-old kid. Let's say he's a real green-ass, maybe he's trying to suck up to the foreman, do some extra housekeeping before the shift ends—who knows? All the same, he's in there when Big Red throws the switch to cycle the motor.
    Red's been a crew chief for seven years, and if Red says there wasn't any screaming I've got to believe him. Just a bump, he said, a liquid whistling sound. Something that didn't ring right in his ears—that debarker is Red's baby and he would know. Then he opens the discharge vents and a few minutes later the boys find him puking his guts up in the washroom.
    That was three days ago. Tonight it's history, the sign by the highway just doesn't tell the story yet. 329 DAYS, it reads, WITHOUT AN LTA, like maybe Rita in the front office couldn't stand to pull the numbers off the board and hang a zero in their place.
    Â 
    Usually, when I leave the sawmill for the night, I roll the truck windows down and breathe in deep through my nose. I take some of it home that way, some of the smell, some of the life that even a felled tree keeps holed up inside. It means something to me, makes clear the persistence, or maybe resistance, of the