The Most They Ever Had Read Free Page A

been layoffs, slow-downs and short-time, and even a closure or two, but it always reopened, always re-hired.
    It held to people, even in death.
    Iladean Deason Ford, who is well past seventy now, was six years old when she roamed the mill village, eating supper at a different house every night, whether she was invited or not. They lived at 7 A Street when her father began to show the early signs of brown lung. “I don’t go down through there,” she said, “I don’t see my Daddy walking across the street.”
    The modern-day workers can tell you the year, month, and day they got on, the information stored away with birthdays and anniversaries and their babies’ first words, but, somehow, more important. That is what they say, “got on,” not hired, as if this were the last rung on a ladder, a high branch in a tree. It means they got someplace important, almost someplace safe.
    “I got on September 20, 1974,” said Smiley Sams. “I quit school when I was sixteen, and Momma said I could either go back to school or I could go to work. Momma worked here. I got nine brothers and sisters, and all but one worked here. I’ve never even filled out an application. This is all I’ve ever done.”
    He took his place on a line of machines that had spun enough yarn to tie the moon and earth together with one long, uninterrupted cotton string, on a floor worn smooth by people named Hop, Bunk, Chee, Slate Rock, Squirrely, Dago, Jutt, Hook, Kitty, Boss, Elk, Lefty, Possum, Sam Hill, Pot Likker, the Sandwich Thief, and the Clinker Man.
    But by the year 2001, it was the future they talked about, an uncertain nothingness every bit as grim to them as the mill’s darkest past.
    ___
    They could have just left, all two hundred of them. The mill’s last generation could have loaded everything they owned on a pickup and a flat-bed trailer, and said goodbye. They could have stopped at the mill office for one last paycheck, what they call “picking up their time.” The Okies, when the winds blew the dust from beneath their feet, left their struggle behind. There is no shame in it. Sometimes, the road is all there is.
    Two things held them here.
    One, they did not know if another secure place was for their kind. It was as if once they picked up their time, their time would be over.
    Two, they were bound, many of them, to these mountains with something longer and harder than nails or even chains. Few of them owned more than a few acres of the land they loved, and some of them, as their ancestors had, still went to sleep in rented houses. But the highway led no place they wanted to go.
    Their ancestors had watered these trees with sweat, bile, and blood, not in some silly, philosophical way, but drop by drop. These dense canopies of oaks and pines had, for almost two hundred years, hidden hunger, hardship, violence, massacre, and murder—their story. But, as the old men like to say, they were rar’ purty trees .
    The mill paid the light bill, grocery bill, and the Christmas bill in a land where big buck deer leap across the blacktop, where canned peaches, apple butter, and crabapple jelly shine yellow-gold in the sunlight through the kitchen window, and nothing—not two cars parked side by side at a motel, not even their blood pressure —is a secret.
    “You could get a job here if you wanted it,” said Debbie Glenn, whose father farmed cotton in Calhoun County. She went to work in the Jacksonville mill as a young woman, and stayed. She considered it a blessing to wake up in this land. “I got to stay at home. The people I worked with became closer to me than my own family.”
    They considered themselves kin. The Reverend James Martin was born at 127 D Street and married a girl from 43 B Street, Sara Ford. They remember a village where people would give a fistfull of flour to co-workers, even if their fingernails scraped the bottom of their own sack. It was called a “grocery shower,” the Reverend Martin said.
    “If you got in