The Amulet

by Michael McDowell

  The white men in the town work the heavy machinery, and are trained in a specific skill that is sufficient to earn them their weekly check and to keep them busy for forty hours a week, but does not have much meaning or applica­tion outside the factory. But it is the women of Pine Cone—at least the white women—who keep the place going, for they are put to work on the assembly line, setting in screws and adjusting the sights and locking in the barrel of every rifle that lurches past the conveyer belt. The man­agement of the factory has found that it is best to have women in these boring jobs, because they are more pa­tient than their husbands and brothers, less likely to com­plain of low wages, and they do not scurry about for promotions. Without these wives, and daughters, and sis­ters of Pine Cone, the family of the Alabama congres­sional representative (he has never been defeated for reelection) would have a great deal less money than it does possess at this time.

  The black men are put to work on maintenance crews about the factory, and it is their responsibility to see that the buildings are kept in repair, that no damage comes to the machinery through grime or sabotage, and that the parking lot is kept free of liquor bottles. Black women are put to work after hours in the buildings, sweeping the place clean every night of candy wrappers, spent shells, and iron filings that are spewed out of the die presses.

  The management of the plant even contrives in sum­mer to find menial positions for the sullen teenagers of Pine Cone; having them endlessly restack empty crates, or spray letters and complicated directions onto the sides of boxes that are to be burned, or destroy the raccoons and skunks that make their homes, in great numbers, be­neath the buildings. In addition to these, several high school senior boys are employed year-round for a few hours each day after school. Their job is to test the rifles. They stand out in a clearing a few hundred yards from the factory buildings and fire again and again at targets several dozen yards away or sometimes, for variety, at birds that fly overhead. The rifles are loaded for them by two senior boys from the county high school for blacks, for the management is nervous seeing young black men holding rifles. The white boys become quite proficient in the course of the year, and when they subsequently enter the army, by choice or by ill fortune, it is not infrequently that they are awarded medals and commendations for sharpshooting. Dean Howell had been one of these. He had been very familiar with the kind of rifle that destroyed his face and a large part of his brain.

  The Pine Cone Munitions Factory was like the town of Pine Cone itself, insofar as both were small and mean. The owners of the plant made a good deal of money off the place, and it caused them not a whit of trouble. The plant made one kind of rifle, that is, it assembled one kind of rifle: the parts were manufactured in other places—in Detroit, and in Des Moines—then shipped to Alabama. A few special pieces that could not be obtained elsewhere were stamped out in Pine Cone, but the metal plates were forged in Pennsylvania, and brought in once a month on the L&N spur. A more aggressive owner would have ex­panded the capacity of the plant, diversified the manu­facture, upgraded and streamlined the facilities, but really, what need was there? The family members of the congressman were lazier than they were greedy, and they liked to spend all their time in their houses on the Florida Gulf coast. They got checks every month, which were very handsome, and once a year they threw away the annual report without even looking at it. Once in a while they worried vaguely about a union coming in and making trouble, or fretted that the minimum wage was going to be raised again, or they dreaded being sued for negligence in the event of an industrial accident; but they didn’t con­cern themselves so much that their tans faded, and they invariably decided against reinvesting profits to increase the safety precautions in the plant buildings.

  The Alabama congressional representative had a grand-nephew who went to business school somewhere in the North, and came to his great-uncle with all sorts of ideas on how to “maximize long-term profit” for the Pine Cone Munitions Factory, which he had never laid eyes on. The Alabama congressional representative explained carefully to the young man, that until he got rid of such ideas entirely, he was not to go near the place. “It made money for your mama, and your grandmama. It made money for me, and it sent you through eight years of school in the goddamn North. You don’t touch it, and maybe it’ll get you through the rest of your life, so that you can afford to have all the crazy ideas that you want.” The Alabama congressional representative was a savvy man, though you wouldn’t have known it to hear what the grand-nephew had to say about him after this interview.

  Chapter 3

  Dean Howell’s young wife Sarah sat at the assembly line from eight to twelve in the morning, and then again from one to five in the afternoon, five days a week. She set three screws into the butt of the Pine Cone rifle. The woman next to her—her best friend and next-door neigh­bor—flipped the rifle over, and set in another three screws. Becca Blair thought that she had the more inter­esting task, because on her side was the embossed pine-cone that was the emblem of the company, while Sarah Howell’s side was smooth and unadorned.

  Becca explained, “The reason you got this job at all is because Marie Larkin died—she had a brain tumor, and I suffered with her through ever’ damn day of it—and she had this place on the line, where I am right now. I had your place, then they brought you in, but they moved me up to Marie’s place, because I had the seniority. I had been here for eight years, so they handed me the side with the pinecone on it. It wouldn’t have been fair to give it to you, coming in fresh like you did, you know . . . you prob­ably wouldn’t have appreciated it the way I do . . . it would have caused unrest . . .”

  Sarah said she understood and that it was only fair that Becca should get to look at the pinecone all day.

  Everything in the factory was new to Sarah, and strangest of all was the very notion of work, for she had never before been able to find employment in the de­pressed economy of Pine Cone. She was sure that the factory was going to ruin what good looks she had left af­ter three months of living with her mother-in-law. The girl was slender, above average height, with thick dark hair that she had always arranged as simply as possible. Her smile was arch, and many people objected that it was mocking, but this was not so. Sarah’s eyes were black, moved about ceaselessly, and seemed altogether too intel­ligent to be wasted in Pine Cone; but wasted they were, and there were times that Sarah thought she had rather have them put out entirely rather than to have them star­ing—for forty hours a week—at three little screws being worked into the butt of a military rifle.

  But Sarah Howell was not responsible only for herself; she had two other people to think of now. She had just turned twenty, but girls in Alabama—those without money, whose parents work in shops or are farmers—grow up quickly. She had been married to Dean Howell almost a year before he went off into the army. They had known one another in high school, though Dean was a couple of years older, had dated once or twice, and then, for no very good reason, had decided to get married as soon as Sarah had graduated. Perhaps it was that Sarah’s parents had both died, of different kinds of cancer, within six months of one another and Dean felt sorry for the girl, thus left all alone; perhaps it was just that Dean wanted to spite his mother.

  Sarah and Dean had lived for a while in a trailer camp just outside the city limits of Pine Cone, but Dean lost his job at the Piggly Wiggly supermarket because of a fight he had with one of the stock boys. Dean broke the boy’s arm, and the boy was the son of the manager’s first cousin. During the depressing season of his employment, Dean fell behind in the payments on the trailer, and it was repossessed; he and Sarah were forced to move into town, and share the house inhabited by Dean’s widowed mother. Sarah was displeased with this setup, because Josephine Howell had never liked her daughter-in-law, and had tried to persuade her son not to marry at all. Now the woman maintained only that her son had made the wrong choice. She would be completely happy now, she claimed, if Dean had only married Jackie Madden, when she was still avail
­able, because she had a sweet temper, could cook, and would stand to come into money when her grandmother died.

  Dean was not successful in obtaining work, because his temper was known, and there were few jobs anyway; but when a place opened up on the assembly line at the plant, Dean’s old hunting buddy, who was in charge of hiring at the plant, gave Sarah the job, and this eased their financial condition somewhat.

  Before he was able to find himself work, however, Dean was drafted into the army. He was sent to train at Fort Rucca. Because he had shown considerable me­chanical aptitude on the intelligence tests that the army routinely administered, he was being trained in heli­copter maintenance. It was virtually certain that he would be sent to Vietnam, for this was 1965, during the first great buildup of American forces in that part of Asia.

  Sarah lived alone with her mother-in-law now, and every day she thanked her stars that so good and kind a woman as Becca Blair lived next door, so close that they could wave to one another out their kitchen windows while they were washing dishes.

  It was not a happy life that Sarah Howell led, but she had resigned herself to it as being no worse than she had ever imagined life would be, though certainly it was no better.

  Becca Blair was about forty, with harsh good looks. Her husband had run away more than ten years before, and since that time Becca had lived alone, finishing off the payments on their house, and raising their daughter. Mar­garet Blair was now sixteen, and in her junior year of high school. But in this time of her grass widowhood, for she had legally divorced her husband, Becca had not lacked for male companionship. Jo Howell despised her next-door neighbor and said at least twice a week, that “Becca Blair is no better than she has to be, and sometimes she’s not even as good as that!” But Becca Blair was a good friend to Sarah Howell, and with her good humor and unfailing spirit, had pretty much talked Sarah out of her depression about being left alone with Dean’s mother. Becca said all the things about Jo Howell that Sarah thought but did not dare say herself. “That old woman,” Becca Blair would exclaim to Sarah on their way to work every morning, “mean as the hell that’s prepared for her, with a rear end like the side of a Mack diesel, making you wait on her. Sarah, I don’t see how you put up with it, making you wait on her like you was paid forty dollars a week to do it, and she don’t do a thing all day long while you and me are twisting our fingers off at the plant. I see you at night, and I know you do the laundry, I see you hanging out your sheets by the light of the moon, and I tell you, I don’t see why you put up with it! She’s not your mama, she’s Dean’s mama, and that’s not the same thing at all.”

  “Well,” said Sarah, “she does let me live there rent free.”

  “Honey,” replied Becca, “besides the fact that you buy all the food, she’d have to pay me to live in that house with her. Don’t seem like I have ever seen her standing on them two fat ankles of hers.”

  Sarah laughed and felt better about her lot.

  Becca Blair was religious, but hers was a strange reli­gion of fear and superstition; she wore charms about her neck, and was afraid to step out of the house on certain days, and lay shivering in bed at night with the fear of evil spirits in the pantry. There were partitions, about shoulder high, that separated the women on the assembly line. This was to keep them from talking to one another, supposedly; though sustained conversation was impossible anyway, because of the noise of the machinery and the conveyer belt. But on these partitions Becca had placed, with pins and thumbtacks and nails, numerous Catholic artifacts: lithographed cards, a couple of rosaries, and even a tiny vitrine with a figure of the Pietà surmounting a crude copy of Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” “I tell you, Sarah, I tell you something,” Becca would sometimes whisper to her friend, “I’m scared as hell of going to hell.” But she was never strong enough to give up her men or her weekend six-pack of beer for that fear, and she lis­tened gratefully when Sarah would try to convince her that there were worse things than men and beer: “Like being mean, like being mean at the heart, like Jo Howell.”

  Chapter 4

  Sarah Howell had no car, which is a considerable hard­ship in a place like Alabama, which sets great store by automobiles, and where the possession of one is not deemed a luxury, but an absolute necessity. The super­market does not make deliveries in Pine Cone, there is no public transit system, and no taxi service since 1937 (and it had been a failure and a joke even then). In the newer parts of town, the municipal government had not even bothered to put in sidewalks, for who walked? Schoolchil­dren, perhaps, when they lived not more than a block or so from the school, and even then only in the finest weather.

  Dean and Sarah had had a car when they married, of course, and they had ridden in it down to Panama City, Florida, for their honeymoon. They stayed in a miserable little cottage in a complex of many such small run-down buildings collectively called the Bide-A-Wee Inn. The Bide-A-Wee was not very expensive, and it was just across the highway from the Gulf of Mexico and Dean and Sarah had enjoyed themselves very much, walking up and down the beach and fishing off the great pier. At night, they played carpet golf or lost themselves in an arcade that boasted over a hundred and fifty pinball ma­chines. A mechanized gypsy in a glass case had pointed to the jack of clubs with a broken finger and then promised Sarah a long life, ample fortune, and many friends.

  The 1959 Ford Country Squire station wagon got them to Florida and it got them back to Pine Cone; it lasted through the first ten months of their marriage and would probably have seen Sarah through the three years that Dean was scheduled to be away from her had he not smashed it to junk the night before he was to leave for Fort Rucca. He was drunk, in the company of two young men who were not going into the army, and, driving without headlights, had plowed into a fence post about eight miles outside of town, on property belonging to Jack Weaver, a not-very-prosperous pig farmer. Mr. Weaver was understanding when he learned that Dean was to go into the army the next morning, and his wife Merle bound up the foreheads of Dean’s two companions with much sympathy. Then all three men rode back into Pine Cone in the back of Mr. Weaver’s pickup truck, but the Coun­try Squire was left in a drainage ditch, until it was taken away about two months later by someone who wanted the parts.

  Dean left for Fort Rucca, before dawn, without telling Sarah about the accident. She was very surprised not to see the car in front of the house the next morning when she needed to get to work, but supposed that one of Dean’s companions had had to drive her husband home the night before, and had kept the automobile overnight. She learned the truth when she talked to the wife of one of these men at the plant on morning coffee-break. If there had been any way of getting in touch with Dean right then, Sarah thought she would have yelled at him for not having told her. An accident was an accident, it was even excusable that he had been drunk, but there was no justification for his cowardice in keeping the news from her. But when she wrote to him that night she could only think how depressed Dean had been about going off to Fort Rucca, and of course there was the possibility that he might not come home alive from Vietnam. Sarah had not had the heart to bring the car up to him, except in passing, asking what she should do about the insurance.

  No insurance money was forthcoming, for Dean had not carried collision coverage. All of Sarah’s money went into the household expenses, and she had none to spare, especially not the kind of money that is needed for car payments. Dean’s checks from the army were meager; he kept half for his incidental expenses, and the other half went directly to his mother. Sarah saw not a penny of these funds, and Jo explained to her daughter-in-law, “I told Dean you didn’t need the money, and you don’t. You make lot more than him. You got your mama and daddy’s insurance money laid up somewhere, and if you really wanted a Cadillac Eldorado, I know you could take the bus down to Mobile, and walk right into the Cadillac showroom, and drive that thing right off the floor. There is not a reason in this world for Dean to send you money when you don’t need it, and I can’t work an
d I’m not going to be getting Social Security for another eight years and four months, unless I go blind first, and then I’ll get it sooner . . .”

  Sarah had explained to her mother-in-law many times that her parents had left only enough money to pay for their funerals, and to discharge their debts. There had been nothing left over for Sarah herself. Jo had always told Sarah in return that she didn’t believe a word of this. Sarah had stopped trying to convince her, and when Jo now demanded, every other day, that Sarah go out and buy them a Cadillac Eldorado, Sarah merely said, “Jo, I couldn’t afford a glove to put in the glove compart­ment . . .”

  Sarah was again fortunate in living next door to Becca Blair, for Becca was always pleased to take Sarah wher­ever she needed to go, and if she wasn’t available, Becca’s daughter Margaret had strict instructions to make the purple Pontiac available to Sarah at any time. This was no great hardship on Becca, however, for the two women maintained schedules that were quite similar. They went to work and left it at the same time, needed to shop at the grocery store as often (and had just as soon do it together anyway), and whenever Jo bore down particu­larly hard on Sarah (usually every weekend when Jo and Sarah were in the house together for many uninterrupted hours) Becca was more than happy to drive Sarah around out in the country until she had recovered herself. Sarah grew to think of the front passenger seat as her own, and learned how to open the glove compartment of the car without all the little statues of the Virgin Mary and Saint Christopher tumbling out onto the floorboards.