REPORT OF UNSATISFACTORY SERVICE
Joe’s full and proper name, hiring date, and employee number were set beneath in flawless typing. Itemized violations followed. They included disregard for company property and rules, willful negligence and reckless endangerment of the crew, passengers, and that same company property as entrusted to his care; a complete failing of personal restraint and modes of self-discipline befitting of a veteran employee and engineman. Lastly, was the time and date of his hearing, three o’clock on the following Wednesday, afternoon.
Having completed her pile of utility rags, Sarah drifted over to glance at the missive.
“Everything here, but the kitchen sink.” Joe muttered.
Her reply was spiced with bitter levity.
“Well, if a person’s going to do something, why waste time on half measures?”
His letter hand sank feebly to the tabletop.
“The little jerk knew me better than I knew myself. I walked blind and smiling, right into his two-bit trap. Worse, is dragging Vint along with me and the fool I must’ve made old Ches look like to that whole downtown mob.”
He slid open the second message and shook out a single piece of yellow pasteboard. It was a simple crew clearance card. Brand new and blank, it made Joe bristle.
“A clearance card? What’s this supposed to be, someone’s idea of a sick joke? Like clearing me for getting kicked out on my ass???”
Before he could dwell further, Sarah plucked away the correspondence. She traded his letters for her heap of torn linen, dumped in his lap.
“Enough of this. There, take those out to the garage rag box. You’ve been in here for the last two days, straight. At least walk that far and get some fresh air. And stay out there for a while. Straighten your workbench or something. Just don’t come back, until I call you in for supper.”
Joe started to protest. But Sarah pointed firmly at the door.
“Go!”
CHAPTER 40
Rags in hand, Joe trudged half-heartedly away. The afternoon’s awaiting brilliance though, was a staggering slap across his face; far too cheery for the kind of mess he was in and the man nearly retreated.
A quick, distant squeal of heavy truck brakes intervened. Their blunt and grating sound died immediately. Yet, the direction was telling. It came from the rail yard, meaning some degree of deconstruction was already under way. A surge of bitter momentum surfaced in the reality and powered Joe on.
He shoved at the heavy side door, gaining access to his garage. Although he’d planned to simply toss the rags inside and bail out, Sarah’s scheme took hold. An embracing, shadowed quiet awaited that drew the man on and just his simple act of entering immersed Joe in the single place that defined him outside of railroading.
Joe drank in the structure’s familiar breadth and width, every square inch personally designed. In a distant corner of its dim foundation were the young impressions of his mate’s tiny, bare feet. Left in the now aged concrete, they were a proud signature to future times, of the job done here by the team of husband and wife.
If anyone deserved such immortality, it was his Sarah. By Joe’s stead, the woman had hefted and hammered and leveled. On a shoestring budget, she’d helped build the place, taking most of a summer to squeeze work into Joe’s brief layovers. Even now, the result was straight and square, tight and level.
Joe’s hand brushed against a dangling collection of old gunnysacks in reaching for the light switch. He paused to regard them and the week’s first hint of a smile came with their touch. They’d originally hauled feed for his birds, with many then recycled into crash-proof holiday gift carriers for destitute trackside families.
In the spirit of Christmas, Joe and Sarah often filled such sacks with a minor assortment of yuletide offerings. Included, were simple things; hand knitted winter scarfs, socks, and mittens. Gumdrops, licorice, and candy sticks were also packaged for the kids. Sarah would garnish the parcels with little twists of festive red and green ribbon, then bundle them tightly, against their bumpy downhill ride from Joe’s slowed engine cab.
Sometimes there was even a supplementary parcel of coal spillage, foraged from the freight yard grounds and heaped in another sack, to help the tenant farmers heat their drafty shacks for the holiday.
On his next trip by, an entire family might be seen standing in the cold, waving their gratitude to the benevolent stranger, only for Joe to find the lodging abandoned and them gone forever, shortly after.
The bit of nostalgia offered him a warm dose of much needed medicine. It drew Joe deeper inside the garage, where, ringing its stout walls in orderly ranks, hung the man’s proud collection of hand tools. Every style and make of maul, shovel, pickaxe, and sledgehammer were represented and they’d all been amassed through years of rewarding trade.
Growing up at a time when money was scarce, but manual labor common, had taught Joe the skill and joys of a non-monetary commerce that became an adult hobby. The result was now stored all about, in the neglected, orphaned, or junked utensils, that he had rescued, refitted, and reworked; making each one healthy and whole.
Like so many other things Joe knew, the bartering craft was becoming just another dying social art form. But, in the olden, once-upon-a-blue-collar-time, off its downtown main streets and deep in the town’s craw, had lived serious pockets of Chicago swapping traffic.
There, Joe aptly honed and plied his skills. Sacks of surplus pigeon squabs became batches of tired woodworking chisels, hand planes, and machine files; all of which he’d lovingly scoured free of rust, then stropped back into lethal, chip-cutting brilliance; most simply garnered for their sense of once-impossible ownership.
Nearest the ceiling, was his ultimate source of pride - the two man crosscut saw. Its broad steel band proudly spanned all else Joe owned, forked teeth spread skyward like distinct gems of a gigantic tiara. Now slathered in a clotted mucus of protective linseed oil, it still was razor sharp and ready for any action to come its way.
Joe hadn’t been quite certain what he’d do with such a monstrous, out-of-place thing when happening across it. But it immediately filled a place in his heart. Negotiations were met and the saw was proudly lashed across his old ’34 Dodge. Hood to trunk, it rode back home like some newly bagged trophy buck, to the sanctity of this, its ultimate resting spot.
Here, Joe had lovingly drawn its dulled and bent teeth back in line and to life, where it paid for its space many times over, hogging through all those discarded crossties for lean seasons of supplemental heating wood.
His workbench waited next. Beneath a backyard window and beside his special front wall cabinet, its plank surface was splattered with the many, long departed colors of stirred house paint which’d coated rooms and eaves and attic. It bore countless character marks of the innumerable projects conducted there; dings, grooves, and notches, along with a fair ration of deep saw cuts, when the boys, while deep in some personal undertaking, had lost track of their blade depth and run ripping teeth aground on its top.
Broken Victrolas and assorted gramophones had been dissected here, coaxed back to life for again riding the grooves of ancient paraffin cylinders and early vinyl discs. And how many sprung neighborhood clocks, in need of home-cast Babbitt bushings or handcrafted mainsprings were also reincarnated by Joe’s hand on this same operating table?
Customized shelves surrounded the workplace window as a kind of wreathed storage, packed with old coffee cans and pickle jars full of scrounged bric-a-brac; hinges and screws, nails, springs, washers, and bolts.
Take-off auto engine belts and radiator hoses rested at a far end, like coils of dusty old snakes. Not quite bad enough to discard, they stood always ready for getting someone by in a pinch.
Nearby was the pile of salvaged electrical cords. Snipped from junked appliances, they awaited rewiring into faulty lamps, coffee pots, or other household gadgets, sho
uld Joe’s, fix-it skills again be requested by some needy neighbor.
This was his proud domain, nearly everything under roof being fair game about the community. Yet, to the side and above his workbench was the one special cabinet, which was off limits to all but Joe. Inside, rested the few private tools and mementoes that Joe Graczyk did not share. He went to it now.
Joe’s probing fingers swept atop the dusty cabinet and came away with its loosely hidden key. He noted again, that its time-blackened brass didn’t seem as grimy as it might have been, left up there untouched, between only his visits. But, again he dismissed the possibility of anyone purposely using it to violate his little sanctuary and unlocked the door.
Nearest inside, was Joe’s prized box of precision screwdrivers. No hand but his had touched these in the two decades since old man Halupka gifted them over, retiring from his watch repair business.
Their generic counterparts were the most abused tool in modern civilization, used for everything from jimmy-bars to chisels and picks. But these high-quality blades, secure in their miter-cut box with its velvet lined, individual rests, had never - nor would ever - touch any commonplace screw slot. Only those delicate fasteners belonging to the most sophisticated mechanisms, would be so honored.
Joe swung open the snug housing and ran his fingertips across their uniform nobility. He nodded in satisfaction at the deeply chromed ferrules and sleek cherry handles; relishing the precision of their pot blued, hollow-ground shanks.
But, his brief cheer dimmed just moments later, with a stray glance back toward the open wall box. Owing only to an odd sense of obligation, did Joe put the favored drivers aside to dutifully reach ahead.
A hunk of old chamois met his touch. Age had colored it like milk chocolate, made soft and soaked by congealed oil. Any masked innocence fell away though, when Joe’s fingers settled on the harsh wartime shape held within.
The protective goatskin revealed an even older chunk of thick cowhide. Riveted as well as industrially sewn, its leather was blackened with age and nearly ossified. Just a shriveled remnant of the once dun-colored, pliable scabbard that rode on Joe’s youthful hip, half a century prior and half a world away.
Nested inside, were 16 inches of still lethal, forged steel blade. It was the same blade which had hung from the deadly muzzle of his bolt-action Springfield, in that far-off Norman forest. This, was Joe’s combat bayonet from the First World War.
Joe gently separated the dagger and its mummified sheath. In the decades since, the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor artwork of his left forearm, once boldly-inked by a Philadelphia tattoo parlor, had faded into a nearly unrecognizable blur of indigo noodles. But, bayonet serial number, 529261 still bore a crisp, Springfield Armory ordnance mark and a1912 year of manufacture, as if its own clock had stopped.
Blade in hand, Joe Graczyk pondered the curious notion of patriotism. Same as his railroad career, the man’s military experience hadn’t started with any firm decisions. There’d been no chest pounding vows or furiously waved fists. It’d just been a realistic combination of being on the lam and having an empty stomach, when the freight train he’d hopped aboard after beating his stepfather comatose, paused to trade cars at a downtown district.
Waiting to restart, chilly Joe had been blindsided by an excruciating scent of brewing coffee. The enticing aroma drifted out from a nearby Marine recruiting station and was strong enough to draw him over.
Joe popped his head inside the dingy building, daring to address its seated recruiter.
“Any chance, sparing a cup of that?”
The man at first, growled.
“This is a government agency, Mac. No freeloader’s soup kitchen. Look for your handouts somewheres else.”
Spying Joe’s swollen and freshly split knuckles, though, the pragmatic recruiter also saw an enlistment possibility. He offered a magnanimous swing of his chin toward the warm tin pot.
“Ah, what the hell, I ain’t payin’ for it. Go ahead. Just don’t spread word around.”
The sergeant’s hardboiled eyes never left the fugitive, as Joe hurriedly filled a cup and relished its quenching warmth.
“You just hop off that downtown freight?”
“Uh-huh.”
He nodded to Joe’s hands.
“Those busted knuckles a souvenir of last night?”
“Yeah.”
“Bar fight?”
“Personal.”
“You kill the guy?”
Joe clenched his jaws.
“Not sure. Hope he got the message, though.”
“Don’t see no marks on your face. So, you must handle yourself pretty well.”
Joe shrugged off the compliment as the recruiter closed in.
“Cops on your tail?”
There, Joe returned a scowl.
“You sure ask a lot of questions for a free cup of coffee.”
The sergeant set his newspaper aside and leaned back in his chair.
“Just being real about things, Mac. See, if those cops was to come along asking, I’d have to tell them that you were here. But, if you was to sign up, I could honestly say that all I saw was a Marine.”
Joe cocked his head, amused.
“You mean join? Me?”
The recruiter gave a judicious nod.
“Why not? Three squares a day. Room and board. You come back in a couple of years and things’ll be sure to have cooled down, back here. Besides, looking at you now, I don’t see much else going.”
Joe studied a poster tacked across the dingy room’s side wall. On it a ramrod stiff Leatherneck stood ready for action in his brown wool tunic and wide campaign hat, eyes peering coolly confident toward some yet invisible menace. A 30.06 rifle was clutched in his hands, its attached bayonet (identical to the one Joe now held) glistened in the sun.
The few words pasted below were simple and direct.
BE A MARINE!
Joe regarded the sergeant.
“Aren’t they shootin’ at each other across the pond right now?”
The recruiter shrugged it off.
“Yeah, so?”
“I ain’t mad at nobody over there.”
“Don’t need to be. This ain’t a problem-free world. Mac. These days it’s coming to us. Besides, I’m surprised a healthy looking guy like you hasn’t been drafted already.”
Joe smirked at the man’s bold salesmanship.
“If you’re such a big fan, why’re you here, instead?”
“I dodged my share of lead, wearing these breeches,” the recruiter growled back. “Philippines, with Black Jack Pershing among other places. But the Corps needs nimble, younger guys to fill in behind us older vets.”
Considering his lowborn station in life, Joe did have to admit some truth in what the stranger said. He wasn’t sure what being a Marine entailed. But, if any of it included not being a pauper, it might be for him. Why not let Uncle Sam supply the room and board for a change? And considering his existence up to now, any training deprivations would be child’s play.
“Yeah, okay.” Said Joe. “Why not?”
A tight smile of success lit his craggy mug and the sergeant slid over an enlistment form.
“If you can write, fill it out. If not, I’ll help you.”
Remembering that day and those following, Joe handled the blade tentatively. He hadn’t been one of those morbid battlefield souvenir hunters and so many miles and years removed, could not even recall having purposely brought this thing home. But, ever since, it had resided in numerous, out of the way storage places, until finally settling to permanent rest, here.
Man and blade came together in June, 1918, when Joe Graczyk, as a Chicagoan who ironically, had never even ventured across the nearby Indiana state line, found himself spirited an entire ocean and continent away, sweating out the muggy summer heat of a long ago, N
orman forest.
As one of the combatants in the Bois de Belleau, Joe’d endured a three-week long tug of war over that hunk of woodland between his fellow, 4th Brigade, 5th Regiment Marines and their German adversaries.
The Americans first assaulted fixed enemy machine guns; crossing an open wheat field in a tactic reminiscent of Picket’s murderous Gettysburg charge, 50 years prior. Then, a half dozen times more, engaged their foe with rifle, bayonet, and hand-to-hand combat. The surviving Leathernecks walked away with their most costly triumph, ever, until finally being broken by their own future ranks of yet unborn Marines, in the South Pacific battle for Tarawa, a quarter century hence.
It was also in that sweltering French forest, that the Marines’ fighting tenacity and deadly marksmanship was rumored to have earned them the eternally respected, low-German nickname of, Teufel Hunden or Devil Dogs, by their foe.
A jumble of faded impressions sifted back. The numbing heat, never-ending whine of mosquitoes, and brassy ring of spent shells. Frustrated curses and feeble moans. The cloying fetor of bitter smoke, sweated bodies, and rancid, unburied dead.
Joe’s skin chaffed in memory of a long ago woolen uniform. He again felt the hot, dusty earth he’d braced against; thirty caliber rifle heavy and slick in his clenched hands. Echoes of pure animal fear flooded his mouth with its sour, coppery taste, the one he choked back time after time, awaiting the shrill blast of the sergeant’s traffic cop whistle and the man’s gruff command of “MARINES UP!” ordering him to again advance and attack.
Joe gave the bayonet a testing grip and examining turn. Like its scabbard, the blade’s fluted maple grips had atrophied and shrunken. Yet, the groove of its deadly bloodline, vicious edge, and fatal spear point remained battle ready.
He gently set his thumb to a jagged notch near the blade’s bottom center; the place where, attached to his ‘aught-six, it’d deflected a similar knife fixed to an enemy soldier’s rifle. The clashing shivs actually had peppered their owners in a quick spray of brittle sparks when they met and parried, leaving Joe, as the fractionally faster man, to recover, counter-thrust, and continue on his way.
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