by Tucker, Todd
“It doesn’t belong to us,” I said. “And this isn’t like digging up potatoes in some field or stealing melons. That thing is really valuable—taking it would be stealing.”
“I’ll bet Professor Borden would want me to have it.”
“Where are you going to keep it?” I asked, thinking I had found my trump card. As hard as it would be for me to hide a gigantic four-hundred-year-old German sword from my parents, it would be impossible for Tom in that army barracks he called a bedroom. “Why don’t you leave it here until we figure out what to do with it?”
Tom mulled it over. “Shit, I did want to go looking for Sanders and Kruer tonight.”
“You did?” That was news to me.
“Yeah…you said you wanted to, remember?”
“I just didn’t know we were doing it tonight.”
“Every time we’re in the woods, we’re going to be looking for them.” I could tell he briefly considered stalking them with sword in hand, but thought better of it. “That’ll have to wait. I’m taking this thing and hiding it in the cave.”
I had to admit that was a good hiding place—no one knew the caves of the area as well, and the thing would actually probably be preserved better in an arid cave than in the musty second floor of the Borden Institute. I thought of my imaginary archaeologist finding the old German sword in the future, an object whose presence in a Clark County cave would be even harder to explain than Tom’s shorts and shoes.
Suddenly the door burst open into the room. Tom and I instinctively ducked down, like rabbits in a bramble. I knew we hadn’t been seen, we were that quick. But I wondered if someone had heard us walking around up there, or arguing, and were now searching for us. If so, it wouldn’t take long to find us.
The intruders shut the door slowly, and then crossed the room, to the windows, one row of tables in front of us. We saw their frayed bell-bottom jeans and work boots as they walked by.
The man in front walked right to the window where we had come in. He opened it a crack.
“This’ll do just fine,” he said. I recognized the voice. It was Ray Arnold, the man who’d fought with Tom’s dad the night before. I heard the metallic clink of a Zippo lighter opening, and then a few seconds later the sickly sweet smell of Clark County weed drifted through the old classroom.
Tom and I looked at each other with some relief. They weren’t up there to bust us; they were there to spark up. If we jumped up and yelled “boo!” they’d probably run out of the room. Tom and I carefully leaned back so we could sit against the tables and wait the potheads out. Tom had the sword lying across his crossed legs.
“This is better than listening to that bullshit downstairs, ain’t it?” Ray exhaled loudly. “Jesus Christ, I am sick of it.” Tom carefully stuck his head around the corner to get a better look, and I did the same.
It was the first time I’d seen a grown man after a genuine ass-kicking. Ray Arnold didn’t quite have a black eye, not the perfectly round, perfectly black, comic-book variety, anyway. Half his face was dark red, however, almost as if it had been scraped badly on the asphalt. I noticed, too, in the way that he put his Zippo back in his pocket, that his fingers appeared to be hurting, as if maybe he’d gotten in a few good licks of his own. He was as wild-eyed as he sounded, with long thin hair and a ragged mustache that twitched when he spoke. With him was Lonnie Vogel, a stocky maintenance man at the plant who also grew Christmas trees on his family farm to make a few extra bucks during the holidays—we got our Scotch pine from him every year. Lonnie delicately took the joint back from Ray Arnold.
“We need to be careful,” said Lonnie. “If we drop this thing in here the whole place will burn to the ground in about five seconds.”
They both chuckled at that.
“So help me,” said Ray, “if one more of those dipshits calls me his brother, I am going to kill him.”
“Yep,” said Lonnie with a sigh, clearly preferring that they not waste a good joint talking about the strike.
“They ain’t my brothers,” Ray continued. “Truthfully, most of ’em are assholes. I might cross the line just to piss ’em off. Just to piss off that dickhead George Kruer.”
Tom and I shot each other looks. Tom was grinning.
“You’re not serious,” said Lonnie, releasing a lungful of smoke.
Ray thought it over. “I didn’t want this strike. And I’ve never told no one no different.”
“You can’t cross the line.”
“Look, man, I’ve got a hungry baby at home and a wife who won’t get off my ass. I was going along with this bullshit, thinking we might get a raise after a week or two, but now they’re killing folks. Hell, I liked Don Strange!”
“I did, too,” said Lonnie thoughtfully.
“Now they’re killing folks, and no raise we get is ever going to make up for the money we’re losing on strike, and I am sick of it.”
“So you’re just going to walk across that line by yourself.”
“I wouldn’t be by myself,” said Ray. “I guarantee you that. I ain’t the only sorry asshole in Borden who needs a paycheck. I’d like to see George Kruer’s face when I take a whole shift back into the plant. You’d follow me across, wouldn’t you?”
Lonnie Vogel thought long and hard, so long I thought he might have forgotten Ray’s question. “I don’t know, Ray,” he said finally. “My dad would kill me if I ever crossed a picket line.”
Ray Arnold thought it over. “That’s true. Your old man would shit. Well, I’m sure somebody would come with me. I can’t be the only one who sees how retarded this whole thing is.”
There was thunderous applause downstairs, and a chant began: Ten ninety-six! Ten ninety-six!
Ray started whispering in rhythm: “Ten ninety-six! We’re all a bunch of pricks!”
They both giggled hysterically, as they finished up the last of Ray’s small joint. “Thanks, dude,” said Lonnie. “That was good.”
Ray sighed theatrically. “Let’s go downstairs and see what we just agreed to.” They tromped out of the room, considerably less carefully than when they came in. Ray pulled the door shut behind him as he exited.
Tom and I stood up. A thin layer of reefer haze floated at chest height.
“I’m keeping it,” he said, picking up the argument where we’d left it.
We stared at each other a moment, Tom knowing full well that he always won these debates. A new chant began downstairs that we couldn’t make out. Combined with Ray and Lonnie’s departure, it led me to think the meeting was reaching a climax. We had to make our move soon, whatever it was.
“We need to go,” I said. I ached for the Sinbad sword on the wall, but knew I couldn’t bring myself to steal it, anymore than I could prevent Tom from taking his.
“Then let’s go,” he said, leading the way across the room with sword extended.
We got to the window, and I let Tom go out first. I followed, and carefully closed the window behind me, taking one last look at all the treasure I was leaving behind. The sun had gone down, which was good news for Tom now that he was officially committing grand theft. Tom knelt down on the small roof. Leaning as far as he could over the edge, he dropped the sword straight down. It stuck in the dirt cleanly right by my bike’s front tire, its weight driving the point into the gravel driveway. Tom jumped down after it, hanging briefly on the roof’s edge by his fingertips before dropping down with a grunt. From above, I watched him pull the sword from the ground like young King Arthur.
I dropped down beside him Tom was positively glowing.
“How are you going to get that thing home?” I asked.
“I’ll hide it in the back of my dad’s truck. I’ll take it out tonight and hide it in the woods, take it to the cave when I get a chance. Next time, though, we’re goin’ lookin’ for them.”
“I still don’t think you should have taken anything from a museum,” I said self-righteously.
Tom laughed. “Well, you did.” He pointed at my hands.
And I had. Without realizing it, I had taken the copy of Borden’s Personal Reminiscences. So we were both thieves.
Tom ran over to his dad’s truck and shoved the sword under the tarp just as the doors of the institute burst open and union men began rolling out, smiling and lighting one another’s cigarettes. We turned to face them, trying to look casual.
“What’d you decide?” Tom asked two of the strikers as they passed.
“We’re all sorry about Don Strange,” said one of them. “We’re buying flowers out of the strike fund.”
“And we’re staying on strike until hell freezes over,” said the other. Those strikers close enough to hear him cheered.
I rode my bike home with the book shoved up my pants leg. My father was waiting for me in the living room, lying on the couch and reading Chesapeake. I could tell the second I walked in, from the quiet and from the general sense of emptiness, that Mom was not home, perhaps instead at one of her feminist gatherings in Louisville, or on a secret errand for the sheriff.
Dad greeted me with an eager smile. “Did you see any?”
For a second, I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. Then it all came back to me, along with the fear that my stolen book was about to fall out of my pants leg, and that Dad would be able to smell the fine bouquet of Ray’s weed coming off my clothes. He waited for an answer.
“They were falling like rain,” I said.
Numerous historic preservation groups tried to save the institute, but in the end its own grand scale worked against it, making it prohibitively expensive to renovate, and too big to be of any real practical use in our small town. Despite the fact that the building had been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1973, it was condemned by the state fire marshal. Since it was so close to the grammar school, local officials finally decided to demolish the building in 1983, calling it a safety hazard to the romping schoolchildren nearby. I stood in the parking lot and watched them destroy it the day before leaving for college. In all, William Borden’s building had lasted ninety-nine years, which I think to a geologist would seem like just the blink of an eye. What remained of Professor Borden’s collections were carefully inventoried by the preservationists, crated up, and sent three hundred miles away, to the Field Museum in Chicago. So, looking back, I think Tom was right. I’m glad at least one of those swords is still in Borden, and yes, I think Professor Borden would be happy about it, too.
Five
They buried Don Strange the next morning. I sweated in the front yard in my blue JCPenney sport coat and clip-on tie as my parents finished getting ready inside. Tires crunched on the gravel of Cabin Hill Road, a sound soon followed by Tom’s father driving past in his blue Dodge truck. I automatically lifted my hand to wave, and he briefly made eye contact with me and waved back. His eyes went quickly back to the road. My father was on the front porch in his suit by then, looking out at me with an expression I couldn’t decipher.
The service was at St. Mary of the Knobs Catholic Church, a center of community life I had been to many times, even though I wasn’t Catholic. I’d attended weekly meetings in their parish hall during my brief hitch with the Cub Scouts. We went to their Strawberry Festival every March, where my dad and I would eat shortcake and Mom would buy a raffle ticket for a quilt made by the Knights of Columbus ladies’; auxiliary. I’d even been to a wedding inside the church once, the only wedding I had ever seen, when a man my dad worked with invited us the summer before.
My father had complained that local law enforcement would never challenge the strikers. Now we had state troopers at our funerals, observing the mourners from their black-and-white Crown Vic a respectful distance away. Inside the church, Don Strange lay on pillowy white satin inside a gleaming walnut casket, finally trying out one of the products he had been constructing his entire life. The walnut, it occurred to me, had sprung from southern Indiana dirt, and would now return to it, just like Mr. Strange.
The crowd in the church was arranged into two halves, in a way that reminded me of the bride’s side and the groom’s side in that wedding I had been to. In this case, plant management and Bord en’s small merchant class sat on one side of the church. The strikers sat on the other much more crowded side. The strikers looked as uncomfortable as I did in their suits, and I noticed that most of them, like Tom’s dad, came alone, leaving their families at home, making that side of the church overwhelmingly adult and male. I wondered if it was because they anticipated danger in some way, although I doubted that, because any inkling of danger and my mother wouldn’t have let me within a hundred miles of the church. Maybe they didn’t want their families to see Mr. Strange laid out like that, the rosary wrapped around his clasped dead hands.
Sprinkled randomly among us, oblivious to the seating protocol of our two rival camps, were Mr. Strange’s relatives and friends from out of town. There were two svelte daughters from the swank suburbs east of Louisville, jarringly beautiful women in black dresses and wide hats. There were crying grandchildren, old casket company associates, an aging army buddy in an American Legion hat, and a young grandnephew in a white navy uniform.
An unseen organ announced the start of the service with a startling minor chord. A smoldering censor swinging in front of them, a column of priests, deacons, and altar boys marched into the church, singing hymns in a mournful baritone, sending chills up and down my spine. In my fourteen years, I had been exposed just enough to the Catholic religion to become completely fascinated by it. When the priest began the mass from the front of the church, I noticed that the strikers more or less all crossed themselves in unison, while many on the management side of the church did not. Mr. Strange had labored in the mill room for a decade or so before working his way into management, and it appeared that at least as far as his faith was concerned, he had more in common with the rank and file than he did with management. Old stained-glass windows along each side of the church depicted the church’s numerous patron saints in various stages of martyrdom, and a small plaque at the bottom of each thanked a familiar family name for their generosity a century earlier: Kruer, Stemler, Huber, and so on.
I was impressed with the studied impassiveness of the priest. Our preacher down at Blue River Christian Church always seemed like he was trying to sell us salvation with amplitude and clever sermons. To hold our interest, he had to play the opposing trump cards of eternal bliss and eternal damnation. The Catholic priest, in contrast, was stern and removed in a way that seemed confident to me, as he wearily executed the rites of his church. He wasn’t trying to convince me of anything—he had two thousand years of tradition on his side. If you don’t believe any of this, he seemed to be telling us, that’s your problem. “What right have you to recite my statutes?” he intoned. “To take my covenant on your lips, when you detest my teaching and thrust my words behind you?” I turned my head slightly from side to side, trying to identify to whom the priest was addressing the accusation.
When it came time for communion, the labor side of the church filed out of their pews smartly, while we had to step awkwardly aside to let those few Catholics on our side pass by into the aisle. I watched them all walk right up to the priest, who was directly in front of Mr. Strange’s casket, and accept the Eucharist. About half the mourners, I noticed, looked inside Mr. Strange’s casket as they passed. They glanced into it quickly, as if they weren’t supposed to, and maybe they weren’t. I didn’t know what the rules were. I just knew that for the first and only time that day, I was glad to be in the Protestant minority. I knew I would not have been able to avoid peering inside the casket if I walked up there, and I knew doing so would give me nightmares for weeks. We stepped outside for the burial.
The cemetery was right next to the church. To get to Mr. Strange’s grave, we had to walk through the older sections, where the epitaphs were written entirely in German. At Mr. Strange’s grave, a row of chairs and a small Caterpillar backhoe awaited us. A green tent had been set up with enough room for
Mr. Strange’s closest relatives to sit in the shade. Behind it, the gravedigger snuck a cigarette and waited for his cue. Graveside, the priest pointed out to the crowd that Mr. Strange was being buried right next to Mavis, his beloved wife, who had died fifteen years earlier. After a few comments more they lowered Mr. Strange into the ground, and the service was over. Dad took a few minutes to shake hands with some of the old-timers who had shown up for the funeral. All of them wanted to talk about the strike. My father did not.
The strikers stood around the outside of the church smoking, their jackets on their shoulders or hung on low tree branches, ties loosened, sweat beading on their foreheads. I realized that I was accustomed to seeing these men exhausted, either plodding into the factory at dawn, or treading across the parking lot at the end of a shift, covered in varnish, sawdust, and fatigue. Seeing them this way, large groups of them rested and idle, was a slightly scary revelation. They all quieted as we passed. Normally my father was the kind of guy who would start a twenty-minute conversation with the guy bagging his groceries. Upon seeing someone from the plant, he usually rejoiced and gossiped like he had found a long-lost cousin. After the funeral he hustled Mom and me as rapidly as he could to our car with his eyes straight ahead.
We were almost to the car, passing a small knot of strikers, when just two feet in front of us Tom’s dad turned around and started walking toward the church, toward us. There was no way to tactfully avoid him; he and Dad almost collided. I could tell by the way Dad stiffened that it was exactly the encounter he had wanted to avoid.
“Howdy, George,” said my mom and dad simultaneously.
“Howdy,” he said back, trying harder than my father to hide his discomfort. Even so, he looked haggard, more genuinely mournful than his cronies, who turned discreetly to see how the conversation was going. “Sad day,” he said.
“Yes, it is,” said my dad. He was stubbornly refusing to take the conversational bait. In normal times he would have been halfway through the shitting-in-the-paddock anecdote.