"Clean up the pipes," he said.
The Croat, Marco, Joe, and Fritz were at Number 6, with forks. You see,
the pipes run up the ladle's side and release a stopper for pouring the
steel. They are covered with fire clay, which is destroyed after one or
two ladlings and has to be knocked off and replaced. We loosened the
clay with sledges, and Marco watered down the pipes with a hose, to cool
them. They were moderately warm when Fritz and I started piling them on
the truck. Once or twice the pipe touched Fritz's hand through a hole
in his glove, and he yowled, and then laughed. Once or twice I yowled
and laughed also.
When we piled near the top, we swung in unison, and tossed the pipe into
the air. It was like piling wood.
I caught a torn piece of my pants on a sharp bit of slag while carrying
two pipes, and acquired a rip halfway from pocket to knee. Marco had a
safety pin for me at once; he kept emergency ones in his shirt-front.
We finished the job in half an hour, and pushed the truck till it came
under jurisdiction of a crane. Marco fixed the hooks rather officiously,
pushing Fritz and me aside. There is, I suppose, more snobbishness
induced by the manner of crane-hooking than in any other pit function.
The crane swung the pipes on holders and dropped them in front of the
blacksmith shop. We carried them into the shop, Marco and I working
together. Inside there were half a dozen small forges, some benches, and
a drop hammer. It was the place where ladles and spoons were repaired.
The blacksmiths and helpers gave us friendly, but condescending glances.
As we walked back, we saw the crane swing a ladle from the moulds into
which it had been pouring toward the dumping pit in front of Five. When
the giant bucket approached, the chain hooked to the bottom lifted
slowly, and dregs half-steel, half-ash, rolled out into the dump. After
a little cooling, we would clean up there. With the chain released, the
bucket righted itself with a shuddering clank, and swayed in the air
scattering bits of slag and burnt fire clay.
A little later, we did a three-hour job on those dregs. We loosened the
slag with picks first, and then lifted forkfuls and shovelfuls into the
crane-carried boxes. A good deal of scrap was in the lot, probably the
makings of half a ton of steel. This, of course, went into a separate
box. I hooked up a couple of big scrap-hunks, weighing perhaps 500
pounds each, and took some sport out of it. That is one small matter, at
least, where a grain of judgment and ingenuity has place. A badly hooked
scrap-hunk may fall and break a neck, or simply tumble and waste
everybody's time. Loosening up with the pick, too, demands a slight
knack and smacks faintly of the miner's skill. We had to go down into a
pit, where there was heated slag on all sides, using boards to save
scorching our shoe leather. In turning up fractures eight or ten inches
thick, there would be an inner four inches still red-hot.
At eleven o'clock, I was working at a fair pace, flinging moderately
husky forkfuls over a ten-foot space into the box, when Marco looked up.
"Hey," he called.
I glanced at him for a moment. He was smiling. "Rest yourself," he said;
"we work hard when de big bosses come."
During the next fifty shovelfuls, the remark went the rounds of my head,
trying to get condemned. My memory threw up articles in the "Quarterly
Journal of Economics," with "inefficiency and the labor-slackers," and
"moral irresponsibility of the worker on the job," and so forth, in
them. A couple of sermons and a vista of editorial denunciations of the
laboring man who is no longer willing to do "an honest day's work for an
honest day's pay," seemed to bring additional pressure for righteous
indignation. I asked the following questions of myself, one for every
two forkfuls:--
"Isn't it morally a bad thing to soldier, anyway?
"Is Marco a moral enormity?
"Do business men soldier?
"Isn't 'Get to hell out of here if you don't want to work' the answer?
Or has the twelve-hour day something to do with it?
"Can these five or six thousand unskilled workmen take any interest in
their work, or must they go at it with a consciousness similar to that
of the slaves who put up the Pyramids?"
I had to use the pick at this point, which broke up the inquiry, and I
left the questions unanswered.
I saw wheelbarrowing ahead for the afternoon, and corralled the only one
properly balanced, when I started work at 1.00 P.M., keeping it near me
during a scrap-picking hour, until the job should break. At 2.15, it
did. Al said: "Get over and clean out under Seven. If we can ever get
this goddam stuff cleaned out--" That was an optimism of Al's.
One of the new men and I worked together all afternoon: pick at the
slag, shovel, wheelbarrow, dump in the box, hook up to crane. Start
over. There was a lot of dolomite and old fine cinder, very dusty, but
not hot. This change in discomfort furnished a sensation almost
pleasurable. I found out that everyone hid his shovel at the end of the
shift, beside piles of brick in the cellar of the mill, under dark
stairways, and so forth. I hadn't yet acquired one, but used mostly a
fork, which isn't so personal an instrument, and of which there seemed
to be a common supply. I felt keen to "acquire" though.
After supper, I wrote in my diary and thought a bit before going to bed.
There's a genuine technique of the shovel, the pick, and especially of
the wheelbarrow, I thought. That damn plank from the ground to the
cinder-box! It takes all I can muster to teeter the wheelbarrow up, dump
without losing the thing quite, and bring it down backward without
barking my shins. There's a bit of technique, too, in pairing off
properly for a job, selecting your lick of work promptly and not getting
left jobless to the eyes of the boss, capturing your shovel and hiding
it at the end of the turn, keeping the good will of the men you're with
on team-work, distinguishing scrap from cinder and putting them into the
proper boxes, not digging for slag too deeply in the pit floor, and so
forth and so on.
I wonder if I shall learn Serbian, or Russian, or Hungarian? There seems
to be a Slavic polyglot that any one of a half-dozen nationalities
understands. That word, "Tchekai!--Watch out!"--even the Americans use
it. It's a word that is crying in your ears all night. Watch out for
the crane that is taking a ladle of hot metal over your head, or a load
of scrap, or a bundle of pipes; watch out for the hot cinder coming down
the hole from the furnace-doors; watch out for "me" while I get this
wheelbarrow by; and "Heow! Tchekai!" for the trainload of hot ingots
that passes your shoulder.
I set my alarm for five o'clock, and got into bed with the good-night
thought of "The devil with Pete Grayson! I'll get on that furnace!"
Another day went by, hewing cinders in the pit. I tried to figure to
myself persuasive or threatening things I could say to the melters, to
let me work on the floor. A shrewd-looking little man with moustachios
worked near me.
"Did you ever work on the floor?" I asked.
"Oh, yes," he said: "too much hot; to hell with the money!"
They pay you two cents more an hour on the floor. At twenty minutes to
five I went upstairs to my locker. Dick Reber, senior melter, stopped
me.
"Need a man to-night; want to work?" he said; "always short, you know,
on this ---- long turn."
"Sure," I said.
That was one way to get promoted, I thought, and wondered how I'd stand
fourteen more hours on top of the ten I had had.
"Beat it," yelled the melter.
Jack and I got our flat manganese shovels, and went on the run to the
gallery. We were tapping at last. This furnaceful had cooked twenty-two
hours. Nick was kneeling on water-soaked bagging, on the edge of the hot
spout. He dug out the mud in the tap-hole with a pointed rod and
sputtered oaths at the heat. Every few minutes the spout would burn
through the bagging to his knees. He would get up, refold the bagging,
and kneel again to the job.
Finally the metal gurgled out, a small stream the size of two fingers.
Nick dodged back, and it swelled to a six-inch torrent.
"Heow, crane!"
Pete Grayson had come out, and was bawling something very urgently at
the pit crane. The ladle swung closer; we could feel the increased wave
of heat.
He looked over at us and held up two fingers. That meant both piles of
manganese that lay on the gallery next the crane were to be shoveled
in--double time for us, in the heat.
"Heow!" yelled the melter.
Jack and I leaped forward to the manganese, and our shovels scraped on
the iron gallery. I saw Jack slapping his head to put out a little fire
that had started on the handkerchief wound round his neck. I slapped a
few sparks that stung my right leg. We finished half the pile.
There was something queer about this heat. The soles of my feet--why in
hell should the gallery burn so! There was a blazing gas in the air--my
nostrils seemed to flame as they took it in. This was different from
most manganese shoveling. My face glowed all over in single
concentrated pain. What was it? I saw Jack shoveling wildly in the
middle of that second pile. We finished it in a panic.
"What was the matter with that damn ladle?" I asked as we got our breath
in the opening between the furnaces.
"Spout had a goddam hole in the middle," he said; "ladle underneath,
see?"
I did. The fire-clay of the spout had given way, and a hole forming in
the middle let the metal through. That made it necessary, in order to
catch the steel, to bring the ladle close, till part of it was under the
platform on which we worked. The heat and gas from the hot steel in the
ladle had been warming the soles of our feet, and rising into our faces.
"Here's a funny thing," I said, looking down. One of the sparks which
had struck my pants burned around, very neatly taking off the cuff and
an inch or two of the pant-leg. The thing might have been done with a
pair of shears.
I came out of the mill whistling and feeling pretty much "on the crest."
I'd worked their damn "long turn," and stood it. It wasn't so bad, all
except that ladle that got under the manganese. I ate a huge breakfast,
with a calm sense of virtue rewarded, and climbed into bed with a smile
on my lips.
The alarm clock had been ringing several minutes before I realized what
it was up to. I turned over to shut it off, and found needles running
into all the muscles of my back. I struggled up on an elbow. I had a
"hell of a head." The alarm was still going.
I fought myself out of bed and shut it off; stood up and tried to
think. Pretty soon a thought came over me like an ache: it was "Fourteen
hours!" That was beginning in fifty-five minutes--fourteen hours of
back-walls, and hot ladles, and--Oh, hell!--I sat down again on the bed,
and prepared to lift my feet back in.
Then I got up, and washed fiercely, threw on my clothes, and went
downstairs, and out into the afternoon sun.
Down by the restaurant, I met the third-helper on Eight.
"Long turn wouldn't be so bad, if there weren't no next day," he said,
with a sort of smile.
In the mill was a gang of malignant men; things all went wrong;
everybody was angry and tired; their nerves made mistakes for them.
"I only wish it were next Sunday!" I said to someone.
"There aren't any goddam Sundays in this place," he returned.
"Twenty-four hours off between two working days ain't Sunday."
I thought that over. The company says they give you one day off every
two weeks. But it's not like a day off anywhere else. It's twenty-four
hours sandwiched between two work-days. You finish your night-week at
7.00 Sunday morning, having just done a week of one twenty-four hour
shift, and six fourteens. You've got all the time from then till the
next morning! Hurrah! How will you use it? If you do the normal
thing,--eat breakfast, and go to bed for eight hours,--that brings you
to 5.00 o'clock. Will you stay up all night? you've had your sleep. Yes,
but there's a ten-hour turn coming at 7.00. You go to bed at 11.00, to
sleep up for your turn. There's an evening-out of it! Hurrah again! But
who in hell does the normal thing? Either you go on a tear for
twenty-four hours,--you only have it twice a month,--or you sleep the
twenty-four, if the week's been a bad one. Or--and this is common in
Bouton--you get sore at the system and stay away a week--if you can
afford it.
"Hey, you, get me a jigger, quick. Ten thou'."
"All right," I said, and shut off my mind for the day.
I usually had bad words and bad looks from "Shorty." Jack calls him
"that dirty Wop." Late one afternoon he produced a knife and fingered it
suggestively while he talked. So I always watched him with all the eyes
I had.
One day we had shoveled in manganese together over a hot ladle, and I
noticed that he was in a bad mood. We finished and leaned against the
rail.
"Six days more," he said very quietly.