The Man I Let Go Before Christmas

Earl Dobbs sat across my desk with his cap in his lap and read the paper twice.

He read slow. He did everything slow. That was the whole reason he was sitting there.

It was ten minutes past one on a Friday, the fifth of December, and through the window of the foreman’s office I could see line three running without him. Somebody had already rolled a cart of slabs up to his station. The router was screaming on the far end. Nobody on the floor was looking at my window, which is how I knew every one of them was thinking about it.

“Separation notice,” Earl said. He said it like a man reading the name off a feed sack.

“Yes sir.”

I was his foreman, and I had been calling him sir for six years.

“Is it the count?” he asked.

“It’s the count.”

That was true, as far as it went. I had the sheet right there under my elbow if he wanted to see it. Earl hung sixty-one doors a shift. Jeff, at the hanging station beside him, hung seventy-four. It had been like that for years. On paper, Earl Dobbs was the slowest man on first shift, and paper was what I had been asked for.

He did not ask to see the sheet.

He looked at the paper a little longer. Two weeks of pay. Insurance through the end of the month. A line at the bottom for him and a line for me, and mine was already signed. I had done it the night before, at my kitchen table, so I would not have to do it in front of him.

“All right,” Earl said.

He took the pen out of the cup on my desk, signed his name in that square farm-boy printing of his, and set the pen back in the cup with the point down, the way he had found it.

Then he said the only other thing he said in that office.

“There’s nine doors on my cart. I’ll finish those.”

“Earl, you don’t have to.”

“They’re started.”

He put his cap on and went back out on the floor.

Nine doors. He set each slab in its frame, ran the screws into the hinges, swung it, and bent to look at the gap down the latch side. Every door, he took a nickel out of his apron pocket and slid it along that gap, top to bottom. On two of them he stopped, took the door back off, and did something at the bench with his back to me. Then he hung it again and ran the nickel again.

When the cart was empty he untied his apron, folded it once, and hung it on the nail by his bench where it had hung every night for twenty-nine years and four months.

He did not shake anybody’s hand. He did not make a scene. He nodded to Jeff, picked up his lunch box and his thermos, and walked out the side door to the lot.

I had known he would not make a scene. I am going to tell you this straight, because I have had a long time to get it straight. That was the other reason I picked him.

Here is how it came to be my pick.

The plant is on the south side of Marshfield, Wisconsin. We build doors and windows. Line three is prehung interior doors: the slab comes down from the machining end with the hinge pockets routed and the lock hole bored, the frames come over from the frame bench, and two men at the end hang the one in the other, check it, and send it on to be braced and wrapped. I had been foreman on first shift for six years.