The Man I Let Go Before Christmas

Earl had hired on the eleventh of August, the summer he was thirty-seven. He had milked cows with his father out past Hewitt until the place could not carry two families, and then he had sold the herd and come to town and learned to hang doors. Everybody on the floor knew his date. He never talked about it, but Jeff did. Jeff had it written on the calendar by the time clock, a little star in the corner of August eleventh, with “Earl 30” printed under it.

Eight months. He was eight months short.

Coming up short of the thirty was going to cost him close to three hundred dollars a month. Every month. Until he died.

So do not let me tell you I did not know. I knew what eight months meant to a man living on a pension check and Social Security in a paid-off house. I knew it Thursday night at my kitchen table with the pen in my hand.

I did try. I will say that much for myself, and no more. Wednesday I took Kessler another plan, figured out in pencil: cut my own overtime and the Saturday half shifts, put all eleven hands on short weeks through February, and nobody goes.

He read it through and slid it back across the desk.

“I sent them one like it in November. They won’t take it. They want a head, not hours.” He looked worn out. “One name by Friday, Rob. If I go back to them with nothing, I’ll be told to pick two, and I’ll have to.”

I could still have told him to pick the name himself. But I thought about our mortgage, and Paige needing braces in the spring, and what he had said about foremen, and I was afraid the next name on the paper would be mine.

So I went down the count sheet and stopped at the low number. I am not asking you to let me off. Kessler asked for a name. It was still my hand that signed it.

I told Missy that Friday at supper. I said it fast, between the potatoes and the pork chops.

“I had to let Earl Dobbs go today.”

She put her fork down. “Earl who brings the tomatoes?”

Every August, Earl left a paper sack of tomatoes on my desk. Big ugly ones, split at the shoulders, the best I ever ate. Missy canned them.

“That Earl.”

“Did you have to?”

“Kessler wanted a name.”

“I didn’t ask what Kessler wanted.” She was not sharp about it. Missy is never sharp. “I asked if you had to.”

I did not have a good answer.

“Isn’t he the one who’s almost retired?” Missy said.

“Eight months.”

She looked at me for a while. Then she picked her fork back up and asked Paige about her band concert, and that was the last word she said to me about it, which was worse than if she had said a hundred.

The floor said even less.

Nobody quit. Nobody mouthed off. They just stopped. Jeff used to stick his head in my office every morning and tell me what the Packers should have done. He stopped doing that. Kim used to save me a bar from whatever she had baked on Sunday. That stopped too. When I walked the line, the talk went quiet ahead of me and started up again behind.

I moved one of the young fellows, Cody, off the machining end to hang doors in Earl’s spot. He was quick. First full day he hung seventy-one.

He hung his apron on the back of a chair.