The Man I Let Go Before Christmas

I had been asking myself one question since about eight o’clock on Christmas Eve, and it was a question I should have asked six years earlier. Earl Dobbs had been hanging doors for twenty-nine years. Jeff had been hanging them for eleven. A man does not do a thing for twenty-nine years and stay slower at it than the fellow beside him unless he is doing something the other fellow is not.

So what was he doing?

I took his apron down off the nail.

The nickel was there. So was a block plane no longer than my hand, with the iron honed so keen it took the hair off my wrist. A three-quarter chisel with a leather cap on it. A stub of carpenter’s pencil. And in the bib pocket, a stack of thin gray cardboard strips, cut to the exact size of a hinge leaf, held together with a rubber band.

Hinge shims.

I stood there holding them and I felt my face go hot in that cold building.

When the router bit on the machining end gets dull, it cuts the hinge pocket a hair too deep. A hair is all it takes. Hang that slab and the door sits crooked in its frame, tight at the top and wide at the bottom, and in a month it is rubbing, and the lumberyard that sold it gets a phone call. The right thing to do, by the book, is hang a red tag on it and roll it to the rework cage, where a man takes it all apart again.

Earl had not been red-tagging them. He had been fixing them. A shim behind the hinge, a pass with the plane where a slab came through a little proud, a chisel where the pocket was not square. Then the nickel down the gap to prove it. Then on down the line with the rest, a good door, and nobody the wiser.

That was why nine doors had taken him forty minutes. That was sixty-one against seventy-four.

I went up to the quality cage and unlocked the cabinet where the rework logs are kept. Every red tag in the plant gets written in that book: date, shift, line, what was wrong. I signed the first-shift sheet every Friday. I had signed it for six years.

I sat down on the concrete with the binder and a pencil and went through it by the light of my phone.

For the year, up to the fifth of December, first shift on line three had averaged four red tags a week.

Second shift ran the same line, the same router, the same lumber. They had averaged twenty-three.

I had seen those two numbers side by side every month for six years. I had believed it was because I ran a tighter shift. I had never once asked why.

Then I turned to December.

The week of the eighth, the first week without Earl, first shift had nineteen red tags. The week of the fifteenth, twenty-six. The Monday and Tuesday before the shutdown, two days, fourteen.

There was a yellow slip clipped to the last page, in the shipping clerk’s handwriting. A lumberyard in Wausau had refused part of a load on the eighteenth. Thirty-two units, sent back on our truck. Doors binding in the frame.

I did the arithmetic on the back of a blank tag, and I did it three times, because I wanted it to come out some other way. A red tag is about half an hour of a rework man’s time, and half the time it is a new frame besides. Earl was thirteen doors a shift behind Jeff. He had been saving me better than twenty tags a week and Lord knows how many trucks coming home.