The Watch From the Ones at Home

“No. I do not suppose he did. I tried to pay him. I had my checkbook out. He would not take a dime. He said, ‘You would do the same for my wife.’ He had to be at that plant at six in the morning, and he had been in my cellar until one.”

She tapped the fifty and the ten and the two ones I had not picked up.

“So you will put that back in your envelope. I have waited twenty-eight years to do something for Dennis Lowe, and I will not be argued out of it by his wife.”

I put it back in the envelope. I could not have argued anyway. I did not have the voice for it just then.

“It will be ready Thursday,” she said. “I do the lettering by hand, and I will not rush it.”

I went back to my window with sixty-two dollars I had not expected to have and my mascara in a state.

What I did not know, that Monday, was that I was not the only one doing something.

I got this part later, in pieces, mostly from Tiny himself, and some from Larry Combs.

Tiny was Dennis’s foreman on Line 4 for nineteen years. He is six foot five and built like a chest freezer, and nobody alive remembers who first called him Tiny. He is sixty-three and still working, which is why he was not at the Eagles hall on Saturday. The banquet is for the retirees and their wives and the front office. Tiny was home in his recliner.

Monday morning Larry Combs came by the plant to clean out his locker. He found Tiny at the foreman’s desk and he said, “They did not give Denny a watch.”

“They called eleven of us,” Larry said. “He sat right there and clapped for every one, Tiny. I walked back to my table carrying that box and I could not look at him.”

Tiny said he sat there a long minute. Then he got up and went to the vending area, where there is a rack of greeting cards the auxiliary sells for a dollar, and he bought the biggest one on it. It had a fish on the front and said “Happy Retirement, You Old Trout.” He said it was that or a sympathy card with lilies.

He wrote his own name first. Then he took it out on the floor.

He did not make a speech. He would walk up to a man at his station, wait for a stopping place, and say, “You know they did not give Dennis Lowe a watch Saturday.” And then he would hold out the card and a pen.

He took it around first shift on Monday. He stayed over on his own time for second. Tuesday he came in early to catch third shift going out the door.

Every man who signed it reached for his wallet. Tiny had not asked for money. The first one, a boy named Kevin who Dennis trained when he was nineteen, just held out a five and said, “Get him one. A good one. Get it from us.” After that it was five dollars a man, and Tiny carried a coffee can.

Forty-one men signed that card. Some of them wrote only their names. Some of them wrote more than that.

I did not know any of this. I went to work and came home and made supper, and Dennis said nothing about Saturday at all. If you did not know him you would have thought he had forgotten it.