Four Men Who Refused to Stay Silent
So that’s what I did. I sat in the break room with a bag of ice from the machine and a dish towel and a cup of coffee Eddie brought me, which I held with my left hand because my right was no good to me. At noon I told Bart I was going to urgent care. He said that was my call. At 12:15 I drove myself to Mattoon with my left hand on the wheel and my right arm pinned against my ribs.
The doctor was a quiet woman named Dr. Sayers. She pressed on two places and I almost left the table through the ceiling.
“I’d bet money this is a full tear of the rotator cuff,” she said. “You’ll need an MRI to be sure, and probably surgery. How did it happen?”
“At work. A pallet fell. I caught it.”
“Then your employer needs to be told in writing, and I’ll mark this as a work injury.” She wrote it on the chart, and then she wrote it again on a half sheet with her name and the time. “Keep that. Keep a copy of everything.”
I said I would.
I drove back to the warehouse to hand Bart her note. I got there at 1:50, and he met me in the lot and said Jodi wanted a word.
I sat in my truck for twenty minutes after they walked me out. Wes from security stood thirty feet off with his eyes on the ground. He had been to my daughter’s graduation party and he was ashamed of the job. I had a box on the seat beside me: my lunch cooler, my gloves, a mug with a faded combine on it, and the folded note from Dr. Sayers.
My arm was throbbing in time with my pulse. I called Trudy at the credit union and the branch manager put her on.
“I got fired,” I said.
She didn’t say anything for about three seconds.
“What do you mean you got fired?”
I told her. I told her the way I’ve told you, leaving nothing out. She listened without a sound, and when I was done she said, “Come home. I’ll leave now.”
“You’re at work.”
“Galen. Come home.”
She beat me to the driveway. She had told her manager she had a family emergency and handed her drawer to Kay, which in a town like ours means the whole square knew by supper. She put an ice pack on my shoulder and sat across the kitchen table and put both hands around my left one.
“What can we do?” she said.
I thought about the lawyer first, and the state, and the forms. A man can file with the state Workers’ Compensation Commission. A man can hire a lawyer who does nothing but this, and many do, and I won’t say a word against anyone who does.
But I had a man at church tell me once about his own fight over his back. He waited fourteen months. What I took from it was that a lie on paper gets stronger every day it sits. Jodi’s notice already said I’d removed a chain. If four men’s memories were going to be worth anything, somebody had to ask them while they were fresh, and ask them as men, not as witnesses.
And there was Jared.
“I want to call the four who were there,” I said.
“Today?”
“Right now. Before somebody gets to them first.”