Four Men Who Refused to Stay Silent
Arlo came first with a yellow legal pad. Eddie came next in the clean shirt he wore to church. Jared came in right at seven with a pie in a dish with a dish towel over it, and his mother’s name was on a strip of tape on the bottom. Calvin was last and pale. He stayed standing at the end of the counter for a while with his keys in his fist.
Trudy sat them at the oak table, which seats six with the leaf in. She set out coffee, plates and forks, and the pie, and then she took her own cup to the front room, and so did I.
I’d like to say I heard nothing. I heard Arlo’s pencil, which is a carpenter’s pencil and sounds like a man sawing quietly. I heard Eddie ask how to spell “scanner,” and Arlo tell him. I heard Jared stop and start, stop and start. About twenty minutes in I heard Calvin pull out a chair. It scraped.
An hour later Trudy went back in, and I followed her.
There were four sets of pages on the table, and nothing matched. Arlo’s was two sheets off the legal pad, in square slow capitals. Eddie’s ran a full page and a half and wandered. Calvin’s was eight lines, and the last line said, in his own words, “I told him the forks would be up and he told me go slow.” Jared had written the longest, and it was careful and young, and in the margin he’d drawn a small floor plan of the aisle with an X where he was kneeling.
“Do I put the time?” Calvin asked.
“Put what you remember.”
“I remember it was 9:35 or so. I looked at the clock on the scanner because we were behind.”
“Then put 9:35 or so.”
Arlo had written his first page at home, and before we ate he slid it across the oak toward me. It was a plain statement of the chain, the order and Calvin’s answer. The second line on it was the one I had not thought about at all, and I read it twice.
He saw me read it. “That’s why I brought it,” he said. “Ask Eddie.”
I looked at Eddie.
“Oh,” Eddie said. He put his fork down. “Oh, that’s right.”
I’ll come back to that.
Jared ate a slice of the pie his mother made and told Trudy it was too sweet, and she told him it was exactly right. Then the four of them put their names to their pages and dated them October 28th. Calvin signed last. He printed his name and then wrote it in cursive under the print, as though that would make it count twice.
We came through the front door of the plant at 5:50 Thursday morning. Trudy drove me and she parked and walked in beside me, and I did not tell her not to.
The four men were already inside by the board. It still said 412. Nobody had wanted to touch it since Tuesday, and I think nobody had thought it was theirs to touch.
Bill Faber came in at 6:00. He is a tall man, gray in the face, who started on the floor like the rest of us and moved up through the office, and he was holding a paper cup of gas station coffee and a phone he kept looking at. He had driven in from Peoria before dawn. When he saw the five of us standing there by his white board, he stopped walking.