Four Men Who Refused to Stay Silent
“I’ll deal with that myself,” he said. “Not Bart. Me.”
He called at 11:40. I was sitting in the recliner with the ice machine running.
“Corporate’s man is here a day early, because I asked him to come early,” Bill said. “I put your four statements and a printout from the scanner in front of him, and he put it in front of Jodi on the phone. I can’t tell you everything that’s going to happen. I can tell you that the termination is not going to stand, and that your injury is being reported as a work injury as of 10:40 Tuesday morning, and that I am the one calling the carrier.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. I should have caught this on Tuesday.” He stopped. “Bart is off the dock as of this morning. He’s been told to go home until we talk.”
“What about the lie?”
“It’s on paper, Galen. They don’t like it when the paper’s against them.”
He didn’t say anything else about it that day, and I didn’t ask.
By Monday it was done. A letter arrived with the corporate logo, signed by a vice president whose name I didn’t know, saying my notice of termination had been rescinded as issued in error, that my absence would be treated as a medical leave and a compensable one, and that my position would be held. The claim was accepted. Dale Linnell read it twice and called it the cleanest turnaround he’d seen in twenty years of this, and he said he would not send a bill for what he had done so far.
The board changed, too. Eddie told me. Bill Faber walked in at 5:45 that Monday and wiped it himself, and wrote a zero, and underneath it, small, October 27th. No speech. A couple of the guys on first shift asked what it meant, and Eddie told them that a man had hurt his shoulder, and they stopped asking.
My surgery was in Springfield. Two hours and ten minutes. The surgeon said it was a full tear, and that if I had waited another year it might not have been repairable. The bill came to $47,850. I never saw it. It went to the company’s carrier, because it was a work injury, the way it should have gone from the first minute.
I won’t tell you the company made it up to me. Illinois pays two-thirds of your average weekly wage while you’re off, and no company in this state has to do more. For me that was $724 a week against $1,086. Prairieland did not top us up, and I never expected it to. We got through the winter on Trudy’s overtime at the credit union and a favor from her brother. I did my therapy twice a week in a strip mall in Decatur. I learned to button my own shirt with my right hand again in March.
Calvin got a written warning for the raised forks. That was Bill Faber’s decision, and he told me so himself, in his office, because Calvin had been running a load with the forks up, and it was true. But in January, after the carrier’s safety audit came back, Bill pulled the warning out of Calvin’s file and told him it was gone. Calvin didn’t say anything. He went back to the lift truck. He has never taken another load through that aisle, and he checks the clasp on the chain with his thumb every time he passes, whether anyone is watching or not.