The Shirts on the Conference Table
Rodney McAllister runs operations for the whole region now, five plants, out of Fort Cletus. But in 2005 he was a twenty-three-year-old kid with a community college welding certificate and a bad haircut, terrified of a press brake at Hoosier Hitch & Axle, and the forty-one-year-old operator who walked over and stood beside him was Ross Weller. Rodney has never forgotten whose press he learned on. He sends us a ham at Christmas.
I had not known Ross meant to call him. My husband, the man who didn’t want a fuss, had been planning since Sunday night, and he never said a word. He just let me think I had done it.
Tuesday at 6:41 in the morning I sat in the plant lot with the heater running and watched first shift go in, in trucks with Purdue stickers and TinCaps decals. Curtis Bell pulled in next to me, still in his night-weld gloves. Third shift gets off at 7, but he had come early on purpose.
He rolled down his window. “Everybody’s here, Mrs. Weller.” He held up a paper grocery sack from the Kroger. “My wife folded mine three times. She said if it’s going on a table, it better look right.”
Inside I could see a gray work shirt folded into a square with the name patch facing up. The collar was dark with years. Along the inside ran a strip of silver duct tape, and a card was paper-clipped to the front in block letters: Curtis Bell. Issued 6/2019. Patched 6 times. Taped 1.
Ross had stayed home. He wanted no one on that floor thinking this was about him. “It’s about thirty-one shirts,” he said. “I’m just a name on a card.” But he had asked me for one thing. “Be there when Rodney walks in. Don’t say a word. Just sit where he can see you.”
In the lobby Charlene Hartman, who has run the front desk and the payroll window since the building was poured, took one look at my face and said, “Mrs. Weller. They’ll want you in the conference room, honey.”
“I wasn’t invited.”
“Ross called Rodney, and Rodney called me at home.” She lowered her voice. “I’ve worked here twenty-eight years. I cut that check. Neil gave me the deduction code himself. I should have said something, and I didn’t, and I haven’t slept right since Friday.”
The conference room is at the end of the second-floor hall, with a long table of fake wood and a window over the loading dock. By 6:55 it was full of shirts.
Thirty-one of them, in a double row down the middle, each folded square, each with a card. They had been washed and ironed. Some of the men had laid theirs out on hangers first, the way you would for a funeral. Hector’s had a note clipped to the collar: Sec. 6, pg. 14. When worn. Tony Ferris’s was patched at both elbows and a shoulder. Bill Oster’s had a pocket repair so old the thread had gone brown. Jimmy Pace’s was the newest of the lot, and he had not folded it right; one sleeve was tucked under like a boy’s. His card said: Jimmy Pace. Issued 2021. Patched 3 times. Ross showed me how.