The Crew That Refilled Locker 114
By my fourth year I had moved to final test, and I never left it.
Here is what Tallgrass makes: hydraulic cylinders. The steel arms that lift the bucket on a farm loader, tilt the bed of a grain truck, raise the blade on a county grader. If one fails in the field it does not fail politely. It fails with the bucket up and a man standing under it.
My job was to see that it did not. Every cylinder off Line 4 came to my stand. I hooked it up, brought it to three thousand pounds of pressure, and held it for twenty seconds. I watched the gauge. That is the part everybody understands.
The other part nobody wrote down. I wiped the rod with a white cotton glove, the whole length, and I held my head close to the gland and listened. A rod seal that is going to weep gives a faint wet tick under pressure, a sound you would call nothing if you had never heard it, and then a bead of oil no bigger than a pinhead at the wiper. The gauge will not tell you. The gauge holds at three thousand and calls it a pass, and four months later a farmer is wiping his loader arm and wondering why his sleeves are oily.
I taught myself to hear that tick in 1998. Nobody showed me. I just got tired of the returns.
Gene died four years ago in March. His heart, in the barn, on an ordinary Tuesday. The kids were grown and two states away, Lisa in Denver and Mark in Kansas City, and they came home for a week and then went home again, which is what grown children do.
I held on to the job. I did not stay at Tallgrass for love of hydraulic cylinders. I stayed for the health insurance and for the pension. The plan pays a full benefit at thirty years of service, at any age, and carries your medical coverage through to Medicare. For me that meant $2,310 a month and a medical card that bridged me to sixty-five. Without the thirty, I was looking at a reduced early benefit of $1,480 and no medical bridge at all.
Shelby Dolezal came in at 5:52 and found me standing at my bench with the lid in my hand.
Shelby is twenty-nine. I trained her on seals when she was twenty-three, and she has worked the rod-seal station on Line 4 ever since. She came around the corner with her lunch bag swinging, talking about her truck, and she saw the box, and she stopped talking.
She put the back of her wrist against her mouth. That was all. She stood there in her safety glasses and made no sound.
It was the only crying anybody did on that floor that day, and she did it quietly, which I have never forgotten. I said, “Shelby, I’m all right,” which was a thing I said to people for four years after Gene, and they believed it every time, and it was never true.
Others came in behind her. Cheryl Kucera from assembly, with her hair net in her hand. Aiden Roper, twenty-two, eleven months on the line. They stopped at the edge of my bench the way people stop at the edge of a yard where a dog has died, and nobody asked what had happened, because every one of them could see.