The Crew That Refilled Locker 114
What I did not know was that eleven miles away forty people were making sure somebody did.
Everything I am going to tell you now I learned afterward, from Shelby’s notebook, which she kept as if she were building a case, and from Vern, and Tomás, and an old man in a lawn chair.
On Friday at lunch, forty people from three shifts did not go to the break room. They went to the east end of the parking lot, to the shade of the old grain elevator, and sat on tailgates and the curb and ate what they had brought and did not say much.
Tomás Villarreal sat in his truck.
Tomás is forty-four. He has been in maintenance at Tallgrass nineteen years, and at 4:30 that morning Rich Hargadine, the plant manager, had come to the maintenance shop and told him there was a locker to open before shift. Tomás is the one who cut my padlock, with bolt cutters, at 4:41. He did not ask whose locker it was, because you do not ask. The lock was already on the floor when he read the name on the door frame. He sat down on the bench for a while.
He kept the lock. Nobody had told him to throw it away, so he put the cut padlock in a sandwich bag and the bag in his shirt pocket, and he carried it all day against his chest.
“I should have said something,” he told Vern.
“You did what you were told,” Vern said. “So did everybody. That’s what we’re going to fix.”
Saturday morning at seven, twenty-two people came to Vern’s pole barn on Rural Route 3. His wife made coffee in the big church percolator. Cheryl brought two dozen kolaches from the bakery in Wilber, because this is Nebraska, and when somebody has been hurt you bring something with fruit in it.
The oldest person in the barn was Arlo Nuss.
Arlo is eighty-four. He ran the shop floor when I was hired, and he sat on the pension committee back in the eighties when the Koenigs wrote the plan. He came in his good Sunday cap, with a walker he refused to put weight on and a folder of his own on his knees. He had heard it at the café that morning, before it was properly light.
“I hired that woman,” he said. “I told her it’d hurt her forearms.”
“It did,” Shelby said.
“Well, now I’ve got to go tell somebody it hurt worse than that.”
Brenda Villarreal was there too, Tomás’s wife, a paralegal for a firm in Lincoln, a quiet woman in a quilted vest. She read the plan summary Arlo had brought, front and back, with her glasses pushed up in her hair. The barn waited.
“I’m not going to tell you what to do about the law,” she said finally. “I’m not her lawyer. I’ll say one thing, and it isn’t legal advice. If you want these people to fix it, don’t threaten them. Companies don’t fold when they’re threatened. They call their lawyers. Write them a letter. Ask them, in plain words, to look at her date.”
“That’s all?” Vern said.
“Companies hate being asked politely,” Brenda said, “by a lot of people at once.”
So they wrote a letter. It took an hour and forty minutes, because it was written by line workers and every sentence was argued over, and in the end it was five lines. Shelby has a copy in her notebook, and she let me copy it down.