The Nights I Never Told Them About
The plant
I have worked hard all my life. I thought I knew what a tired man was. I did not know.
The packout line runs on a belt about as wide as a kitchen table. Chicken comes down it in bags, and you grab them and count them and set them in cardboard cases, forty pounds each. The cases go to the end of the line where somebody stacks them. Then the pallet jack takes the pallet to the dock, and the belt keeps coming. All night. At 34 degrees.
For the first week I couldn’t feel my hands from eleven at night until I got home. They cracked across the knuckles and the cracks bled, and I put gum on them under the gloves because I’d read that somewhere.
The man who ran the line was Efrain Salazar. He was forty-one then, a thick-shouldered, quiet fellow, born in Guadalajara and raised in Texas, who had worked nights at that plant for eleven years. He had a wife and three girls and a house in Anderson. He was the first person to talk to me on my first night, and he did it by asking if I owned two pairs of socks.
“No, sir,” I said.
“Wool and cotton,” he said. “Cotton under. Tomorrow you bring both.”
He called me Mr. Kincaid for a week. I told him to quit, and after that he called me Lyle, and I never once heard him make a remark about my age, which a lot of younger men would have. A woman named Dolores on the line next to me, who’d been boxing chicken for nineteen years, gave me the whole secret of the job on my third night. “You don’t fight it,” she said. “You find the rhythm and go along. It’s like dancing with a man who can’t lead.”
A boy named Dominic, nineteen, started lifting the top cases onto my stacks when my shoulders went. Neither of us ever said a word about it.
The shift ran from ten at night until six-thirty in the morning, with fifteen minutes at one and thirty minutes for lunch at three. I didn’t eat lunch. I ate a sandwich in four minutes and slept for twenty-six, in the cab of my truck with the heater on and an alarm set on my phone. Then I drove the forty minutes home, parked at the end of the lane to change my shirt, and walked into the kitchen at seven like a man back from an ordinary night on the highway.
Darlene always had breakfast on.
After breakfast I did the chores. I fed what cattle I had left, checked the water, mended fence, and took a nap on a bale in the hay barn around noon where nobody would look. At supper I sat across from my wife with my eyes open. At nine I left to drive to Carthage. I slept about four hours a night, and some weeks less.
I did the arithmetic every night on the line. I needed the $73,700 at the end, and the interest-only payments on the way, and the property tax and the feed store besides. Call it $88,000 over a hundred and four weeks. At my pay, with overtime, I would clear it with a few hundred dollars to spare.
If I didn’t miss a night. Not one.
I never did.