The Card I Laid on His Desk

Dale in the Front Row

Dale Pruett sat in the first row with his right hand still wrapped in a brace the size of a ball mitt.

He had been back three weeks, on light duty, counting parts and pushing a broom, and he clapped too.

He clapped with his left hand against his thigh because his right hand could not close anymore. He lost three fingers on that press in July.

The index, the middle, the ring. They could not put them back.

I will tell you what that machine is, so you understand.

Number Six is a two hundred ton press, an old Minster that has been in that building longer than most of us have worked there.

It runs a progressive die that stamps steel brackets for the camper frames they build up in Elkhart.

Steel goes in one end on a coil, and brackets drop out the other.

When a blank hangs up in the die, the press jams, and the easy thing, the thing everyone did, was to reach in and free it with your fingers rather than shut the whole line down and call maintenance.

Dale reached in on a Tuesday afternoon to clear a hung blank. His foot was nowhere near the pedal.

But that old press had a worn trip, and the ram came down on its own, the way a worn press will, and it did not care whose hand was under it.

I was two machines over when he screamed. I will hear that sound for the rest of my life. So will everybody who was on the floor that day.

I got to him before the line even stopped.

He was down on one knee holding his wrist, white as the paper on the wall, and the sound he was making was not words.

Patty hit the red mushroom button on the end cap and the whole line shuddered dead.

I took off my flannel shirt and wrapped his hand and I held it up over his head the way you are taught, and I talked to him the whole time, nonsense, anything, the Lord’s Prayer, the score of his boy’s ball game, whatever came.

His blood came through the flannel and down my arm and I kept my voice flat and easy because he was watching my face to know how bad it was.

The thing I remember is that he kept apologizing.

He kept saying he was sorry, he was sorry, he should have shut it down, he knew better.

A man with his fingers on the floor of that press, saying sorry to me.

We do not shut the line down for a hung blank. That is the truth of it, and everybody knows it and nobody says it.

The line is what pays us.

You reach in, you clear it, you keep the parts dropping, because a stopped line is a number somebody upstairs looks at.

Dale did what all of us did every shift. The press is what should not have let him.

They flew him to Fort Wayne. He kept the thumb and the little finger on that hand.

The three in the middle, the ones you point with and count on and hold a hammer with, those were gone before he landed.