The Fifty I Laid On His Desk

He didn’t say anything. He stood there behind that metal desk with his fifty in his hand, and his mouth worked once like he was trying to find a word, and then he just nodded to me.

One nod. He put the bill in his jacket pocket and sat back down and put his glasses on.

“Driveway on Ninth Street today,” he said, looking at his tickets. “They want it before noon.”

“We’ll have it in,” I said.

I turned around. The men in the doorway stepped back to let me through, and we all went out to the trucks without a word, and we poured that driveway on Ninth Street, and it was in by eleven forty.

Nothing changed after that, not that anybody could see. Hobart did not make a speech. He did not call a meeting.

He did not hand out bonuses or call anybody into the office to explain himself. He was the same quiet, gruff old man in the same navy jacket, first in the building every morning.

That Thursday we poured a long driveway out on a farm place east of town, a young couple building their first house on a corner of her folks’ land.

It was a cold day, and we were racing the weather. It was going to be one of the last pours of the season.

When we had it floated and edged and broomed, I walked down to the far corner where it met the gravel road.

I knelt down on a board, and I took a finishing nail out of my pocket.

Sully had done this on every driveway he ever finished. Down in one corner, small, where the homeowner would hardly ever look, he would press his initials into the wet concrete with a nail.

S.M. and the year. He said every man ought to sign his work, and if somebody didn’t like it they could take it up with him.

I had never done it once. I had always told him it was a little bit of a showoff thing to do. He would just grin at me and keep writing.

I knelt there on the board, and I pressed S.M. into the corner of that driveway, and the year under it, as neat as I could.

When I looked up, the whole crew was standing on the slab around me, every one of them. Nobody had called them over.

Juddy was the one who spoke. “You did the M wrong,” he said. “He always made the middle of it come down further.”

“Then you fix it,” I said, and handed him the nail.

He knelt down with his bad shoulder and fixed it. Then he handed the nail to Pete, and Pete just touched the edge of the S and handed it on, and it went all the way around the crew like that, every man touching it once, until it came back to me.

Tanner was last before me. He knelt down on the board and did not do anything for a minute.

Then he wrote, very small under the year, the words thanks Sully. He stood up fast and walked off toward the truck, the way he had in the break room.

We left it. The young couple came out that afternoon to look at their new driveway, and the wife found it in the corner, and she asked me what it was.