The Job Nobody Would Give Me

The first morning

I was at the gate at seven-twenty-eight. I sat in Marcel’s old truck, which he had loaned me, with the engine ticking, and I walked in at seven-thirty on the dot.

The foreman was Ulysse Ardoin, fifty-eight, broad and slow, with forearms like fence posts and a gray mustache that did not move when he talked. He had worked for the Fontaines thirty-one years.

He looked at me the way you look at a dog that bit somebody. “I put the lumber on the racks. You hand it up,” he said, and that was all he said to me that day. He said nothing for three weeks after, except to point.

I learned the yard slowly. How to read a cut list. How to tell a number one southern yellow pine from a number two by the knots.

Why a man building a crawfish dock wanted treated lumber while a man building a church fellowship shed wanted something that would last. By noon my hand ached to the elbow, and I did not mind.

Customers minded. Lucien Vidrine, who built pole barns and hay sheds across three parishes, walked in at nine and saw me at the stack.

“That him?” he said to Ulysse. Ulysse said nothing. “Celeste,” Lucien called toward the office, “that’s the one that hit your shed. What in the world are you doing?”

Celeste came out with her clipboard and looked at him over her glasses. “I am running my yard, Lucien. Did you want the two-by-eights or not?”

He wanted the two-by-eights. He stood at the register with his back to me and told her, loud enough to carry, that she would regret it.

She wrote up his ticket. “Maybe so,” she said. “Twenty-two forty.” He did not come back for a month and a half.

She never spoke of it to me. She kept handing me the next thing. Another list. Another bundle. Another day at seven-thirty.

My first paycheck came on a Friday, four hundred and twelve dollars after taxes, in an envelope with my name typed on the front.

I had not seen my name on a paycheck in ten years. I did not have a bank account, and I told Celeste I would take it in cash if she could.

“I do not keep cash for that,” she said, and put on her coat. “Get in the car.”

She drove me to the bank herself in her old Buick, a mile down the road, and parked and kept the engine running. “I’ll wait,” she said.

A young woman at the desk looked up my name on a screen and her face went small and tight, and then she said the account would take a fifty-dollar deposit. I had Noella’s fifty dollars.

When I came out with a white card in my hand, Celeste did not ask what the woman had said. She put the car in gear. “There,” she said. “Now you are a man with a bank.”