The Job Nobody Would Give Me

The long winter

The town did not forgive me quickly. That first winter I carried loads to trucks where drivers stood with their arms crossed. I wore the yard’s green apron and kept my head down.

I learned which customers would speak and which would write their orders on the back of a receipt and slide it across to Celeste without a word.

Mrs. Dupré came in once in January for four cedar posts. She walked past me and Ulysse to the office door. “I will wait for someone else to load these,” she said.

Celeste looked at her a long moment. “Then you may wait at the gate, Aurelie, because the only man on the rack today is Jude.”

Mrs. Dupré sat in her car in the gravel for twenty-five minutes with the engine off. Then she came back in, tight-lipped, and paid. I carried the posts to her trunk.

I said, “Yes, ma’am,” to nothing in particular, and she looked at me. It was a small thing. I could not read it, and I did not try.

On a Thursday in February it rained all day, and a flatbed of treated pine from Alexandria arrived at four in the afternoon, long after everyone had punched out.

The driver was in a hurry and the racks were soaked. There were forty-two bundles to stack and a dark sky coming on. I started unloading by myself.

Two hours later my good hand was blistered and my bad one had gone numb. The light was gone, and a pair of headlights swung across the yard. It was Ulysse.

He got out of his truck without a word. He pulled on his gloves and started stacking beside me. We worked another hour in the dark, and neither of us spoke.

When the last bundle was racked, he went back to his truck and came back with a steel thermos and held out the cup. It was chicory coffee, hot and strong enough to stand a spoon in.

“You square ’em better than the last boy,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“Seven-thirty,” he said, and went home.

He started talking to me the next week, in his slow, careful way. He never apologized for the three weeks, and I never asked him to.