The Last Vat at Pike Lick

The hallway

I want to tell this part straight, because the way I have told it to myself over the years has been softer than it was.

Mr. Pruitt did not shout. He said, “Who had the steam on this vat?”

And I stood three feet from Cyrus Gentry, and I opened my mouth, and nothing came out. I did not decide to be silent.

The silence got to me first, and every second I let it go on, the cost of breaking it went up.

I could feel Lavada seven months along, and the note on the forty acres, and my own good name, all stacked on my tongue like sandbags.

Cyrus looked at me. I will carry that look to my grave. It was not angry. It was the look a man gives you when he has seen what you are carrying and has made up his mind to take the other end.

“I did, Mr. Pruitt,” he said. “I had it set too high. I’m sorry.”

It was a lie, and a kind one, and an expensive one, and I let him tell it.

Mr. Pruitt sent the rest of us out into the hall while he and Leland talked to him. I stood there with my hand wrapped in a wet towel, and I heard Mr.

Pruitt’s voice go up and Cyrus’s stay low and steady. I could have walked back in. The door was ten feet away. I counted the tiles on the floor instead.

There were forty-two between me and that door, and I have counted them in my sleep ever since.

At seven o’clock Leland called me in to give my account of the night.

I told him I had cooked the vat to ninety-eight and left it for half an hour to take a call at the front office. I said it to Mr.

Pruitt’s face, with Cyrus sitting in the next chair. Cyrus did not look at me. He looked at the floor, and he nodded, once, as if I had said something that agreed with what he already knew.

That is the sin. Not the nap. A man can sleep one minute too long and the Lord will forgive it.

The sin is that I had the chance to say it was me three times in one morning, and I went three for three the other way.

What it cost

The Louisville truck went out eleven hundred pounds short, and the chain canceled the contract that March. Mr. Pruitt laid off nine people over the spring, including Delwin Ledbetter, who drove the milk route out past the river.

The town knew whose name went with the nine. Cyrus Gentry’s name went with the nine.

Mr. Pruitt fired him that morning, at half past seven. Leland walked him to the dock and took the white coat off him there, in front of the crew coming in for the early shift.

I was in the lot when he came out. He had his cap in his hand.

He folded the bill once down the middle, the way he did, and set it on his head and looked at me across forty feet of gravel. He did not say a word.

He nodded, like a man who has seen a bill and does not plan to send it, and he got in his truck.

What followed was slower and worse. People stopped speaking to him at the grocery. Somebody left a block of cheese on his porch with a note that said “for the contract.”

Billie, who was eight, got called “Leather” at school. I heard about that from my own daughter, who came home asking what it meant.

He lasted until April. He loaded what he had into his truck and drove his daughter north out of the county. I watched them go from the window of the feed store.

She was in the passenger seat, looking out at the hills, with her coloring book in her lap.