Evan Hunter - Sons

“Oh, are you a veteran?” Mr. Moreland asked.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“See any combat?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I was with the Third Division at the Marne and later fought in the Meuse-Argonne offensive.”

“We were hoping for somebody with at least some experience, though,” Mr. Moreland said.

“Well, I haven’t any experience, sir,” I said, “but I’m a hard worker. I’ve got a wife to support, you see, and...”

“Oh, are you married, Taylor?”

“Tyler. Yes, sir, I was married just last Sunday. I’m here in Chicago on my honeymoon.”

“You’re applying for a job while you’re on your honeymoon?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, well,” Mr. Moreland said.

“Sir,” I said, “I can’t see any future for me in timber.”

“Can you see one in paper?”

“Yes, sir, I can,” I said.

“When’s your honeymoon over, Taylor?”

“Tyler. On the twenty-first of April.”

“Can you start on May first?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then I guess you’re hired.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, and that was that.

I was always having to break things to Nancy after I’d already gone and done them, it seemed. I told her that night about my taking the job, and she said she thought I was crazy, so I reminded her that not so long ago she had said she’d come with me even to Paris if that’s where I wanted to go, and she said, Pardon? which she said a lot lately when she heard things she didn’t want to hear.

The apartment on Springfield and Twenty-eighth was nice, even Nancy had to admit that, a far sight nicer than the one we’d agreed to rent in Eau Fraiche. But Chicago was overwhelming, and I thought I would never get used to it. In our first several weeks there, I imagined I would choke each time I walked out into the street, the soot and grime were so terrible. Smoke poured from a thousand chimneys, prairie dust billowed up from the sidewalks, filth seemed everywhere in evidence, despite the big iron litter bins on the curbs, two and a half feet long and eighteen inches high, but so positioned that you had to step into the gutter to lift the lid and drop anything into them.

The buildings were another thing, not as big as some I’d seen in New York but enough to make me dizzy anyway whenever I looked up at one of them. In Eau Fraiche, the tallest building had been the Wisconsin Trust over on Carter Street, six stories high and considered huge. Here in Chicago, the City Hall and County Building covered the entire square between La Salle, Randolph, Washington and Clark Streets. Even the post office filled a whole city block, a big slate-gray building with a huge dome in the center and openwork stone balustrades over the pillared wings on each of its four sides. Of all the architecture in Chicago, I think I felt most comfortable with the two lions outside the Art Institute, themselves enormous, but affectionately called “prairie dogs” by the people of the city. I was not yet a Chicagoan. I could not get used to the grime or the size, I could not get used to the lack of open space, and most of all, I could not get used to the noise.

Trolley cars rattled and clanked over countless switch intersections, iron wheels raising a din so loud you could hardly hear yourself speak, whether you were riding in one or walking alongside it on the sidewalk. There were more automobiles in two Chicago city blocks than there were in all of Eau Fraiche (well, maybe I’m exaggerating) and they made more noise with their honking horns and squeaking brakes and squealing tires and broken wheel chains than I had ever heard anywhere else except on the battlefield in France. There were still a lot of horses in Chicago, too, clomping along, pulling coal wagons that tumbled their clattering loads onto chutes into open basement windows, hauling wagons carrying jangling scrap iron and junk, drivers screaming at their teams, policemen blowing whistles, and over it all the elevated trains pounding in from north, south, and west, to add to the resounding cacophony that was the parallelogram of the Loop. I could not stand anything about Chicago.

Moreover, I was beginning to think in those first few months that the paper industry wasn’t exactly for me. My job was to stand between the barker and the woodpecker, which did not mean that I was positioned between a dog and a bird, though the foreman did have a dog, a Welsh terrier who nipped at my heels and who went frantic each time the cranes piled up a new shipment of eight-foot-long logs. It seemed to me that a dog who went crazy at the sight of wood shouldn’t have been hanging around a paper mill. I’d never liked dogs, anyway. (That’s not true. I started disliking dogs when the Germans were using them in the war.) This particular little dog was called Offisa Pupp after the cartoon character, and he started hating me the day I reported to work. My partner on the job was a fellow named Allen Garrett, a strapping six-footer from Chicago’s South Side, who, like me, was seeking to make a “future” in the paper industry. Allen worked with me at the far end of the barking drum where the peeled logs came out. We both held spiked picaroons in our hands, and we — well, I think I’d better explain what I was beginning to learn about making paper from wood.

Back in Eau Fraiche, we always cut a felled tree into eight-foot lengths, but the drum barker wasn’t designed to take such big chunks of wood and also you couldn’t make paper out of wood that still had the bark on it. So the first thing that happened was all the logs were piled up in these towering pyramids and then dumped into what was called the hot pond, which was a big concrete basin through which hot waste water from other parts of the plant flowed. This was done to soften the bark and get rid of leaves and ice and clinging forest dirt. Then they were carried up a jack-ladder conveyer to the circular saw where they were cut into four-foot lengths so they could be taken to the drum barker. I came in after the drum barker, some exciting job, I was not exactly an executive.

The drum barker, or the barking drum as we also called it, was a cylindrical steel tube open at both ends, close to fifteen feet in diameter and some forty-five feet long. Supported by rollers and enormous steel tires, power-driven by chain belts slung from overhead and spaced along its entire length, the drum received a tangle of logs on a conveyer belt from the hot pond and the cut-off saw, tumbled, tossed, and sprayed them for maybe fifteen minutes, and then plunked them stripped and white onto a conveyer belt at the other end. The drum made a lot of noise, as what wouldn’t with thousands of logs banging into each other and shedding their skins, the loosened bark dropping through the open-rib construction onto another conveyer belt, to be whisked away as fuel for the steam plant. At the far end of the drum, Allen Garrett and I studied each of the logs as they went by on the conveyer belt. If we saw one with a section of bark still clinging to it, or a furrow filled with pitch, or a knot, we hooked it with our picaroons and rolled it over to the woodpecker, where the operator there would either drill out the knot or grind off the bark, after which we rolled the log back onto the conveyer belt. I knew nothing at all about what happened to the wood once it moved deeper into the mill. I was new in this business, and it was a bore.

I worked fifty-four hours a week, from eight o’clock in the morning to six o’clock at night. It took me almost an hour and a half to get to the mill in Joliet, which meant that I had to get up at six in the morning, wash and dress, go into the kitchen for breakfast with Nancy, and then run down to catch the #88 streetcar to Archer Avenue, where I transferred to the #74 to Cicero Avenue, and then caught a train. The train was run by the Chicago and Joliet Electric Railway, and the trip was thirty-one miles each way, morning and night. I would not get back to the apartment until close to eight o’clock. It was a long, grueling noisy day, broken only by the pleasant lunch-hour conversations I had with Allen Garrett. I naturally looked forward to my Sundays with Nancy.