Steel Worker

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4. Everyday Life



I came into the mill five minutes late one morning, and went to the green check-house at the gate, to pick 1611, the numerical me, from the hook. A stumpy man in a chair looked up and said: "What number?"

I gave it. "An easy way to lose forty-three cents," I thought, feeling a little sore at the stumpy man, and going out through the door slowly.

I increased my step along the road to the open-hearth, and reached my locker just as the Pole who shared it was leaving.

"Goddam gloves!" he was saying. "Pay thirty-five cents--three days--goddam it--all gone--too much. What you think?"

"I think the leather ones at fifty cents last better," I said.

He made a guttural noise, signifying disgust, and left.

I opened the locker, and disentangled my working-clothes, still damp from the last shift, from the Pole's. I removed all my "good" clothes, and stood for a minute naked and comfortable. The thermometer had registered 95° when I got up, at 4.00.

For the past few days I had been demoted to the pit; there had been no jobs open on the floor. As I took up my gloves and smoked glasses, I wondered how I could get back to furnace work.

Pete was moving with his lurching short steps past Six.

"How about helping to-day on the floor?" I said.

He snapped back quickly in his blurred voice, "You work th' pit, tell y'--goddam quick, want y' on the floor."

I looked back at him, swore to myself, and went slowly down the pit stairs.

I couldn't find the gang at first, but later found half of them: Peter the Russian, the short Wop, the Aristocrat, and a couple more, all under furnace Eight, cleaning out cinder. The Aristocrat was trying to get the craneman to bring up one of the long boxes with curved bottoms for slag. The craneman was damning him. There was one too many at the job,--four is enough to clean cinder,--so I threw a bit of slag at Peter (for old time's sake) and passed on.

I met Al, and said, "Where are they working?"

"Clean up the pipes," he said.

The Croat, Marco, Joe, and Fritz were at Number 6, with forks. You see, the pipes run up the ladle's side and release a stopper for pouring the steel. They are covered with fire clay, which is destroyed after one or two ladlings and has to be knocked off and replaced. We loosened the clay with sledges, and Marco watered down the pipes with a hose, to cool them. They were moderately warm when Fritz and I started piling them on the truck. Once or twice the pipe touched Fritz's hand through a hole in his glove, and he yowled, and then laughed. Once or twice I yowled and laughed also.

When we piled near the top, we swung in unison, and tossed the pipe into the air. It was like piling wood.

I caught a torn piece of my pants on a sharp bit of slag while carrying two pipes, and acquired a rip halfway from pocket to knee. Marco had a safety pin for me at once; he kept emergency ones in his shirt-front.

We finished the job in half an hour, and pushed the truck till it came under jurisdiction of a crane. Marco fixed the hooks rather officiously, pushing Fritz and me aside. There is, I suppose, more snobbishness induced by the manner of crane-hooking than in any other pit function. The crane swung the pipes on holders and dropped them in front of the blacksmith shop. We carried them into the shop, Marco and I working together. Inside there were half a dozen small forges, some benches, and a drop hammer. It was the place where ladles and spoons were repaired. The blacksmiths and helpers gave us friendly, but condescending glances.

As we walked back, we saw the crane swing a ladle from the moulds into which it had been pouring toward the dumping pit in front of Five. When the giant bucket approached, the chain hooked to the bottom lifted slowly, and dregs half-steel, half-ash, rolled out into the dump. After a little cooling, we would clean up there. With the chain released, the bucket righted itself with a shuddering clank, and swayed in the air scattering bits of slag and burnt fire clay.

A little later, we did a three-hour job on those dregs. We loosened the slag with picks first, and then lifted forkfuls and shovelfuls into the crane-carried boxes. A good deal of scrap was in the lot, probably the makings of half a ton of steel. This, of course, went into a separate box. I hooked up a couple of big scrap-hunks, weighing perhaps 500 pounds each, and took some sport out of it. That is one small matter, at least, where a grain of judgment and ingenuity has place. A badly hooked scrap-hunk may fall and break a neck, or simply tumble and waste everybody's time. Loosening up with the pick, too, demands a slight knack and smacks faintly of the miner's skill. We had to go down into a pit, where there was heated slag on all sides, using boards to save scorching our shoe leather. In turning up fractures eight or ten inches thick, there would be an inner four inches still red-hot.

At eleven o'clock, I was working at a fair pace, flinging moderately husky forkfuls over a ten-foot space into the box, when Marco looked up.

"Hey," he called.

I glanced at him for a moment. He was smiling. "Rest yourself," he said; "we work hard when de big bosses come."

During the next fifty shovelfuls, the remark went the rounds of my head, trying to get condemned. My memory threw up articles in the "Quarterly Journal of Economics," with "inefficiency and the labor-slackers," and "moral irresponsibility of the worker on the job," and so forth, in them. A couple of sermons and a vista of editorial denunciations of the laboring man who is no longer willing to do "an honest day's work for an honest day's pay," seemed to bring additional pressure for righteous indignation. I asked the following questions of myself, one for every two forkfuls:--

"Isn't it morally a bad thing to soldier, anyway?

"Is Marco a moral enormity?

"Do business men soldier?

"Isn't 'Get to hell out of here if you don't want to work' the answer? Or has the twelve-hour day something to do with it?

"Can these five or six thousand unskilled workmen take any interest in their work, or must they go at it with a consciousness similar to that of the slaves who put up the Pyramids?"

I had to use the pick at this point, which broke up the inquiry, and I left the questions unanswered.

I saw wheelbarrowing ahead for the afternoon, and corralled the only one properly balanced, when I started work at 1.00 P.M., keeping it near me during a scrap-picking hour, until the job should break. At 2.15, it did. Al said: "Get over and clean out under Seven. If we can ever get this goddam stuff cleaned out--" That was an optimism of Al's.

One of the new men and I worked together all afternoon: pick at the slag, shovel, wheelbarrow, dump in the box, hook up to crane. Start over. There was a lot of dolomite and old fine cinder, very dusty, but not hot. This change in discomfort furnished a sensation almost pleasurable. I found out that everyone hid his shovel at the end of the shift, beside piles of brick in the cellar of the mill, under dark stairways, and so forth. I hadn't yet acquired one, but used mostly a fork, which isn't so personal an instrument, and of which there seemed to be a common supply. I felt keen to "acquire" though.

After supper, I wrote in my diary and thought a bit before going to bed. There's a genuine technique of the shovel, the pick, and especially of the wheelbarrow, I thought. That damn plank from the ground to the cinder-box! It takes all I can muster to teeter the wheelbarrow up, dump without losing the thing quite, and bring it down backward without barking my shins. There's a bit of technique, too, in pairing off properly for a job, selecting your lick of work promptly and not getting left jobless to the eyes of the boss, capturing your shovel and hiding it at the end of the turn, keeping the good will of the men you're with on team-work, distinguishing scrap from cinder and putting them into the proper boxes, not digging for slag too deeply in the pit floor, and so forth and so on.

I wonder if I shall learn Serbian, or Russian, or Hungarian? There seems to be a Slavic polyglot that any one of a half-dozen nationalities understands. That word, "Tchekai!--Watch out!"--even the Americans use it. It's a word that is crying in your ears all night. Watch out for the crane that is taking a ladle of hot metal over your head, or a load of scrap, or a bundle of pipes; watch out for the hot cinder coming down the hole from the furnace-doors; watch out for "me" while I get this wheelbarrow by; and "Heow! Tchekai!" for the trainload of hot ingots that passes your shoulder.

I set my alarm for five o'clock, and got into bed with the good-night thought of "The devil with Pete Grayson! I'll get on that furnace!"

Another day went by, hewing cinders in the pit. I tried to figure to myself persuasive or threatening things I could say to the melters, to let me work on the floor. A shrewd-looking little man with moustachios worked near me.

"Did you ever work on the floor?" I asked.

"Oh, yes," he said: "too much hot; to hell with the money!"

They pay you two cents more an hour on the floor. At twenty minutes to five I went upstairs to my locker. Dick Reber, senior melter, stopped me.

"Need a man to-night; want to work?" he said; "always short, you know, on this ---- long turn."

"Sure," I said.

That was one way to get promoted, I thought, and wondered how I'd stand fourteen more hours on top of the ten I had had.

"Beat it," yelled the melter.

Jack and I got our flat manganese shovels, and went on the run to the gallery. We were tapping at last. This furnaceful had cooked twenty-two hours. Nick was kneeling on water-soaked bagging, on the edge of the hot spout. He dug out the mud in the tap-hole with a pointed rod and sputtered oaths at the heat. Every few minutes the spout would burn through the bagging to his knees. He would get up, refold the bagging, and kneel again to the job.

Finally the metal gurgled out, a small stream the size of two fingers. Nick dodged back, and it swelled to a six-inch torrent.

"Heow, crane!"

Pete Grayson had come out, and was bawling something very urgently at the pit crane. The ladle swung closer; we could feel the increased wave of heat.

He looked over at us and held up two fingers. That meant both piles of manganese that lay on the gallery next the crane were to be shoveled in--double time for us, in the heat.

"Heow!" yelled the melter.

Jack and I leaped forward to the manganese, and our shovels scraped on the iron gallery. I saw Jack slapping his head to put out a little fire that had started on the handkerchief wound round his neck. I slapped a few sparks that stung my right leg. We finished half the pile.

There was something queer about this heat. The soles of my feet--why in hell should the gallery burn so! There was a blazing gas in the air--my nostrils seemed to flame as they took it in. This was different from most manganese shoveling. My face glowed all over in single concentrated pain. What was it? I saw Jack shoveling wildly in the middle of that second pile. We finished it in a panic.

"What was the matter with that damn ladle?" I asked as we got our breath in the opening between the furnaces.

"Spout had a goddam hole in the middle," he said; "ladle underneath, see?"

I did. The fire-clay of the spout had given way, and a hole forming in the middle let the metal through. That made it necessary, in order to catch the steel, to bring the ladle close, till part of it was under the platform on which we worked. The heat and gas from the hot steel in the ladle had been warming the soles of our feet, and rising into our faces.

"Here's a funny thing," I said, looking down. One of the sparks which had struck my pants burned around, very neatly taking off the cuff and an inch or two of the pant-leg. The thing might have been done with a pair of shears.

I came out of the mill whistling and feeling pretty much "on the crest." I'd worked their damn "long turn," and stood it. It wasn't so bad, all except that ladle that got under the manganese. I ate a huge breakfast, with a calm sense of virtue rewarded, and climbed into bed with a smile on my lips.

The alarm clock had been ringing several minutes before I realized what it was up to. I turned over to shut it off, and found needles running into all the muscles of my back. I struggled up on an elbow. I had a "hell of a head." The alarm was still going.

I fought myself out of bed and shut it off; stood up and tried to think. Pretty soon a thought came over me like an ache: it was "Fourteen hours!" That was beginning in fifty-five minutes--fourteen hours of back-walls, and hot ladles, and--Oh, hell!--I sat down again on the bed, and prepared to lift my feet back in.

Then I got up, and washed fiercely, threw on my clothes, and went downstairs, and out into the afternoon sun.

Down by the restaurant, I met the third-helper on Eight.

"Long turn wouldn't be so bad, if there weren't no next day," he said, with a sort of smile.

In the mill was a gang of malignant men; things all went wrong; everybody was angry and tired; their nerves made mistakes for them.

"I only wish it were next Sunday!" I said to someone.

"There aren't any goddam Sundays in this place," he returned. "Twenty-four hours off between two working days ain't Sunday."

I thought that over. The company says they give you one day off every two weeks. But it's not like a day off anywhere else. It's twenty-four hours sandwiched between two work-days. You finish your night-week at 7.00 Sunday morning, having just done a week of one twenty-four hour shift, and six fourteens. You've got all the time from then till the next morning! Hurrah! How will you use it? If you do the normal thing,--eat breakfast, and go to bed for eight hours,--that brings you to 5.00 o'clock. Will you stay up all night? you've had your sleep. Yes, but there's a ten-hour turn coming at 7.00. You go to bed at 11.00, to sleep up for your turn. There's an evening-out of it! Hurrah again! But who in hell does the normal thing? Either you go on a tear for twenty-four hours,--you only have it twice a month,--or you sleep the twenty-four, if the week's been a bad one. Or--and this is common in Bouton--you get sore at the system and stay away a week--if you can afford it.

"Hey, you, get me a jigger, quick. Ten thou'."

"All right," I said, and shut off my mind for the day.

I usually had bad words and bad looks from "Shorty." Jack calls him "that dirty Wop." Late one afternoon he produced a knife and fingered it suggestively while he talked. So I always watched him with all the eyes I had.

One day we had shoveled in manganese together over a hot ladle, and I noticed that he was in a bad mood. We finished and leaned against the rail.

"Six days more," he said very quietly.

I looked up, surprised at his voice.

"What do you mean?"

"Six days more, this week, me quit this goddam job."

"What's the matter?"

"Oh, ---- me lose thirteen pound this job, what the hell!"

"What job will you get now?"

"I don't know, I don't know; any damn job better than this," he said very bitterly.

Having adopted the quitting idea, these six days were too much to endure. A little later, Jock was ready to make front-wall. He saw Shorty and said, "Get me that hook and spoon."

Shorty stood and looked at Jock, with the utmost malignity in his face, and said finally, "Get your goddam hook and spoon yourself."

Jock was greatly surprised, and returned, "Who the hell are you?"

Shorty snapped instantly, "Who the hell are you?"

And then he was fired.

This is the second "quitting mad" I've seen. The feeling seems to be something like the irrepressible desire that gets piled up sometimes in the ranks of the army to "tell 'em to go to hell" and take the consequences. It's the result of accumulated poisons of overfatigue, long hours, overwrought nerves, "the military discipline of the mills."

The practical advantage of being "given the hook" is that you can draw your pay immediately; whereas, if you simply leave, you have to wait for the end of the two weeks' period.

I ate my dinner at the Greek's.

"Make me some tea that's hot, George. This wasn't. Oh, and a double bowl of shredded; I've got a hole to fill up."

George kept the best of the four Greek restaurants. It had a certain variety. It splurged into potato salad, and a few other kinds, and went into omelets that were very acceptable. The others confined themselves to fried things, with a few cereals and skimmed milk. I looked up from my shredded wheat. George was wiping up a rill of gravy and milk from the porcelain table, and a man was getting ready to sit down opposite. It was Herb, the pit craneman.

"Always feed here?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, "best place in town, isn't it?"

He nodded.

"How big is Bouton? how many people has it?" I asked.

He grinned slowly, and put his elbows on the table. He was a Pennsylvania Dutchman, with worry settling over good nature in a square face.

"Twenty thousand," he said.

"It seems small for twenty thousand," I returned; "like a little village. There's really only one store, isn't there,--the company store,--where they keep anything? Only one empty newspaper, no theatre, unless you count that one-story movie place, no enterprise--"

"A one-man town," he said, quickly. "Nearly every house in town is owned by Mr. Burnham. Now look here, suppose a man works like hell to fix things up, to work around and get a pretty damn good garden, puts a lot of money into making his house right. Suppose he does, and then gets into a scrap with his boss. What can he do? The company owns his house, the company owns every other damn thing in town. He's got to beat it--all his work shot to hell. That's why nobody does anything.--Hey, ham and--Where you workin' now? Ain't seen yer in the pit."

"I'm on the floor, helpin' on Number 7."

"Att-a-boy!"

At last, Saturday night. Everyone felt Sunday coming, with twenty-four hours of drunkenness or sleep alluringly ahead. The other shift had tapped the furnace at three o'clock. We might not tap again, and that was nice to think about. A front-wall and a hot back-wall we went through as if it were better fun than billiards.

"Look out for me, I've got the de'il in me," from Jock, Scotch First on Number 8. I looked up, and the crazy fool had a spoon--they weigh over a hundred--between his legs, dragging it like a kid with a broomstick. As it bounced on the broken brick floor, he yelled like a man after a Hun.

"Who's the maun amang ye, can lick a Scotchman?" he cried, dropping the spoon to the floor.

"Is this the best stuff you can show on Number 8?" said Fred slowly. He dived for Jock's waist, and drew it to him, though the Scotchman tried to break his grip with one of his hands and with the other thrust off his opponent's face. When Fred had him tight, he caught one of Jock's straying arms, bent it slowly behind his back, and contrived a hammerlock.

"You're no gentlemen,"--in pain; "you're interruptin' my work."

Fred relaxed, and Jock jumped away.

"Come over to a good furnace, goddam it, and fight it out!" he yelled, from a distance that protected his words.

The charging-machine, in its perpetual machine-tremolo, shook past and stopped. George slid down from his seat, and came over to Number 8's gang.

"Well, Fred, how in hell's the world usin' yer?"

"Ask me that to-morrow."

"Well, guys, good night; I'm dead for forty minutes."

He picked up a board some six feet long and about six inches in width. He laid himself carefully on it, and was sleeping inside of a minute.

I looked at him enviously for a few minutes. Suddenly it occurred to me that the board lay over a slit in the floor. It was the opening through which the pipes that attach to the gas-valve rise and fall. When gas is shifted from one end of the furnace to the other, the pipes emerge through the slit to a height several feet from the floor. Finally Fred made the same discovery, and a broad smile spread over his face. He continued to watch George, his grin deepening. At last he turned to the second-helper.

"Throw her over," he said.

Nick threw the switch. Slowly and easily the valve-pipes rose, lifting George and the head of his bed into the air, perilously. An immense and ill-controlled shout swelled up and got ready to burst inside the witnesses. George slept on, and the bed passed forty-five degrees. In another second it rolled off the side of the pipes, and George, scared, half-asleep, and much crumpled, rolled over on the furnace floor. It was several seconds before he recovered profanity.

The pure joy of that event spread itself over the entire shift.

When the light from the melting scrap-iron inside the furnace shot back, it lit up the hills and valleys in Nick's face. I noticed how sharp the slope was from his cheek-bones to the pit of his cheeks, and the round holes in which his eyes were a pool at the bottom. His lips moved off his white teeth, and twisted themselves, as a man's do with effort. He looked as if he were smiling. I picked up my shovel, and shoved it into the dolomite pile, with a slight pressure of knee against right forearm that eases your back. The thermometer in the shade outside was 95°. I wondered vaguely how much it was where Nick stood, with the doors open in his face.

We walked back together after the front-wall to the trough of water.

"Not bad when you get good furnace, good first-helper," he said. "Fred good boy, but furnace no good. A man got to watch himself on this job," he went on bitterly; "he pull himself to pieces."

"I can't manage quite enough sleep," I said, wondering if that was the remark of a tenderfoot.

"Sometime--maybe one day a month--I feel all right, good, no sleepy," he went on. "Daytime work, ten hour, all right, feel good; fourteen hour always too much tired. Sometime, goddam, I go home, I go to bed, throw myself down this way." He threw both arms backward and to the side in a gesture of desperate exhaustion, allowing his head to fall back at the same time. "Goddam, think I no work no more. No day nuff sleep for work," he concluded.

Later on in the day, I saw Jimmy let the charge-up man, George, take the spoon and make front-wall. The heat "got his goat." "I lose about ten or fifteen pounds every summer," he said, "but I get it back in the winter. My wife is after me the whole time to leave this game. I tell her every year I will. Better quit this business, buddy, while you're young, before you get stuck like me."

I walked home with Stanley, the Pole. He always called me Joe, the generic name for non-Hunky helpers.

"Say, Joe," he said, as we came under the railroad bridge, "what's your name right?"

"Charlie," I answered. "By the way, where have you been?"

"Drunk, Charlie," he answered, smiling cheerfully.

"Ever since I saw you in the pit?"

"Three week," he stated, with satisfaction; "beer, whiskey, everyt'ing. What the hell, work all time goddam job, what the hell?"