The company had a twenty-six years of service lunch on the books for that Friday. Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, and drove out there, because my name was on the invitation list and because a man does not stop being who he is on account of a Tuesday night.
I stopped at the scale house on the way in.
Scrap leaves that plant on a truck and every load crosses the scale, and the scale house prints a ticket. Gross, tare, net, date, time to the minute, and the name of the man walking the load out, which for twenty-six years has been mine.
The money came out of a locker in the men’s room between 1:15 and 2:00. The floor manager said that himself, at volume, in front of everybody.
My tickets from that night say 1:11 and 1:48 and 2:06. Three loads. The scale house is out past the east gate, a full seven minutes’ walk from the shop floor, and Ernie Dubois who runs that scale on nights was standing there for every one of them, and he initials the tickets too.
Ernie came to the lunch. He is sixty-nine years old and he has not been to a company function since 1998 and he drove in on his day off with a folder.
They gave me the pin and the jacket anyway. The plant manager read out the paragraph about the men who keep the place running while the rest of us sleep, and there was applause, and the sheet cake said twenty-six years on it in blue.
Then Ernie stood up and said he had brought some paperwork and did anybody want to see it.
He read three weigh tickets out loud. Load number, time, initials, mine and his. Then he said, this man was outside the east gate for the entire window, and he was told to sign a resignation Tuesday or be walked out in handcuffs in front of his own crew.
The regional people did not say much at the lunch. They said plenty on Monday.
What happened with the fifty-five dollars is that a young fellow on the line took it out of a locker that has not had a working latch since the Obama administration. He owned up on his own the following week, before anybody put it on him, and he came and found me at my house and stood on my porch with his hat in his hands.
I told him what my own foreman told me in 1999 when I broke something expensive, which is that a man who tells it himself has already done the hard part.
They gave me my job back with the years unbroken. I worked two more and went out on my own terms with my pension whole.
The floor manager was gone before the summer shutdown. Nobody told me and I never asked.
Those three weigh tickets are in my toolbox. Ernie made me take his copies too. He said a man ought to have a spare, and he was not wrong about that.