Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, and drove out to the plant to sit down with Loretta in the safety office, because she comes in at six and because there was one question that man never asked me.
He never asked why my hand was wrapped.
At 11:50 that night I opened up the back of my left hand on a scrap bin lip, the same lip I had written up in March, and I walked myself to the first-aid room and Loretta’s night counterpart cleaned it and closed it with four butterflies and sat with me for the better part of an hour because it would not quit bleeding.
That is not a story I have to be believed on. Federal law says a recordable injury goes in a log, and it goes in with a date and a time and a description and the name of the person who gave the treatment, and the company keeps that log for five years and posts a summary of it on the board by the time clock every February.
The money came out of a break-room locker between 11:30 and 12:30. He announced that himself, at volume, with his hand on my arm.
I was in a first-aid room on the other side of the building from 11:52 to 12:41 with a woman holding gauze on my hand.
He walked past my bandage twice while he was accusing me. He looked right at it. He was so pleased with himself he could not see a wrapped hand three feet in front of him.
Loretta pulled the log entry, printed it, and walked it up to the plant manager herself before seven in the morning, and she was not gentle about it, and she has been in that building thirty-one years and does not have to be.
They called me at nine. I did not go in that day. I told them I had a doctor’s appointment for my hand, which was true, and I let it sit a day, which I am not entirely proud of and would do again.
The sixty dollars was a kid on second shift who had a locker two down and a bad month. He came to me on his own the next week. I told him what my foreman told me in 1998, that a man who says it himself has already done the hardest part, and I have not spoken of it since and neither has anybody else.
They gave me my job with the years unbroken and the week paid. The contract crew never came in. The floor manager was moved somewhere out of state before Labor Day.
The lip on that scrap bin got ground down and capped in April, which is the only thing out of all of it that I actually wanted.
I have a scar across the back of my left hand about two inches long. It is the only proof I carry around with me, and it turns out it was in a federal log the whole time.