Monday morning, Eubanks got up, pressed his uniform like it was Sunday church, set his cap on straight, and drove down to the front gate, and he was not there to ask for his job back.
He had a footlocker in the trunk. Took two of us to carry it in.
Twenty-seven years of watchclock tapes. A watchclock is a brass clock the size of a canteen. Thirty-one key stations are bolted around that mill, the watchman punches every one on every round, and the paper disk inside records the hour. Tapes get dated and boxed.
He set the locker on the front desk, put his key ring on top of it, and asked the girl to get Mr. Corcoran one page out of the property binder.
Corcoran did not come down. Eubanks signed out in the visitor book, thanked a receptionist who was crying, and drove home and went to bed at eight like he has for twenty-seven years.
Wednesday, the carrier’s engineer showed up for the post-sale survey. Any time a property like that changes hands, the underwriter sends a man out.
He asked for the watch records for the week.
There were none after Friday.
Here is the page Eubanks had copied. It is a warranty on every policy that building has carried since the 1968 fire, and it is the reason a timber structure full of oil and lint can be insured at all:
The insured warrants that a watchman shall be continuously on the premises during all hours the plant is not in operation, that a recording watchclock shall be carried on rounds not more than one hour apart, and that the tapes shall be retained. Failure of this warranty suspends coverage from the hour of the failure.
Cameras do not satisfy it and never have. No underwriter writes that building without a man walking it, no bank lends against a building that cannot be insured, and the deal out of Stamford had a covenant in it about keeping insurance in force.
The lawyers called the front office Thursday afternoon. Same question they have asked at every sale since 1999, and this time somebody finally understood why.
Who is Mr. Eubanks, and where do we find him.
He went back. He is seventy-one and his wife has a hip coming up.
But he went back on paper this time, at his price, and the thing he held out for was not money. Since 2011 he has asked that plant for a second watchman so the place is not one man deep. Three ownership groups told him no. He got it in writing on the second of December.
There are two of them now. A kid named Devonte on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Eubanks is teaching him which valves weep in the cold.
The cameras went in anyway. Eubanks wanted cameras back in 2009. He will tell you they are useful and he will also tell you a camera has never once smelled a bearing running hot.
Corcoran shook his hand in January. Nobody made him, and it took him a while.
Every so often a man with a clipboard decides what the old fellow by the door is worth. The building had an opinion about that, and it had been in writing since 1968.