But the next morning I got up, put on my one good shirt, and drove to the plant before anyone else, and I waited by the gate. Not to beg for my job. I went to make the new foreman a promise, plain, that he was about to find out the hard way what forty-two years of welds are worth.
We need young hands, not some old-timer stuck in the eighties, he had said, in front of the whole crew.
He would not hear it. Told me I was done and to clear off. So I cleared off, and I waited, because I have seen this movie before.
Three weeks later a load of beams the young crew had welded went out to a job downtown and failed the state inspection. Failed it cold. The certifying inspector, a man I trained myself twenty years back, pulled every recent weld and started marking them, and the more he pulled, the worse it got. The plant was about to lose the biggest contract it had in a decade.
Then he started pulling the old work, the joints I had laid over forty-two years, the welds in bridges this whole city drives across every day. Every single one passed. Every one.
The company called me before the week was out. This time the foreman was standing behind the plant manager, saying nothing at all. They asked me to come back, not to the line, but as the man who signs off on every weld that leaves that building, at more than I ever made, with the authority to reject any job that is not right.
I took it, on one condition. That I could teach the young ones. That I could stand at their elbow and show them how to strike an arc that holds for forty years, so that when I am gone there is still somebody in that plant who can lay a joint you can trust your life to.
Stuck in the eighties, he called me. But steel does not care what decade you learned in. It only cares whether the man holding the torch did it right, and for forty-two years I did it right, and every joint I ever laid is still holding while theirs came apart in a month.
The young ones do not smirk at me anymore. They call me over when a weld matters. I am past sixty, and my eyes are not what they were, but I can still lay a bead that will outlive me, and now I am teaching hands that will lay them long after I am gone.
Forty-two years I held that crew together without a word. It took my welds outlasting theirs by three weeks to remind them who taught them everything they know.