Four Past Midnight

'But -'

'But nothing. That was the freight, and he knew I'd pay it. I knew they were hiring on the three-to-eleven shift at the mill over in Oxford. I told you I'd gotten myself ready to lose, and going to Pop wasn't the only thing I did. I'd talked to your mother, said I might take a shift over there for awhile. After all, she'd been wanting a newer car, and maybe to move to a better apartment, and get a little something into the bank in case we had some kind of financial setback.'

He laughed.

'Well, the financial setback had happened, and she didn't know it, and I meant to do my damnedest to keep her from finding out. I didn't know if I could or not, but I meant to do my damnedest. She was dead set against it. She said I'd kill myself, working sixteen hours a day. She said those mills were dangerous, you were always reading about someone losing an arm or leg or even getting crushed to death under the rollers. I told her not to worry, I'd get a job in the sorting room, minimum wage but sit-down job, and if it really was too much, I'd give it up. She was still against it. She said she'd go to work herself, but I talked her out of that. That was the last thing I wanted, you know.'

Kevin nodded.

'I told her I'd quit in six months, eight at the outside, anyway. So I went up and they hired me on, but not in the sorting room. I got a job in the rolling shed, feeding raw stock into a machine that looked like the wringer on a giant's washing machine. It was dangerous work, all right; if you slipped or if your attention wandered - and it was hard to keep that from happening because it was so damned monotonous - you'd lose part of yourself or all of it. I saw a man lose his hand in a roller once and I never want to see anything like that again. It was like watching a charge of dynamite go off in a rubber glove stuffed with meat.'

'God-damn,' Kevin said. He had rarely said that in his father's presence, but his father did not seem to notice.

'Anyway, I got two dollars and eighty cents an hour, and after two months they bumped me to three ten,' he said. 'It was hell. I'd work on the road project all day long - at least it was early spring and not hot - and then race off to the mill, pushing that Chevy for all it was worth to keep from being late. I'd take off my khakis and just about jump into a pair of blue-jeans and a tee-shirt and work the rollers from three until eleven. I'd get home around midnight and the worst part was the nights when your mother waited up - which she did two or three nights a week - and I'd have to act cheery and full of pep when I could hardly walk a straight line, I was so tired. But if she'd seen that -'

'She would have made you stop.'

'Yes. She would. So I'd act bright and chipper and tell her funny stories about the sorting room where I wasn't working and sometimes I'd wonder what would happen if she ever decided to drive up some night to give me a hot dinner, or something like that. I did a pretty good job, but some of it must have showed, because she kept telling me I was silly to be knocking myself out for so little - and it really did seem like chicken- feed once the government dipped their beak and Pop dipped his. It seemed like just about what a fellow working in the sorting room for minimum wage would clear. They paid Wednesday afternoons, and I always made sure to cash my check in the office before the girls went home.

'Your mother never saw one of those checks.

'The first week I paid Pop fifty dollars - forty was interest, and ten was on the four hundred, which left three hundred and ninety owing. I was like a walking zombie. On the road job I'd sit in my car at lunch, eat my sandwich, and then sleep until the foreman rang his goddamned bell. I hated that bell.

'I paid him fifty dollars the second week - thirty-nine was interest, eleven was on the principal - and I had it down to three hundred and seventy-nine dollars. I felt like a bird trying to eat a mountain one peck at a time.

'The third week I almost went into the roller myself, and it scared me so bad I woke up for a few minutes - enough to have an idea, anyway, so I guess it was a blessing in disguise. I had to give up smoking. I couldn't understand why I hadn't seen it before. In those days a pack of smokes cost forty cents.

I smoked two packs a day. That was five dollars and sixty cents a week!

'We had a cigarette break every two hours and I looked at my pack of Tareytons and saw I had ten, maybe twelve. I made those cigarettes last a week and a half, and I never bought another pack.

'I spent a month not knowing if I could make it or not. There were days when the alarm went off at six o'clock and I knew I couldn't, that I'd just have to tell Mary and take whatever she wanted to dish out. But by the time the second month started, I knew I was probably going to be all right. I think to this day it was the extra five sixty a week - that, and all the returnable beer and soda bottles I could pick up along the sides of the road - that made the difference. I had the principal down to three hundred, and that meant I could knock off twenty-five, twenty-six dollars a week from it, more as time went on.

'Then, in late April, we finished the road project and got a week off, with pay. I told Mary I was getting ready to quit my job at the mill and she said thank God, and I spent that week off from my regular job working all the hours I could get at the mill, because it was time and a half. I never had an accident. I saw them, saw men fresher and more awake than I was have them, but I never did. I don't know why. At the end of that week I gave Pop Merrill a hundred dollars and gave my week's notice at the paper mill. After that last week I had whittled the nut down enough so I could chip the rest off my regular pay-check without your mother noticing.'

He fetched a deep sigh.

'Now you know how I know Pop Merrill, and why I don't trust him. I spent ten weeks in hell and he reaped the sweat off my forehead and my ass, too, in ten-dollar bills that he undoubtedly took out of that Crisco can or another one and passed on to some other sad sack who had got himself in the same kind of mess I did.'

'Boy, you must hate him.'

'No,' Mr Delevan said, getting up. 'I don't hate him and I don't hate myself. I got a fever, that's all. It could have been worse. My marriage could have died of it, and you and Meg never would have been born ' Kevin. Or I might have died of it myself. Pop Merrill was the cure. He was a hard cure, but he worked. What's hard to forgive is how he worked. He took every damned cent and wrote it down in a book in a drawer under his cash register and looked at the circles under my eyes and the way my pants had gotten a way of hanging off my hip-bones and he said nothing.'

They walked toward the Emporium Galorium, which was painted the dusty faded yellow of signs left too long in country store windows, its false front both obvious and unapologetic. Next to it, Polly Chalmers was sweeping her walk and talking to Alan Pangborn, the county sheriff. She looked young and fresh with her hair pulled back in a horsetail; he looked young and heroic in his neatly pressed uniform. But things were not always the way they looked; even Kevin, at fifteen, knew that. Sheriff Pangborn had lost his wife and youngest son in a car accident that spring, and Kevin had heard that Ms Chalmers, young or not, had a bad case of arthritis and might be crippled up with it before too many more years passed. Things were not always the way they looked. This thought caused him to glance toward the Emporium Galorium again ... and then to look down at his birthday camera, which he was carrying in his hand.

'He even did me a favor,' Mr Delevan mused. 'He got me to quit smoking. But I don't trust him. Walk careful around him, Kevin. And no matter what, let me do the talking. I might know him a little better now.'

So they went into the dusty ticking silence, where Pop Merrill waited for them by the door, with his glasses propped on the bald dome of his head and a trick or two still up his sleeve.

CHAPTER 6

'Well, and here you are, father and son,' Pop said, giving them an admiring, grandfatherly smile. His eyes twinkled behind a haze of pipe-smoke and for a moment, although he was clean-shaven, Kevin thought Pop looked like Father Christmas. 'You've got a fine boy, Mr Delevan. Fine.'

'I know,' Mr Delevan said. 'I was upset when I heard he'd been dealing with you because I want him to stay that way.'

'That's hard,' Pop said, with the faintest touch of reproach. 'That's hard comin from a man who when he had nowhere else to turn

'That's over,' Mr Delevan said.

'Ayuh, ayuh, that's just what I mean to say.'

'But this isn't.'