Ramsey-Warner, like most paper mills, manufactured several grades of stock, and I had begun to understand during my year’s apprenticeship there that different types of pulp were blended to make those various papers. I guess you could say I was an essential employee in the manufacture of both groundwood and sulphite pulps in that it was I (along with Allen) who spiked the logs off the conveyer belt if we saw any defects in them, it being absolutely necessary for wood to be glistening clean before it was transported to either the chippers or the grinders. Mr. Moreland’s office was in the building behind 12-A, where the big grinders were housed. (All the buildings at the mill were numbered, and I was convinced that Joliet used the same identification system for its cell-blocks. I often wondered if the prison, unlike R-WP, Inc. had a building numbered 13.) On the way to Mr. Moreland’s office, I peeked into 12-A to see what was going on, figuring that if I was ever going to own this place, I had better familiarize myself with every phase of the operation whenever I had the opportunity.
There were twenty grinders in the room, each pair of them flanking a 3000-horsepower motor. If you looked at a grinder from a certain angle, it resembled the front of a locomotive, cylindrical, with a covered drive shaft jutting out of it where the locomotive’s headlight would have been, a metal plate somewhat like a cowcatcher just below it, and a narrow cylinder looking very much like a steam whistle, high up on the right. The first impression lost itself quickly enough in a labyrinth of pipes, dials, valves, and wheels, the clean logs moving on their conveyer belt to be fed into three metal pockets equipped with hydraulic plungers that forced the wood against the huge grindstone revolving inside the machine. The logs were ingested parallel to the face of the twelve-ton stone, the resultant friction against their sides separating the wood fibers and dropping a warm thick soupy pulp into the pit below. That was how the grinder worked. I had asked a hundred questions about it the first time I discovered Building 12-A, standing around and chatting with the guys who operated the machines and took the big empty pockets off the line for refilling whenever their contents had been ground away. One of those guys, a Swede named Bertil Äkeson (our private joke was always the same: “Hello, Bert,” and “Hello, Bert”), greeted me now as I poked my head inside the door. I went over to him, hoping he would be involved in some mysterious operation about which I could ask some casual questions without causing him to think I was after his job. But all we did for five minutes was discuss the wonderful weather we’d been having, and when he finally mentioned something about checking the stone pit temperature gauge, I couldn’t stay around to watch or I’d have been late for my appointment in Building 17.
I had been in Mr. Moreland’s office last April, when he’d hired me, and it seemed to have changed little in the intervening months. His desk, leather-topped walnut, dominated the room, sitting large and cluttered before the twin windows that overlooked the company’s digesters in the yard outside. There were glass-enclosed bookcases on the wall to the left of the entrance door, and three portraits (two of the Ramsey Brothers, Amos and Louis, and a third of Martin Warner) unevenly flanked the fireplace and mantel on the right. The walls were wood-paneled, the carpet was brown, the room was inviting and cozy in contrast to the cheerless gray exteriors of all the buildings at the mill. Mr. Moreland beckoned to the single chair angled before his desk. I sat.
“Tyler,” he said, “do you know how many strikes there were in America last year?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“Two thousand, six hundred and sixty-five,” Mr. Moreland said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Four million men walked off their jobs, that’s a rather impressive figure, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Here at Ramsey-Warner, we did not have a single strike in 1919”
“No, sir.”
“Nor do we intend to have one this year, either.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tyler,” he said, “Rumsey-Warner is letting you go.”
I don’t know what I had anticipated. I’d had no idea where his conversation was leading, no clue as to why he’d been throwing strike statistics at me. I guess I’d thought for a single soaring moment that he’d been telling me about Ramsey-Wamer’s good fortune only as a prelude to giving me a raise or a promotion, I guess that’s what I secretly thought and hoped. I looked at him now in stunned silence, his brown suit blending with the warm comfort of the room, his face impassive, brown eyes watching me from behind gold-rimmed eyeglasses.
“This is Wednesday...”
“Sir, did you say...?”
“... but you may draw your wages to the end of the week. I think you’ll agree that’s more than is called for.”
“Sir, I don’t understand...”
“Yes, what is it you don’t understand, Tyler?”
“I don’t understand...”
“We no longer have need of your services, I thought I’d expressed myself quite clearly.”
“But I thought...”
“Yes, what did you think, Tyler?”
“I thought I was doing my job, I thought...”
“Yes, yes,” Mr. Moreland said.
“I’ve never missed a day, I’ve always...”
“Tyler,” Mr. Moreland said, “we do not want a strike here in 1920, is that clear?”
“Yes, but...”
“Your sympathies are well known around this mill. If you want my advice...”
“My sympathies?”
“A man can’t go around talking the way you do, and not...”
“What sympathies?”
“... expect word to get back to Management. There’s no place at Ramsey-Warner for radical ideas.”
“Radical?”
“Yes, radical, now damn it, Tyler, you’re trying my patience.”
“Sir,” I said, “I’m not a Communist, if that’s what you’re...”
“Did I say you were a Communist?”
“No, but...”
“I did not say you were a Communist, nor do I know whether you’re a member of the Party or not. It has been estimated by the National Security League, however, that there are 600,000 resident Communists here in America, and I can assure you, Tyler, that we don’t want any of them here at this mill. Now if you want my advice, you’ll draw your wages and be quietly grateful for our generosity, that’s my advice to you.”
“Sir,” I said, “this is America. A person can...”
“Yes,” Mr. Moreland answered, “and we’re damn well going to keep it that way.”
There was dazzling sunshine in the yard outside. It reflected from the flat gray of the buildings, so that the walls surrounding me seemed so many mirrors bouncing back light without image. Allen, I thought. Allen Garrett told them. Allen is the only person I’ve ever considered a real friend here, the only person with whom I’ve exchanged ideas, it must have been Allen who said I was a radical. Stunned, I walked across the sunlit yard and tried hopelessly to reconstruct every conversation we’d ever had. “They are little Lenins,” I remember quoting sarcastically, “little Trotskys in our midst,” this was at the beginning of the month, when we were talking about the New York State Assembly’s vote to expel its five elected Socialist members. Yes, of course, oh God, and Allen had quoted in rebuttal a clipping from the Times, sent to him by his uncle in New York, “It was an American vote altogether, a patriotic and conservative vote. An immense majority of the American people will approve and sanction the Assembly’s action,” and I had told him that the Times was crazy, and so was his uncle, and so was he. And hadn’t (no, it couldn’t be true, it couldn’t have been Allen who’d cost me my job) but hadn’t we argued only last week about those two Italians up in Massachusetts, whatever their names were, who had supposedly committed murder and armed robbery, but who were also — coincidentally — radicals who’d taken part in several strikes and who’d organized some kind of protest against the Department of Justice? Hadn’t I said, Oh God, what hadn’t I said, what hadn’t I felt free to discuss with my good friend Allen Garrett?