Steel Part 16

"Then I fought with Towers. He gave me a week. After I came back I had another run-in.... When I carried my bucket out o' that place, I was off work entirely. Didn't go to work for three months, thought I never would work again.

"But after a h.e.l.l of a spell, gotta job, pipe mill New Naples--eight hours--a good job, but the mill's shut down now. Then the suckers drafted me. Balloon comp'ny a b.l.o.o.d.y year and a half."

There followed a very vast series of parties in the army, and explicit views on all the officers he'd had. There was usually a new army story whenever I met him. He was extraordinarily clever in getting away with A. W. O. L.'s.

"When I got my discharge, father wanted me to come to work here, so I did. Worked on those stoves where you are, for a while--stove-tender helper, then stove-tender. Then I got this job.... Don't you chew?...

I'll lose it too if I take many more days off for sickness. Last time I was 'sick'"--he grinned--"Bert Cahill and the bunch and I took three skirts in Bill's car to Monaca. Had six quarts of d.a.m.n good whiskey. I was out a week. Ralph says, when I come back: 'Pretty d.a.m.n sick, you!'

But to h.e.l.l with 'em! I'm not afraid of my job."

That little blower called Dippy, I found, knew the furnace game in all its phases with great practical thoroughness. I used to try to get chances of talking with him on questions of technique.

"What about those jobs in the cast-house?" I said one day, "the helper's jobs? Isn't it a good thing to know about those if you're learning the iron game?"

"You don't want to work there," he said quickly, "only Hunkies work on those jobs, they're too d.a.m.n dirty and too d.a.m.n hot for a 'white' man."

So I got thinking over the "Hunky" business, and several other conversations came into my mind. d.i.c.k Reber, senior melter on the open-hearth, had once said, "There are a few of these Hunkies that are all right, and d.a.m.n few. If I had my way, I'd ship the whole lot back to where they came from."

Then I thought of the incident of my getting chosen from the pit for floor work on the furnaces. Several times Pete, who was a Russian, discriminated against me in favor of Russians. Until d.i.c.k came along and began discriminating in my favor against the Hunkies.

How many Hunkies have risen to foremen's jobs, I thought, in the two departments where I have worked? One in the open-hearth--a fellow who "stuck with the company" in the Homestead Strike--and none on the blast-furnaces except Adolph, the stove-gang boss.

My recollections were broken into by a call for violent action.

"Cooler," yelled McLanahan, his voice going up into a husky shriek.

That meant molten iron inside, melting the cone-shaped water-chamber around the blast pipe. If let alone, the cooling at that place would cease, and in a short time there would follow an escape of molten metal.

"Cooler!" yelled on a blast-furnace means "Hurry like h.e.l.l."

I grabbed a wrench to take the nut off the "bridle"--the first step in taking out a sort of outside cooler, the tuyere.

"Bar," said the Serbian stove-tender very quietly, picking up a specially curved one, and McLanahan took the other end.

Somebody knocked out some keys with a sledge, and the blowpipe fell on the curved bar, making the holders of it grunt. They took it off fast, for the instant the thing loosens, a flame shoots through the hole and licks its edges.

Then the tuyere comes loose with a few strokes of a pull bar. All of these moves are fast; a tuyere goes bad every other day and men work fast like soldiers at a gun drill.

But coolers don't break a lead but once in three months or so; and the cone's heavier, the gang bigger, there's less efficiency and more holler and sweat.

When the pull bar gets into action it looks a little like a mediaeval mob with a battering ram. A "pull bar" is a tool designed to translate the muscle of many men into pull, on a small gripping edge against which sledging is impossible. At one end a thick hook grips the edge of the cooler, at the other a weight is brought against a f.l.a.n.g.e that runs around the bar. Everybody on the gang has a piece of a rope attaching to that weight.

The stove gang moving between stoves Thirteen and Fourteen were caught and brought into this for muscle, and a couple of pa.s.sing millwrights drafted.

"Hold up the G.o.ddam end," from Steve, boss by common consent.

"A little beef this time!" from a blower. "What the h.e.l.l's the matter, _sick_?"

We all swear between breaths, and take a grip higher on the rope--the weight cracks the f.l.a.n.g.e again, and makes the bar shiver.

When the new cooler, which resembles more nearly a gigantic flower pot, without any bottom, than anything else, is in place, there's a cry of: "Big Dolly!"

That involves four or five men, lifting a kind of ramrod with a square hammer-end, from the rack, and lugging it to the cooler.

I get near the ramming end this time; Tony is near me on the other side.

Together we hold the hammer against the cooler. As the end strikes, the jar goes back through the men's hands.

"Now top."

Arms raise the bar painfully, and hold it poised a little unsteadily, sway back, tense, and drive.

"Hold it, hold it on the cooler, G.o.ddam you."

Tony and I had let our arms shake a fraction, and the hammer fell glancing on the cooler's edge.

"Now!"

Seated this time. Arms relax and stretch.

When things are ready, Adolph makes the water connections.

"Hold de G.o.ddam shovel, what you t'ink, I burn up."

A cinder-snapper holds a shovel in front of the hole to keep the flame from his hands.

"All right, all right."

The job's done; the millwrights pick up their tools, and the stove gang moves off leisurely to their cleaning. I hear the superintendent talking with a blower near the sample box.

"They did that in pretty good time," he says.

I used to eat my lunch and kept my clothes in a little brick shanty near Number 4, sharing it with the Italians of the stove gang. Although by the bosses' arrangement it was a mixed gang, Italian and Slav, the mixture did not extend to shanty arrangements, and race lines prevailed.

I felt that I should learn low Italian in a few weeks if I continued with this group; the flow of it against my ear drums was incessant and some of it had already forced an entrance. Besides I was learning a great deal about: how to live, what to wear on your head, on your feet, and next your skin; where to get it--good material to resist the blast-furnace, and cheap as well; wisdom in eating and drinking, and saving money, in resting, in working, in getting a job and keeping it.

There was a whole store of industrial _mores_. In some respects the ways of living of these workmen seemed as rooted and traditional as the manners of monarchs, and as wise. I won considerable merit, when I brought in a kersey cap that I got for seventy-five cents, and lost much when I reluctantly admitted the price of my brown suit.

Everyone on the gang performed the washing up after work with the greatest thoroughness and success. They devoted minute attention to the appearance of clothes worn home. Rips and holes got a neat patch at once, and shoes were tapped at the proper period--before holes appeared.

I have seen only one or two men in the mill who were not clean in their going-home clothes.

I talked to John one day on the subject of neatness. He asked, "You have to clean up good in the army?"

I dilated on the necessity of policing when wearing khaki.

He said: "Man that no look neat, no good. I no like him, girls no look at him. Bah!"

I was almost always offered some food from the bursting dinner buckets of my friends: a tomato, some sausage, a green pepper, some lettuce and cuc.u.mbers. I accepted gladly for it was always superior to my restaurant provender.

Tony told me one day that Jimmy had come over "too late from old country, to learn speak English and be American." He was thirty-one years old. He was going back this Christmas. And Tony was going too, but just for a visit. They were going to Rome. We had talked it over a good many times, all Italy in fact, people, women, farms. Tony turned to me: "You come Italy with Jimmy and me this Christmas? We go see Rome."