Steel Part 6

EVERYDAY LIFE

I came into the mill five minutes late one morning, and went to the green check-house at the gate, to pick 1611, the numerical me, from the hook. A stumpy man in a chair looked up and said: "What number?"

I gave it. "An easy way to lose forty-three cents," I thought, feeling a little sore at the stumpy man, and going out through the door slowly.

I increased my step along the road to the open-hearth, and reached my locker just as the Pole who shared it was leaving.

"G.o.ddam gloves!" he was saying. "Pay thirty-five cents--three days--G.o.ddam it--all gone--too much. What you think?"

"I think the leather ones at fifty cents last better," I said.

He made a guttural noise, signifying disgust, and left.

I opened the locker, and disentangled my working-clothes, still damp from the last shift, from the Pole's. I removed all my "good" clothes, and stood for a minute naked and comfortable. The thermometer had registered 95 when I got up, at 4.00.

For the past few days I had been demoted to the pit; there had been no jobs open on the floor. As I took up my gloves and smoked gla.s.ses, I wondered how I could get back to furnace work.

Pete was moving with his lurching short steps past Six.

"How about helping to-day on the floor?" I said.

He snapped back quickly in his blurred voice, "You work th' pit, tell y'--G.o.ddam quick, want y' on the floor."

I looked back at him, swore to myself, and went slowly down the pit stairs.

I couldn't find the gang at first, but later found half of them: Peter the Russian, the short Wop, the Aristocrat, and a couple more, all under furnace Eight, cleaning out cinder. The Aristocrat was trying to get the craneman to bring up one of the long boxes with curved bottoms for slag.

The craneman was d.a.m.ning him. There was one too many at the job,--four is enough to clean cinder,--so I threw a bit of slag at Peter (for old time's sake) and pa.s.sed on.

I met Al, and said, "Where are they working?"

"Clean up the pipes," he said.

The Croat, Marco, Joe, and Fritz were at Number 6, with forks. You see, the pipes run up the ladle's side and release a stopper for pouring the steel. They are covered with fire clay, which is destroyed after one or two ladlings and has to be knocked off and replaced. We loosened the clay with sledges, and Marco watered down the pipes with a hose, to cool them. They were moderately warm when Fritz and I started piling them on the truck. Once or twice the pipe touched Fritz's hand through a hole in his glove, and he yowled, and then laughed. Once or twice I yowled and laughed also.

When we piled near the top, we swung in unison, and tossed the pipe into the air. It was like piling wood.

I caught a torn piece of my pants on a sharp bit of slag while carrying two pipes, and acquired a rip halfway from pocket to knee. Marco had a safety pin for me at once; he kept emergency ones in his shirt-front.

We finished the job in half an hour, and pushed the truck till it came under jurisdiction of a crane. Marco fixed the hooks rather officiously, pushing Fritz and me aside. There is, I suppose, more sn.o.bbishness induced by the manner of crane-hooking than in any other pit function.

The crane swung the pipes on holders and dropped them in front of the blacksmith shop. We carried them into the shop, Marco and I working together. Inside there were half a dozen small forges, some benches, and a drop hammer. It was the place where ladles and spoons were repaired.

The blacksmiths and helpers gave us friendly, but condescending glances.

As we walked back, we saw the crane swing a ladle from the moulds into which it had been pouring toward the dumping pit in front of Five. When the giant bucket approached, the chain hooked to the bottom lifted slowly, and dregs half-steel, half-ash, rolled out into the dump. After a little cooling, we would clean up there. With the chain released, the bucket righted itself with a shuddering clank, and swayed in the air scattering bits of slag and burnt fire clay.

A little later, we did a three-hour job on those dregs. We loosened the slag with picks first, and then lifted forkfuls and shovelfuls into the crane-carried boxes. A good deal of sc.r.a.p was in the lot, probably the makings of half a ton of steel. This, of course, went into a separate box. I hooked up a couple of big sc.r.a.p-hunks, weighing perhaps 500 pounds each, and took some sport out of it. That is one small matter, at least, where a grain of judgment and ingenuity has place. A badly hooked sc.r.a.p-hunk may fall and break a neck, or simply tumble and waste everybody's time. Loosening up with the pick, too, demands a slight knack and smacks faintly of the miner's skill. We had to go down into a pit, where there was heated slag on all sides, using boards to save scorching our shoe leather. In turning up fractures eight or ten inches thick, there would be an inner four inches still red-hot.

At eleven o'clock, I was working at a fair pace, flinging moderately husky forkfuls over a ten-foot s.p.a.ce into the box, when Marco looked up.

"Hey," he called.

I glanced at him for a moment. He was smiling. "Rest yourself," he said; "we work hard when de big bosses come."

During the next fifty shovelfuls, the remark went the rounds of my head, trying to get condemned. My memory threw up articles in the "Quarterly Journal of Economics," with "inefficiency and the labor-slackers," and "moral irresponsibility of the worker on the job," and so forth, in them. A couple of sermons and a vista of editorial denunciations of the laboring man who is no longer willing to do "an honest day's work for an honest day's pay," seemed to bring additional pressure for righteous indignation. I asked the following questions of myself, one for every two forkfuls:--

"Isn't it morally a bad thing to soldier, anyway?

"Is Marco a moral enormity?

"Do business men soldier?

"Isn't 'Get to h.e.l.l out of here if you don't want to work' the answer?

Or has the twelve-hour day something to do with it?

"Can these five or six thousand unskilled workmen take any interest in their work, or must they go at it with a consciousness similar to that of the slaves who put up the Pyramids?"

I had to use the pick at this point, which broke up the inquiry, and I left the questions unanswered.

I saw wheelbarrowing ahead for the afternoon, and corralled the only one properly balanced, when I started work at 1.00 P.M., keeping it near me during a sc.r.a.p-picking hour, until the job should break. At 2.15, it did. Al said: "Get over and clean out under Seven. If we can ever get this G.o.ddam stuff cleaned out--" That was an optimism of Al's.

One of the new men and I worked together all afternoon: pick at the slag, shovel, wheelbarrow, dump in the box, hook up to crane. Start over. There was a lot of dolomite and old fine cinder, very dusty, but not hot. This change in discomfort furnished a sensation almost pleasurable. I found out that everyone hid his shovel at the end of the shift, beside piles of brick in the cellar of the mill, under dark stairways, and so forth. I hadn't yet acquired one, but used mostly a fork, which isn't so personal an instrument, and of which there seemed to be a common supply. I felt keen to "acquire" though.

After supper, I wrote in my diary and thought a bit before going to bed.

There's a genuine technique of the shovel, the pick, and especially of the wheelbarrow, I thought. That d.a.m.n plank from the ground to the cinder-box! It takes all I can muster to teeter the wheelbarrow up, dump without losing the thing quite, and bring it down backward without barking my shins. There's a bit of technique, too, in pairing off properly for a job, selecting your lick of work promptly and not getting left jobless to the eyes of the boss, capturing your shovel and hiding it at the end of the turn, keeping the good will of the men you're with on team-work, distinguishing sc.r.a.p from cinder and putting them into the proper boxes, not digging for slag too deeply in the pit floor, and so forth and so on.

I wonder if I shall learn Serbian, or Russian, or Hungarian? There seems to be a Slavic polyglot that any one of a half-dozen nationalities understands. That word, "Tchekai!--Watch out!"--even the Americans use it. It's a word that is crying in your ears all night. Watch out for the crane that is taking a ladle of hot metal over your head, or a load of sc.r.a.p, or a bundle of pipes; watch out for the hot cinder coming down the hole from the furnace-doors; watch out for "me" while I get this wheelbarrow by; and "Heow! Tchekai!" for the trainload of hot ingots that pa.s.ses your shoulder.

I set my alarm for five o'clock, and got into bed with the good-night thought of "The devil with Pete Grayson! I'll get on that furnace!"

Another day went by, hewing cinders in the pit. I tried to figure to myself persuasive or threatening things I could say to the melters, to let me work on the floor. A shrewd-looking little man with moustachios worked near me.

"Did you ever work on the floor?" I asked.

"Oh, yes," he said: "too much hot; to h.e.l.l with the money!"

They pay you two cents more an hour on the floor. At twenty minutes to five I went upstairs to my locker. d.i.c.k Reber, senior melter, stopped me.

"Need a man to-night; want to work?" he said; "always short, you know, on this ---- long turn."

"Sure," I said.

That was one way to get promoted, I thought, and wondered how I'd stand fourteen more hours on top of the ten I had had.

"Beat it," yelled the melter.