Five
They buried Don Strange the next morning. I sweated in the front yard in my blue JCPenney sport coat and clip-on tie as my parents finished getting ready inside. Tires crunched on the gravel of Cabin Hill Road, a sound soon followed by Tom’s father driving past in his blue Dodge truck. I automatically lifted my hand to wave, and he briefly made eye contact with me and waved back. His eyes went quickly back to the road. My father was on the front porch in his suit by then, looking out at me with an expression I couldn’t decipher.
The service was at St. Mary of the Knobs Catholic Church, a center of community life I had been to many times, even though I wasn’t Catholic. I’d attended weekly meetings in their parish hall during my brief hitch with the Cub Scouts. We went to their Strawberry Festival every March, where my dad and I would eat shortcake and Mom would buy a raffle ticket for a quilt made by the Knights of Columbus ladies’; auxiliary. I’d even been to a wedding inside the church once, the only wedding I had ever seen, when a man my dad worked with invited us the summer before.
My father had complained that local law enforcement would never challenge the strikers. Now we had state troopers at our funerals, observing the mourners from their black-and-white Crown Vic a respectful distance away. Inside the church, Don Strange lay on pillowy white satin inside a gleaming walnut casket, finally trying out one of the products he had been constructing his entire life. The walnut, it occurred to me, had sprung from southern Indiana dirt, and would now return to it, just like Mr. Strange.
The crowd in the church was arranged into two halves, in a way that reminded me of the bride’s side and the groom’s side in that wedding I had been to. In this case, plant management and Bord en’s small merchant class sat on one side of the church. The strikers sat on the other much more crowded side. The strikers looked as uncomfortable as I did in their suits, and I noticed that most of them, like Tom’s dad, came alone, leaving their families at home, making that side of the church overwhelmingly adult and male. I wondered if it was because they anticipated danger in some way, although I doubted that, because any inkling of danger and my mother wouldn’t have let me within a hundred miles of the church. Maybe they didn’t want their families to see Mr. Strange laid out like that, the rosary wrapped around his clasped dead hands.
Sprinkled randomly among us, oblivious to the seating protocol of our two rival camps, were Mr. Strange’s relatives and friends from out of town. There were two svelte daughters from the swank suburbs east of Louisville, jarringly beautiful women in black dresses and wide hats. There were crying grandchildren, old casket company associates, an aging army buddy in an American Legion hat, and a young grandnephew in a white navy uniform.
An unseen organ announced the start of the service with a startling minor chord. A smoldering censor swinging in front of them, a column of priests, deacons, and altar boys marched into the church, singing hymns in a mournful baritone, sending chills up and down my spine. In my fourteen years, I had been exposed just enough to the Catholic religion to become completely fascinated by it. When the priest began the mass from the front of the church, I noticed that the strikers more or less all crossed themselves in unison, while many on the management side of the church did not. Mr. Strange had labored in the mill room for a decade or so before working his way into management, and it appeared that at least as far as his faith was concerned, he had more in common with the rank and file than he did with management. Old stained-glass windows along each side of the church depicted the church’s numerous patron saints in various stages of martyrdom, and a small plaque at the bottom of each thanked a familiar family name for their generosity a century earlier: Kruer, Stemler, Huber, and so on.
I was impressed with the studied impassiveness of the priest. Our preacher down at Blue River Christian Church always seemed like he was trying to sell us salvation with amplitude and clever sermons. To hold our interest, he had to play the opposing trump cards of eternal bliss and eternal damnation. The Catholic priest, in contrast, was stern and removed in a way that seemed confident to me, as he wearily executed the rites of his church. He wasn’t trying to convince me of anything—he had two thousand years of tradition on his side. If you don’t believe any of this, he seemed to be telling us, that’s your problem. “What right have you to recite my statutes?” he intoned. “To take my covenant on your lips, when you detest my teaching and thrust my words behind you?” I turned my head slightly from side to side, trying to identify to whom the priest was addressing the accusation.
When it came time for communion, the labor side of the church filed out of their pews smartly, while we had to step awkwardly aside to let those few Catholics on our side pass by into the aisle. I watched them all walk right up to the priest, who was directly in front of Mr. Strange’s casket, and accept the Eucharist. About half the mourners, I noticed, looked inside Mr. Strange’s casket as they passed. They glanced into it quickly, as if they weren’t supposed to, and maybe they weren’t. I didn’t know what the rules were. I just knew that for the first and only time that day, I was glad to be in the Protestant minority. I knew I would not have been able to avoid peering inside the casket if I walked up there, and I knew doing so would give me nightmares for weeks. We stepped outside for the burial.
The cemetery was right next to the church. To get to Mr. Strange’s grave, we had to walk through the older sections, where the epitaphs were written entirely in German. At Mr. Strange’s grave, a row of chairs and a small Caterpillar backhoe awaited us. A green tent had been set up with enough room for Mr. Strange’s closest relatives to sit in the shade. Behind it, the gravedigger snuck a cigarette and waited for his cue. Graveside, the priest pointed out to the crowd that Mr. Strange was being buried right next to Mavis, his beloved wife, who had died fifteen years earlier. After a few comments more they lowered Mr. Strange into the ground, and the service was over. Dad took a few minutes to shake hands with some of the old-timers who had shown up for the funeral. All of them wanted to talk about the strike. My father did not.
The strikers stood around the outside of the church smoking, their jackets on their shoulders or hung on low tree branches, ties loosened, sweat beading on their foreheads. I realized that I was accustomed to seeing these men exhausted, either plodding into the factory at dawn, or treading across the parking lot at the end of a shift, covered in varnish, sawdust, and fatigue. Seeing them this way, large groups of them rested and idle, was a slightly scary revelation. They all quieted as we passed. Normally my father was the kind of guy who would start a twenty-minute conversation with the guy bagging his groceries. Upon seeing someone from the plant, he usually rejoiced and gossiped like he had found a long-lost cousin. After the funeral he hustled Mom and me as rapidly as he could to our car with his eyes straight ahead.
We were almost to the car, passing a small knot of strikers, when just two feet in front of us Tom’s dad turned around and started walking toward the church, toward us. There was no way to tactfully avoid him; he and Dad almost collided. I could tell by the way Dad stiffened that it was exactly the encounter he had wanted to avoid.
“Howdy, George,” said my mom and dad simultaneously.
“Howdy,” he said back, trying harder than my father to hide his discomfort. Even so, he looked haggard, more genuinely mournful than his cronies, who turned discreetly to see how the conversation was going. “Sad day,” he said.
“Yes, it is,” said my dad. He was stubbornly refusing to take the conversational bait. In normal times he would have been halfway through the shitting-in-the-paddock anecdote.
“I’ve known Don all my life,” said George Kruer, trying to fill the void. “I just… I just never thought something like this would happen here.”
“I guess there are evil people everywhere,” said my dad. George Kruer raised an eyebrow at that, allowing my dad a second to qualify his statement or tone it down. But he didn’t.
“Nobody wanted this to happen,” responded Mr. Kruer. He was defensive, but I thought I detected the slightest note of guilt in his voice, too.
“Looks like somebody did.”
Mom stepped in, trying to bring us back around to the kind of weightless declarations that normally filled the air after a funeral. “We’ll all miss him, very much.”
“The plant won’t be the same without him,” said George.
My dad just nodded and stared past him, refusing to allow the conversation a peaceful death. Finally, Kruer turned uncomfortably around, abandoning whatever chore he had inside the church, returning instead to the safety of his union pals. We finished our short walk to the car.
When we got in, my father turned the key and sighed loudly. I suddenly realized how draining the funeral had been for him. Mother patted his knee sympathetically.
“They’ve got a lot of nerve showing up here like that, don’t they?” he said.
My mother removed her hand quickly and looked out the window.
“Come on, it’s not like Don died of a heart attack,” my dad responded.
“Stop.” Mom was offended. “This doesn’t have anything to do with the strike. Most of these men have known Don Strange since they were boys.”
“Nothing to do with the strike?” My father started to prepare a more detailed rebuttal, but thought better of it, and drove us home in silence.
I always slipped into kind of a trance in the backseat of Dad’s smooth Buick back then, especially when the air-conditioning was cranked up on a sweltering day. The thought of Don Strange’s death, the image of that gleaming casket sinking slowly into the ground, pushed me further into a kind of melancholy fog. I was staring out my window when we turned down our driveway, looking down the barely visible path Tom and I ran on the night of the explosion. Dad pulled up to the house and kept the car running for just a moment longer than normal, a change in rhythm that dragged me out of my trance. When I looked up, Dad was staring straight ahead, his hands clenching the steering wheel. Mom was crying softly for the first time that day, her hands up to her mouth.
YOUR NEXT had been painted in large brown letters on our garage door.
Sheriff Kohl came up immediately. Once he arrived, he sat in the driveway for just a few seconds in the brown Crown Vic, writing studiously in a small notepad. He reviewed his notes with a furrowed brow, then exited the car as we watched.
He was tall and slim in a way that for some reason reminded me of cowboys. The gun on his belt suited him: a .357 Colt Python with a royal blue barrel and a grip of dark, polished walnut, a serious gun for a serious man. His uniform was immaculate, all the way down to where the cuffs of his perfectly creased pants broke against the tops of his shiny brown shoes. Sheriff Kohl had a way of always looking equally concerned, whether he was arresting a drunk driver, handing out Halloween candy at city hall, or singing “I Saw the Light” from the main stage of the Strawberry Festival. Sheriff Kohl looked good, and he looked like a lawman, both of which helped him win reelection, term after term.
He and Dad shook hands formally. Kohl shook his head sadly as Dad showed him the garage door. “That’s a real shame, Gus,” he said. He spoke as if it were the result of some unpreventable natural disaster.
“I appreciate your coming up here so fast.”
“You know I came as soon as I heard,” replied the sheriff. “And when you and I are done, I’m going to start making calls. We’ll make a list of who wasn’t at the funeral and who wasn’t on the picket line. We’ll question everyone in town if we have to.”
“I know you will, Sheriff,” said my father, nodding his head. “Here, I want to show you something.”
He took the sheriff to the shed out back where a half-used can of varnish sat open on the step. Wadded up inside was my basketball net, which the perpetrator had taken down and used to smear the ungrammatical threat on the door.
“I noticed the net was down when we pulled up,” said my father.
“That’s great, Gus. Nice observation.” The sheriff meticulously wrote the information down as if it were the clue of the decade. It dawned on me that the two men were treating each other with a kind of exaggerated courtesy, as if to prove to each other that there was no problem between them, or to prove who was the bigger man. The three of us walked silently back down to the driveway.
I had waited patiently, but now it seemed like the sheriff was wrapping things up, and I thought the important question, the only question, had not been asked. I blurted it out.
“Did the bombers do it?” I asked.
Dad and the sheriff stopped and looked at me, both with very similar startled looks on their faces. It was as if they had no idea what I was talking about.
“The bombers?” I said again. I pointed into the woods by the driveway. The sheriff and my dad were looking at me as if I were inquiring about the odds of a unicorn galloping out of Hoosier National Forest.
The sheriff spoke first. “Son, I don’t believe we have to worry about them. They’re long gone.”
“Why do we think that?” I asked. “Didn’t you find their truck here in town?”
“I’ve got no reason to think they would want to stick around,” the sheriff said. “There’s other ways they could have got to Louisville.”
“Like what?”
My dad stepped in. “They could have got a ride. Hitchhiked. Maybe they had another car nobody knew about.”
“Well, who else could have done this?” I asked, pointing at the garage door.
The sheriff rubbed his forehead. “Son, unfortunately, there’s more than one man in this town right now who might have done something this stupid. But I intend to catch him.” He actually reached out and tousled my hair.
We continued our walk to the sheriff’s car. I was just about to speak up again about the likelihood of the bombers lurking in our woods when the sheriff surprised all of us. Instead of heading back to his Crown Vic, he turned and walked up to the front of the house where my mom had been standing, maintaining her distance. He bounded up the steps while my mom dropped her hands to her front in a startled gesture. Sheriff Kohl took her limp right hand in his.
“I am so sorry about this, Cricket,” he said. She bit her lip and looked to the ground, trying to avoid any more crying.
Sheriff Kohl left, and my parents spent the rest of the day avoiding each other, no easy trick in that small house. I thought about what Tom had said right before we discovered Taffy in the cave, how my dad might be jealous of the sheriff, just because my mom admired him and because he was the sheriff, a man with a badge and a gun who could do things my dad never could. Like arrest the man who made her cry. For the first time, it sort of made sense to me.
During the extended silence, I had lots of time to think. Of course I still didn’t even consider telling Mom and Dad about what Tom and I had seen the night of the explosion. But I still didn’t think that night was some isolated incident that Tom and I could just walk away from, like our other close calls and near misses. Maybe it had implications that were still rippling toward us.
Starting at ten P.M., I watched the normally forbidden Fantasy Island alone in the family room, while Mom sewed buttons onto a small pile of shirts in the kitchen and Dad read Michener in bed, unable to sleep until their fight was resolved. Mom didn’t normally let me watch the show because she thought it licentious. Dad opposed it purely on intellectual grounds. But they were at opposite ends of the house, like boxers in their corners, leaving me to my own devices in the center of the ring. When the telephone rang, I easily got to it first.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Andy?’
“Yessir,” I said, not recognizing the voice.
“This is Sheriff Kohl—”
“Did you find who painted on our garage door?” I interrupted.
“Well, not yet.” He cleared his throat during an extended pause. “Andy, I need to speak to your mother.”
“Oh …” I said, the realization coming over me as Mom and Dad made their way to the phone. It was one of those calls. Mom stood at my elbow.
I handed the phone to her. “Sheriff Kohl,” I said. “He doesn’t know who painted on our garage door.”
She took the phone. “Yes, Sheriff, this is Cricket.” She listened for a few minutes with her back to me. “Yes…Sure enough…Oh my.” She shook her head seriously. “I’ll be right there.”
Within minutes she was stepping into her shoes by the back door and running a brush through her hair while Dad and I watched.
“I’ll get back as soon as I can,” she said, the first words she had said to my father since her conversation with Sheriff Kohl hours earlier. She sounded apologetic.
“Take as long as you need,” my father said. They hugged before she left.
As she drove down Cabin Hill Road, I turned to my dad.
“You know I can’t say,” he told me. “Don’t even ask.”
Later, I tried to stay awake but Mom still hadn’t returned home by the time I drifted off into a restless sleep filled with questions.
When I awoke the next morning Mom was back, scrubbing the threat on the garage door into an unrecognizable brown smear with 409 and a bristle brush. I rode away on my bike and met Tom down on the picket line.
“What happened?” he said. I wondered how much he knew.
“Somebody wrote on our garage door.”
“What’d they write?”
“‘You’re next.’ Except they misspelled ‘you’re.’”
“Shit,” he said. “Who do you think did it?”
“I’ve got an idea.”
Tom scowled. “What do you mean by that?”
“You’re the one who thinks they’re out in the woods still. Maybe they snuck up to our house during the funeral and did it.”
“They’re out there trying to lay low. It’d be retarded to come out of the woods to write some stupid threat on your garage. And besides, my cousin doesn’t have anything against your dad.”
“Did he have anything against Don Strange?”
Tom was getting pissed. “There’s plenty of other dudes in this town who would write that.”
“That’s pretty much what the sheriff said.” We stared at each other for a second. Like most good friends, I suppose, we sensed whenever we reached a line we couldn’t cross together. We stopped ourselves from going further. We shrugged, and let the argument pass.
We cruised around the outside of the strikers, a bigger group than normal that included some wives and other townspeople still hungry for news about the biggest thing to hit Borden since the ’37 flood. The blast damage wasn’t visible from the front of the plant, but Mr. Strange’s death and the giant hole in the factory were part of every conversation.
“Maybe the company did it,” said an old man with a lazy eye. “For the insurance money! Make us look bad!” Everyone around him agreed halfheartedly that it was a possibility.
“Well, they must be geniuses then,” said a young man with bushy Peter Frampton hair and bell-bottom Levi’s. “Because it sure makes us look like shit.” Several laughed bitterly. The picket line no longer had the genial small-town friendliness of a 4-H fair. With the barely concealed tension and smoldering resentment, it felt more like an auction at a foreclosed farm.
Looking back now, I realize that many of the families must have been running out of money about then—we had passed the two-week point in the strike, when the final paycheck had run through its normal lifespan. Hamburger was being stretched with cornflakes and crackers. Gardens were being cultivated with more than the usual vigor. The men on the picket line were looking ahead to September’s bills and wondering how they would pay them.
I think some of the men were also afraid of something more fundamental than getting their pickups repossessed. Before the explosion, the strikers seemed powerful to me, with the confidence of men in firm possession of the moral upper hand. They were just trying to get their fair share, they often said, and I believed them completely. The exorbitant retail prices of the coffins they manufactured had been a popular topic of conversation around the fire drum, and multiplying those prices by the number of coffins manufactured per day astounded me just as it astounded them. To deny the laborers who made it all possible a thirty-cent per hour raise seemed not just cheap, it seemed irrational. Surely, we all thought, it was just a matter of time before the owners came to their senses, met the demands, and everybody got back to work.
Now, with Mr. Strange’s death and the giant hole in the back wall of the factory, the moral clarity on the picket line had been muddied. The factory workers I knew were God-fearing, law-abiding men. From the beginning, the strike had conflicted with their congenital inclinations to obey authority and work to exhaustion every day. These men had awoken one day to discover that they were allied with at least a few who would set explosions and kill people. It was a troubling revelation to those who had voted for the strike swept up in a wave of righteous indignation. And, of course, somewhere out there were the men who had actually killed Don Strange. They had their own reasons for being afraid, like prison and eternal damnation.
“Look,” said Tom. He pointed across Highway 60 to where a state trooper cruiser from the Seymour post was parked, two grim-looking out-of-towners with crew cuts sitting inside. It seemed to confirm that the picketers were now thought of as dangerous men.
Unlike the strikers, I was heartened to see that the troopers had not left after Don Strange’s funeral. Like my father, I had come to doubt that local law enforcement was willing or able to protect Borden from itself during the strike. The writing on our garage door was a direct threat that I knew my dad wasn’t laughing off, even if he had laughed off my theory that the bombers might have done it. The night after the funeral, I heard him checking all our door locks before he went to sleep, a new addition to his ten-thirty routine. I felt incredibly vulnerable as I lay there that night in my bedroom, endangered by the walls and windows that my parents thought would protect us. I knew all too well that the house gave anyone on the outside the advantage, the ability to approach us from any direction without being heard or seen. I seriously considered asking my parents if I could sleep outside until the strike was over, where I at least had a chance of detecting an intruder’s approach: a stick cracking, whispered voices carrying on the wind, careless silhouettes crossing a ridge. From the outside, I could evade intruders or stalk them if I wanted to, my M6 cleaned and ready. Of course, Mom and Dad would never allow it. I looked at the two bored troopers with their crew cuts and half-closed eyes, and tried to believe they could somehow protect us.
Almost as the thought popped into my head, reinforcements arrived on a yellow school bus.
Where the name of the school would normally be were painted the words SHIVELY SECURITY. The tires seemed thicker and knobbier than normal. The windows looked modified, too, tinted and strengthened, and closed tight despite the heat. The bus pulled right up to the front gate, stopping with a hiss from its air brakes. There was a dramatic pause. Then, with a squeak just as innocent as if it were getting ready to discharge a gaggle of first graders, the door swung open.
A huge man stepped down the stairs of the bus, turning sideways to fit. He was wearing black canvas pants and a bulletproof vest that accentuated the size of his barrel chest. Under the vest he wore a black sleeveless T-shirt that showed off his beefy arms. On one shoulder was tattooed the logo of the United States Marine Corps, the eagle and the globe. As he exited, he turned, and I saw Asian script tattooed on the other. His pants were tucked into shiny black combat boots. While he was unarmed, there was something unmistakably military in his bearing. He had a blond flattop and a freckled, incongruously boyish face that looked out of place atop that huge body. The strikers, like me, watched him, rapt.
Without acknowledging any of us, he walked to the padlocked gate, pulled a single tiny key from his front pocket, and unlocked it. He pulled the chain through the hasp, and pushed the gate open. Like everything at the factory, the gate was exquisitely well-maintained and oiled; it swung open without a sound. He waved his arm dramatically at the unseen bus driver.
“Move it!” he barked, making all of us jump. The bus’s brakes squeaked, and it slowly rolled inside as he waited at the gate.
Once the bus was safely on plant property, the blond soldier closed the gate behind it. He did not relock it. Instead, he casually threw the chain and the padlock on the grass beside the driveway in a way that almost seemed arrogant, as if he were saying to us that it would no longer be necessary to lock up now that he had arrived.
The bus rolled to a stop in the center of the vast, empty front parking lot, not far from the empty barrels where Tom and I had hidden. The passengers inside began filing out. All of them were dressed like the blond man, but there was something about them that seemed less authentic. It was the difference between my unadorned M6 and the stickers and meaningless painting on the BB gun I had owned before. That’s not to say these guys weren’t heavily armed. Every other man getting off the bus was carrying some kind of pump-action shotgun.
“Is that a Remington 870?” someone behind me asked about the security force’s gun of choice. Some of the men stepping off the bus actually had bandoliers of shells crossing their chests. A small group of strikers pressed against the fence and soon they were all chattering about the guns on the other side.
“Looks like a Wingmaster to me.”
His friend squinted in concentration. “Nah, it’s a Mossberg 500.”
“My daddy shot a Mossberg all his life—I’d know that gun a mile away.”
“Randall, get over here!” A short man with a handlebar mustache sauntered up to the fence.
“Randall, are those Mossbergs or Remingtons?”
Both men stepped aside deferentially so that Randall, apparently the shotgun expert in the group, could step up to the fence.
“You can’t tell for sure from here,” said Randall after a moment. “But I’d guess they’re Remingtons.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t expect these boys economize on their guns.”
“We’ll just have to wait until they get closer to be sure,” said the Mossberg advocate. And by the end of the evening, I knew, the gun-loving men of Borden would have identified and evaluated every piece of armament inside the fence.
Unlike their leader, the rest of the guards did glance over at us as they got off the bus. They looked at the strikers, with their faded work shirts and scruffy beards, with complete disdain. The soldiers, or whatever they were, gathered around the bus until their leader, who was walking briskly toward them from the gate, shouted something. They quickly formed into two columns. When he got in front of them, he gave a brief talk that I strained my ears unsuccessfully to hear. He shouted another order, and the men ran to the bus and began to unload box after box of equipment, rolls of canvas, and plastic trunks full of supplies.
I looked at Tom to see if he was as impressed as I was.
Silently, he mouthed “Thugs.”
The rest of the crowd on the picket line was coming to the same realization, muttering to each other about the latest development, so there was a short delay before we realized that the bus was not completely done unloading passengers. Stepping off quickly, in work boots and jeans, were a group of men who looked vaguely familiar. They walked hunched over, almost jogging, from the bus to the front door of the factory with their backs to us.
“Holy shit,” said a man behind me, the first to realize what we were seeing.
“Turn around you cowards!” said another, and by now the whole picket line was up against the fence.
“Scabs!” many in the crowd shouted at once. They tried to count them as they ran through the door.
“I don’t believe it,” said another man behind me.
“Assholes!” someone yelled when it seemed as if the last man had hurried off the bus into the safety of the factory walls.
A few seconds passed, and then the last scab stepped dramatically off the bus. Unlike the rest, he was in no hurry to rush inside and he made no effort to keep his back to the picket line. He had on crisp new bell-bottom jeans and a short-sleeved work shirt that was almost completely unbuttoned, showing off his skinny, hairless chest. He turned and faced us with a huge grin on his face. Most of the redness on the side of his face was gone. It was Ray Arnold.
“Ray, you pussy!” someone shouted.
Ray beamed. In his posturing, in being the sole focus of our attention from the other side of a fence, and even in his skinniness, Ray strongly reminded me of the scenes I had seen of British rock stars getting off airplanes in front of a mob of delirious fans.
As the insults reached their crescendo, Ray, still smiling, raised both hands with a flourish, and happily flipped us all off with both middle fingers.
Despite their anger, about half the crowd couldn’t help but laugh.
The thugs and the scabs fell into a routine over the next few days. Four of the thugs strolled around the outside of the plant, in two pairs, at all times. One carried a shotgun. The other wore a wide, army-green web belt that held a baton, mace, and a radio that crackled constantly with military jargon. They never spoke to the strikers, never responded to the occasional insult that was thrown their way. Except for the blond man, they all looked vaguely alike, so it was hard to detect exactly when the guard changed, but it seemed like they worked a six-hour shift, more or less, just like the picketers on the other side of the fence. When they were off watch, they disappeared into the plant. Dad told me they had set up a barracks inside, eating in the cafeteria, showering in the locker room, and sleeping on rows of cots that had been set up in the now-empty receiving area. Despite my pleas, he would not take me to see it.
Dad fell into a routine, too, returning to the plant every morning, piecing together coffins with the small crew of scabs who were now clocking in and receiving paychecks once again. The scabs rolled through the gate every morning behind the tinted windows of the Shively Security bus, and went home at night the same way. Exactly how many scabs there were was a matter of some secrecy. “About a dozen” was all my dad would tell me. According to gossip on the picket line, the number was growing by about one scab every three days. If anyone was more than five minutes tardy for the morning shift on the picket line, it was automatically assumed that he was on the scab bus, and all of his traitorous tendencies were discussed at length, at least until he showed up at the line rubbing his eyes and apologizing for oversleeping.
Despite the predictions of the strikers, Dad and his small crew of scabs somehow managed to finish some caskets. “We’re getting ’em done!” he announced excitedly at dinner. The very act of production seemed to cheer him. “More than I thought, even with that small group. With so few men in there, there’s no screwing around, everybody’s dead serious. It’s slow, but all the lights are on, the ovens are running, and by God, we’re makin’ boxes!” Dad pounded his fist on the table in excitement. The scabs may have been dead serious but Dad was darn near giddy. “The teamsters won’t cross the line to pick them up, but I’ll find a driver.”
The happy optimism in my dad’s voice was still in my ears when I rode up to the picket line the next morning. It was pleasantly cool for August, and the morning fog had not completely burned off. The men on the line were burning the first cigarette of the day and passing around a thermos of coffee, treating the start of their shift on the picket line exactly like the start of a workday. The scabs had arrived on their bus at dawn, greeted by some perfunctory jeering, but their appearance each morning had already assumed the status of just part of the daily routine.
Few strikers paid any attention when the empty flatbed truck pulled around to the back of the factory. A few trucks had come and gone, some removing equipment damaged by the explosion. The truck parked out of sight for about two hours, by which time Tom and I, like everyone else on the line, had completely forgotten about it.
When it pulled back out from behind the plant, to our shock, it was loaded with coffins, each snugly secured in its shipping container, the logos oriented neatly in the same direction. We rapidly counted the boxes as the truck rolled up, arriving at a consensus total of thirty-six.
“How’d they do it?” everyone was asking. There was genuine confusion all around. I believe every single person on that line thought it impossible to build a coffin without their individual presence on the line, much less the full group. That the company could without them produce any coffins, much less a full truckload, violated a fundamental tenet of the strike.
“There were some raw boxes in the warehouse,” someone answered. “Still, they would have to trim them up, completely finish them. That would be the hard part.”
“There must be more guys in there than we thought,” somebody said angrily, “there’s no way fifteen guys could finish thirty-six caskets in this much time.”
“It looks like you’re wrong about that.”
The heavily laden truck pulled up to Highway 60, and waited for a break in traffic. There was a momentary surge in hope as the truck sputtered and stalled. They watched breathlessly to see if there would be some kind of divine, mechanical intervention to strike that Kenworth dead and halt the progress of the scab caskets. Without even getting out of the cab, however, the driver turned the key, restarted the engine, and pulled smoothly onto Highway 60. We heard him shift through his gears as he accelerated down the highway, on to a distributor’s warehouse on Dutchman’s Lane in Louisville. I knew that because Dad had exuded about the details of the shipment the night before.
The picket line lapsed into complete, despondent silence.
While the thugs seemed to be more or less restricted to plant property, Tom and I saw the blond thug in Miller’s on his first afternoon in Borden. Needing a break from the scorching heat, Tom and I pooled our spare change and determined that we had enough between us to split a can of Big Red at the store. More important than the cold drink itself, being actual paying customers meant that the bitchy Miller girls would have to allow us to hang out and enjoy their air-conditioning for a few minutes, a luxury neither of us had at home. The store advertised its AC on its main sign, a cartoon of a fan blowing on an ice cube, right next to the cartoon of the store’s famous five-hundred-pound wheel of cheese, a smiling rat gazing at it lustfully. Despite the folksy friendliness that the signs promised travelers up and down Highway 60, the Miller girls—Patsy, Loretta, and Maybelle—were the nastiest people in Borden. Vern Miller, their father and the store’s third-generation owner, had very successfully raised his little girls to believe that they were Borden royalty, superior to the mere factory workers and farmers who surrounded them. They wore rabbit fur coats in the winter and spent their summers at the family condo in Destin, Florida. They became frustrated to learn as adults that despite their innate superiority, they could not leave Borden, but were required to stay and run the store. They lived for running off local kids who lingered too long, lest they suck up the air-conditioning and sully the atmosphere of the store for the tourists on their way back to Louisville.
To their credit, the place was an authentic general store. You could buy anything in there from mantles for your Coleman lantern, to a gallon of milk, to a tiny jar of Testor’s blue paint for your model airplane. Miller’s, along with the hardware store next door, pretty much made up Borden’s entire retail economy, so maybe the Miller girls were even a little crankier than normal, as they felt the financial pinch of the strike. Or maybe they could sense that Tom and I had only enough money for one can of soda between us. Or maybe they’d heard that my mom bought her groceries at the Kroger’s in New Albany. In any case, as Tom and I walked in the door and gratefully sucked in a breath of that artificially cold air, we were greeted by an unusually venomous stare from Patsy Miller at the cash register. We ignored her, and casually strolled through the store, past the giant wheel of cheese on its wooden spool, back to the lit coolers where we could begin our slow, deliberative soda-selection process.
To my surprise, Taffy Judd was also back there, at the cooler, staring longingly at the soda. It was the first time we’d seen her since the cave.
“Hey Taffy,” Tom and I both said, startling her. She turned to face us with a slight smile.
“Hey Tom. Hey Andy,” she said quietly. She went back to staring at the dewy rows of icy soda cans: A&W, Welch’s Grape, Orange Crush, and Big Red, each too cold to hold more than a minute with bare hands. Taffy seemed like a different person than the girl we’d seen in the cave, confident, laughing, climbing those walls with dazzling agility. Here, she seemed just like I remembered her at school: small, a little tired, a little sad. And beautiful.
“Thirsty?” I asked her, after I failed to come up with anything more clever.
“You bet,” whispered Taffy.
Patsy Miller yelled at us from the register. “You kids get out of here if you don’t got no money. I ain’t a babysitter.”
“We got money,” said Tom.
“What about you? You’ve been back there twenty minutes, little girl.”
“We’ve got money,” I said, trying to match Tom’s defiant tone.
“Let me see it.”
We stepped forward, reaching in our pockets. We pulled out our grimy nickels and dimes, and displayed them for Patsy in the center of our sweaty palms.
Patsy grunted in acknowledgment. She then looked back at Taffy. “What about you, sugar? I know you don’t have any money, do you?”
Taffy glared at Patsy, studiously avoided looking at Tom and me, and then walked briskly to the door. Patsy watched her triumphantly. Taffy slammed her hands into the door as she left, making it fly open and ring the attached bell crazily.
“You best not break that door!” screamed Patsy. “You don’t have enough money for a Coke, I know you don’t have enough to fix that door!”
As Patsy screamed, and before the bell had even stopped ringing, a shadow filled the doorway. I thought for just a moment that Taffy might be coming back to tell Patsy what she could do with her ice-cold Coke cans. But the shadow grew and grew, until it was replaced by a towering, huge man. It was the blond guy, the chief thug.
“Hello, boys,” he said with a smile. Tom and I stared openmouthed. “Ma’am,” he said nodding at Patsy, who gave him an enormously pleased and surprised smile in return, her anger at Taffy evaporating before our eyes. As she started moving around nervously behind the register, I swear I thought she was looking for a pen so she could get his autograph.
He seemed bigger than the other men I knew: I thought as he walked by the blushing Patsy that he would bang his head on the overhead racks of cigarettes. He was scary. Not because he was a stranger—strangers came into Miller’s all the time, tourists looking for local color. At least those people, though, had the courtesy to act uncomfortable or perhaps even charmed by the simple hill folks of the area. This guy was neither uncomfortable nor charmed. He picked up a pound of baloney, a loaf of bread, and a cold six-pack of RC Cola with the ease of a man who might just do it every day for the rest of his life. He took his food to the register. Patsy, as I suspected, was not content to just bag his baloney and give him his change.
“And how are you this mornin’?” she asked once she regained the power of speech.
“Just fine, ma’am,” he said, waiting for her to take the five-dollar bill from his fingers. “How are you?”
“We’re so glad you’re here.” Patsy lowered her voice to a stage whisper. “It’s about time somebody taught those yahoos a lesson.”
The thug again offered her his money without comment, but Patsy wasn’t done yet. She was certain she’d found a fellow traveler in her hatred of Borden natives, and she wasn’t about to let him go without some commiseration.
“The unions are ruining the country, I believe.”
“That could be, yes, ma’am.” His halfhearted agreement seemed just an attempt to bring the conversation to a close. But Patsy was just getting started.
“The Teamsters? Known communists. Longshoremen? Known communists. Autoworkers? I tell my little girl: you see this spool of thread? It costs fifteen cents. If we give everybody more money for making it than they deserve, then the spool of thread will cost a dollar. ‘Momma, nobody can pay a dollar for a spool of thread,’ she tells me.” Patsy cackled at her daughter’s precociousness.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“So we’re real glad you’re here.” Patsy actually clasped his hand in both of hers, like a grateful flood victim greeting a national guardsman. Her voice dropped to where we could barely hear her, although I sensed that she intentionally maintained it just high enough for us to make out her words. “You teach those rednecks a lesson.”
“I’m not here to teach anyone a lesson,” said the thug, escaping from her grasp, still smiling tightly. “I’m just here to protect company property.”
Patsy cackled again and winked. “Of course you are,” she said knowingly. “Of course you are!” She finally gave the man his change.
Tom and I had worked our way over to the door by the time he finally made his escape from Patsy. I read “Solinski” on his nametag as he passed.
“You boys stay out of trouble, okay?” he said. He flashed a pointy-toothed smile and winked at us as he left. Through the door, I watched him stride to catch up with Taffy, who was walking dejectedly down the road. He twisted off a can of RC from his six-pack and gave it to her.
When Tom and I returned to the picket line, the people of Borden were once again abuzz with excitement. The WAVE 3 Action News Team had arrived in a van painted gloriously with NBC’s peacock logo. The Action News Team was unloading their equipment, while Borden’s own Dieter Sajko did the same: six fat, tired-looking bloodhounds he had in the back of his ancient Ford Bronco. It seemed a little late for hounds to pick up the trail, and I suspected the event was being staged solely for the benefit of the news crew.
Sajko lived at the edge of town in a ramshackle converted barn. He somehow eked out a living raising bloodhounds and grinding tree stumps around the county. Sajko must have known in advance that his performance was to be televised—he was wearing an uncharacteristically clean shirt and what looked like a new straw hat. Sheriff Kohl stood to the side and nodded approvingly as Sajko tried to coax his dogs into at least looking like they gave a shit. Sajko took the notorious Mack Sanders ball cap from the sheriff, rubbed it in the muzzles of his confused-looking dogs, and then took off running with them into the woods beyond the bean field in front of the plant. It was exactly the opposite direction that Tom and I had seen the “bombers” go—I thought Sajko might be taking his cue from the psychic. The scruffiest-looking member of the news crew trotted after them with a bulky camera on his shoulder, and Tom and I followed on our bikes.
The hounds briefly got into the spirit of things, howling dramatically as they ran in front of Sajko. Their enthusiasm didn’t last long. The hounds ran to the edge of Muddy Fork, the nearest body of water. There they sat down, exhausted and gasping for breath, and lapping occasionally from the creek when they could muster the energy.
Dieter Sajko stepped between his hounds and the television camera. “They gone,” he declared. “Lost the scent on the water. Probably gone to Lou-a-vul.”
The sheriff and his deputies nodded soberly in agreement at Dieter and the small crowd that had caught up with us. I hoped the dogs were right, but I couldn’t forget that image of the men running in the opposite direction, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the threat scrawled on our garage door. The cameraman knelt down and put his camera on the ground, to get a low angle shot of the panting hounds.
Tom and I turned our bikes around and easily beat the crowd back to the picket line, which was now largely deserted. Inside the fence, I saw that the thugs were ignoring the running of the hounds. Solinski had a large topographical map laid out on a picnic table, the site of summer lunches and smoke breaks during happier days. Two of his RC cans were holding down the corners. Solinski was pointing out coordinates and drawing lines for his men. I could tell even from a distance that it wasn’t a map of Louisville: the large blue band of the Ohio River snaked around the very bottom edge of it. It was a map of Clark County. Solinski didn’t believe Sajko’s lazy dogs any more than Tom and I did.
That night after dinner had been cleaned up and the Sanka had brewed, Dad shuffled and dealt our well-worn deck of Authors cards.
“I’m feeling lucky tonight,” said Dad, sorting his hand.
“The Alhambra?” I asked Mom.
“No,” she said. I drew a useless Pendennis off the pile.
“The Scarlet Letter?” Dad asked me. I slid it across the table.
“Yes!” he said, as he happily laid out Hawthorne’s four major works on the table.
“How’d they do it?” I asked suddenly. Dad looked at Mom, and I could tell that not only did he know exactly what my vague question meant, but that they had anticipated and planned for it. One of the many things I didn’t like about being an only child was that it was nearly impossible for me to surprise my parents.
“How’d they do what?” Dad asked, buying time.
“The explosion at the factory,” I said, pretending to sort my cards. “How’d they make it blow up?”
My father looked to my mother again, confirming the strategy they had decided earlier about what and how much to tell me.
“Do you remember the finishing ovens?” my father asked. “Where the caskets roll between coats?”
I nodded. That was in my father’s area of the plant, the area I knew the best. The coffins rolled single file on a belt through the paint booths, which applied each coat of prime, color, and finish. Then the caskets crept slowly through the warm ovens at a precisely calculated temperature, and rolled out the other side with the color more firmly affixed. Or something like that. My father had been largely unsuccessful in his attempts to interest me in the complexities of finishing fine wood coffins. Even so, I did distinctly remember the ovens. While I grew up in a town where virtually everybody paid their bills with money made from the sale of expensive wooden caskets, there was something spooky to me about that unending column of them rolling slowly through a glowing oven.
My father continued. “They lit a candle at one end of the finish line. Then, they blew out the pilot light on the oven, and turned up the throttle valve on the gas all the way. The place filled up with a cloud of natural gas, and when the cloud reached the candle, it ignited, and exploded.” He paused, took a breath, then continued to explain to me how Don Strange died.
“Don was standing outside his office when it exploded. Maybe he heard something. Maybe he smelled gas. Maybe he was just getting ready to leave.”
“So what actually killed him?” I asked.
“The explosion.”
“No, I mean, how? Was he burned up? Did something go through his head?”
My mother was horrified. “Andy, don’t be morbid.”
“No, it’s okay,” said my father. “It was the explosion. The blast threw him across the finish room, into a concrete wall. Broke almost every bone in his body. It was enough to kill him five times over.”
I pretended to focus on the unaffiliated array of Alcotts, Twains, and Sir Walter Scotts in my hand, and not on the image of tiny Don Strange helplessly flying across the finishing room and slamming into a hard wall.
“They’ll pay for what they did. Sooner or later,” my father said. “Although I would have thought they could catch at least one of them by now, Sanders or Kruer.”
“How do you know they’ll get caught? How can you be so sure?” I wanted to know it was certain; if there was no doubt, then I was all freed from any responsibility to come forward and tell the authorities what Tom and I had seen.
“Wherever they end up, somebody will rat them out,” my mom said quickly.
I was mystified by her reaction. “Don’t we want them caught?”
“Of course we do. I just don’t like the way people are lining up to turn them in.” Her Kentucky accent had sharpened in the same way it did when she spoke about Phyllis Schlafly.
My father sighed. “They’ll get caught without anybody’s help—they’ve hardly proven themselves master criminals.”
“Maybe,” my mom said.
“They found Mack’s ball cap at the factory. With his name written in it. Plus, several people came forward and said Sanders was making a lot of crazy threats at the union meeting that very night.”
“Like I said. Union people around here are pretty quick to turn on one of their own.” I wanted her to elaborate on her own upbringing, where people presumably knew how to throw a proper strike.
“Well, God bless the people around here for that,” said my father. “There are folks on our picket line who don’t cotton to murder and arson.”
“God bless them?” my mother asked.
“God bless them.”
We went back to our card game.