Blood: Packing Corn

29

...the exceeding brightness of military glory — that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood...

Abraham Lincoln

1950

My grandfather was a produce broker. He bought and sold the crops of the nearby counties and shipped them by truck and rail car to the cities — Chicago, Memphis, Kansas City, Tulsa, St. Louis. He shipped beans and tomatoes, spinach and strawberries, peaches and watermelons, cantaloupe and carrots, sweet corn and cucumbers. Whatever was planted and grown nearby. Whatever could be sold.

The drivers pulled their trucks on the scales in front of my grandfather’s office, got their tickets, and then drove across the street and backed up to the loading dock of the packing shed. Then they waited to be loaded. The drivers were friendly to me. They dressed as cowboys in boots, jeans, straw hats, large belts with larger buckles, shirts that had snaps instead of buttons, and had red bandannas hanging out of their hip pockets or tied around their necks on a hot day. One was known as “Kansas” and wore his straw hat tilted to one side of his head. He told me that that was the way cowboys wore their hats in Kansas, where he was from, and I believed him.

Kansas could do rope tricks in the manner of Will Rogers. Waiting for his truck to be loaded he would take the hemp lariat out of the cab, spin it in lazy circles, and step in and out of the loop. He’d toss the loop over my head and it would drop down around my shoulders. He’d tug it tight and draw me to him and ruffle my hair as he took the loop from around me. “Gotta be quicker than that to get away from Kansas, boy,” he’d say. “If I ever got me the right horse I’d go on the rodeo circuit, ’cause I’m the best man with a rope I know. Just ain’t got the right horse.”

Kansas, and almost all the truck drivers, did not sit like ordinary men. They squatted down on the platform of the packing shed. They hunkered on the balls of their feet, the cuffs of their Levi’s drawn up toward the tops of their boots. It was a posture like a catcher behind home plate, and not too unlike that of Vietnamese villagers and Montagnard tribesmen, although those peoples squatted flat-footed. Later in my life I was to do both, squat behind home plate for wild throwing high school pitchers and facing Montagnards in the highlands and Vietnamese village elders in the Delta.

Lounging this way, sometimes leaning back against the side of the packing shed, they whittled on scraps of wood. They all carried a pocket knife of some sort. Some rolled cigarettes made from sacks of Bull Durham carried in a shirt pocket with the red tag hanging out or from a can of Prince Albert. A rare few smoked tailor-mades, possibly Home Runs, or, if he had made a recent run to New Orleans, Picayunes, the famously strong cigarette from that part of the country. Or Lucky Strikes.

Kansas was particularly proud of his ability to tightly roll a cigarette from the flakes of Bull Durham and gummed paper. He made a trough of the paper with the thumb and first two fingers of his left hand and shook the tobacco from the pouch held in his right hand. When he had measured out enough tobacco, he caught the tag of the sack in his teeth, tightened the string, and put the sack back in his pocket. He then tamped the tobacco down with a finger and brought the paper to his lips, licked it, and then smoothed out the cylinder.

“See that, boy, as good as any tailor-made you’ll ever see.”

It wasn’t, I knew, certainly not as perfectly formed as my grandfather’s Pall Malls, but I didn’t say so.

Some of the drivers would let me puff on one of their cigarettes.

“Don’t do him no harm. Long as he don’t inhale.”

“Stunt your growth, boy,” another would say.

My grandmother once smelled the smoke on me and it was the occasion for yet another visit to the forsythia bush behind the house.

Inside the packing shed a crew prepared loads for the trucks. Depending on what was being packed, a configuration of conveyor belts, bins, cutting devices, wrapping machines, piles of crates and baskets, and work lines was established. The machines were all driven by arrangements of belts and pulleys that whirred overhead and led, if carefully traced, back to an electric motor with a great on-off handle in a back corner of the shed.

One day they were packing corn. Trucks filled with loose ears picked that morning in the river bottomland waited to take their turns backing up to the loading dock. At the dock a conveyer belt ran into a truck and the loose corn was shoveled onto the belt. The corn flowed into the shed and along the packing line. At the packing line people stood on both sides of the belt and grabbed the corn as it streamed past them. Alongside the conveyor belt in front of the people working the line was a cutting machine. This was something like a row of enlarged mechanical cigar cutters. In front of each worker was a row of holes that every second or so opened up for a moment before a cutting blade flashed across. What a worker did was grab two ears of corn and thrust the ends of the corn into two open holes. In a moment the blades flashed and chopped off the ends of the ears. Then the worker rotated the two ears, flipping them like small batons, and put the other ends into the holes. The blades flashed again. After that, the worker tossed the ears onto another conveyor belt that delivered the trimmed ears to packers. The packers took the flow of trimmed ears of corn, now all nearly the same length, and put them into boxes. The filled boxes then went down a set of rollers to a waiting truck.

Back at the cutting area the ends of corn filled great bins that were emptied out during breaks between the unloading of trucks. These bins had a sweet summer smell to them. The silage in them often moved with the struggling of corn worms and the sides of the bins were speckled with the brown juices of worms that had been caught by the cutting machines.

The men and women who worked the line were local people. It wasn’t steady work. It ebbed and flowed with the season and the harvest. But some, because of their skills, or because they could reconfigure the lines based on what needed to be done, or because they were some sort of kin somewhere back in time, were always there in the summers. They were all acquainted. One of them was named Joe.

As I watched (they would not let me get anywhere near them while the machines were running) they chatted and joked and told stories on each other as the ears of corn flowed down the line in front of them. Perhaps it was a particularly funny story, or perhaps he’d tasted a bit more than he should of the whiskey that came down out of the nearby mountains the night before, or perhaps his steel-toed boot stepped on a stray piece of corn —  but instead of an ear of corn it was the tips of two of Joe’s fingers that went into the cutters.

The blood spurted across the line and one of the women screamed. Joe’s truncated hand still clutched the ear of corn as he stood back from the line. He shouted to shut the line down. Someone ran back and pulled the big handle and there was a sudden quiet in the room.

Kansas came striding in from the loading dock, whipping his red bandanna from out of his pocket. He wrapped it around Joe’s hand, ear of corn and all, and said, “Let’s get you to the hospital.”

He turned to me. “Go get your grandpa and tell him the line’s been shut down and that we need to take Joe to get his hand fixed.”

He said to one of the other line workers, “See if you can find them fingers and we’ll take ’em along. Don’t think it’ll do no good though.”

I ran across the street and interrupted my grandfather who was talking on the telephone. Papaw took his hat off its hook and went out the door. Kansas was walking Joe across the street, carrying someone else’s bloody bandanna with the fingertips in it. My grandfather started his Hudson and he and Joe and Kansas drove off, leaving me behind to wait.

I told the story to my grandmother at the dinner table that night. Her only comment was not to me, but to my grandfather. “You keep him away from the machinery, Jim. You know that’s a dangerous place.”