Robert Batler - The Ironworkers' Hayride

So this fellow at the new ironworks in Sunnyvale where I am a cost-sheet man and he is a furnace man, he comes over to me at the Ironman Saloon. Im still in my blue- serge suit and collar, though the fellows in their overalls know me as an okay guy, even if they mostly treat me like a hapless little brother. But this one fellow, Zack, spots me as soon as he sets foot in the place. Im sitting on a stool at the bar counting the smoked almonds Im eating and sort of working the numbers out, how many I need to eat to cover the cost of the beer in front of me and wishing I could dare pull out a scrap of paper and do some downright figuring. But that would undercut my standing among these fellows around me, who Im here trying to be part of, the sorts of fellows that used to daily snap my suspenders and tweak my nose when we were all boys. So this fellow Zack presses past his friends and makes straight for me and he claps me on the back, causing me to revise my almond count from twenty back to nineteen, most of the twentieth one attaching itself to the mirror behind the bar. Milton, old man, he says, and he proceeds for the fourth time in four days to urge me to take his sister-in-law on the ironworkers hayride, which is now a mere two days off, even though he has confessed about her having a cork leg.

I am awful tired nights, I say, an excuse I have not yet tried on him, and he perches on the stool next to me with a face crumpled in skepticism. I dont blame him. He shovels coal, I add numbers. He knows this. I know this. My eyes, I say. Tired eyes.

Its dark, he says. You got nothing much to look at except Minnie, and shes easy on the eyes, Im telling you. And that other thing, you know, it wears a shoe and stocking like the good one.

I nod and begin gnawing the thin brown skin off a new almond. This is not my usual method. Minnies brother-in-law is making me nervous.

He lowers his voice and leans near. Look. Nobody but you knows about this leg thing. She walks real good. And she dresses up nice. The others will think youre a regular fellow.

I shoot him a sideways glance and turn the almond over, like a squirrel, to gnaw at the other side. I tote up all the sums of his remark. The others dont already think Im a regular fellow. Im not a regular fellow. If she can hide her cork leg, I can hide my irregular fellowness. Zack has let me in on a family secret with all the obligations and reciprocities attendant thereto. Though I have to point out that I never solicited this secret. It was Zack who took the stocking off the rubber foot, so to speak. No. Erase that. He let the cat out of the bag. Theres a reason for saying things the way everybody else says them.

How bout it? Zack says.

I calculate it all, and the almond is bare and white in my hand. It gives me the willies. I slip it into my mouth, out of sight. I chew fast, knowing Im about to get popped on the back again. I swallow and then turn to Zack, and I say, All right.

This much I take pains to learn from Zack: Minnies leg is missing from well above the knee. She is twenty-two. Her favorite flower is the poppy. And the leg isnt really made of cork. It couldnt be, if you think about it, cork being too soft a wood to bear the weight of a twenty-two-year-old girl, or even half her weight. The leg is of wood willow, in fact and years ago they made a swell wooden leg in the county of Cork in Ireland. Thus the name.

As for the reason, Zack says she lost her leg as a child to a runaway horse and an overturned carriage. She was riding in it. This gives me an idea. Zack, I say. Think. If she goes out in the night in a wagon being pulled by a horse, wont she be caused to dwell on that terrible event?

He bends near, putting his great paw of a hand on my shoulder. It weighs quite a lot. Im having trouble keeping from sliding off the bar stool under its pressure. Look, Milton, he says. I havent been dogging you about this for your sake, much as I. . like you. Its Minnie who wants bad to go on this hayride. Im not about to disappoint her.

He squeezes my shoulder like hes trying to juice an orange and I know I better speak up quick. Sure. Okay, I say, and he lets me go.

Thats my blue-serge pal, he says.

I want to say to him, Why me? I heard you hesitate before the word like in your recent declaration. Pleasantly tolerate is more what it is. So why choose a fellow like that for your sister-in-law? But I dare not ask. And I think I know the answer. He wants to keep from informing his pals in overalls about his sister-in-laws handicap. Not to mention he sees me as a safe choice, the last male in his acquaintance whod ever play the masher with his wifes kin.

So this is how I come to be standing at the front gate of the ironworks in collar and straw hat holding a bunch of orange poppies. I am not alone. A few dozen couples the guys from the various work gangs, mostly, and their girls in lacy shirtwaists and skirts are all gabbling and promenading around me, trying to choose hay companions on the four large, sweet-smelling wagons that wait along the street. There is no sign of Zack and his sister-in-law. Then two piercing yellow eyes appear down the road the headlamps of an automobile and the horses start puffing and stirring, and up roars Zack in his father-in-laws Model T, to the great interest of all the couples. The Ford is as black as the night sky. Zacks father-in-law was one of the first to buy this wonder for a mere $845, and the prices have been coming down already in these past two years, the blue-serge boys in Detroit squeezing their production cost numbers as tightly as Zack squeezing my shoulder. I step forward from the crowd, which is already returning to the matter of choosing wagons. The drivers side of the auto is before me and Zack gives me a nod and I nod back. Then, stepping into the blazing beams of the headlamps is Minnie of the cork leg.

She pauses there, aflame from the lamps of the Ford, and I feel like the flowers are wilting in my hand. She is swell looking. Shes wearing a blue sailor dress with the big collar and the wide, knotted tie hanging down the center of her chest, and her head is bare, her hair all gathered up there with a wide, dark ribbon circling the crown, and there is a radiance all around her thanks to the Ford, but radiance nonetheless her whole head is surrounded with a bright glow, like a saint, a martyred saint who has lost her leg to an evil duke a partially martyred saint and her face is very pale and delicate of nose and brow and ear and so forth my eyes are dancing around her, not taking her in very objectively, I realize her mouth is a sweet painted butterfly. Im squeezing the life out of the flowers in my hand, I realize, crushing their stems in my fist. I try to ease up, settle down. And now her face turns and she looks at me as if she knows who I am already. I flinch a bit inside, wondering how Zack described me, but it cant be too bad, because hes responsible for setting all this up. She steps from the light.

I observe this first step carefully. I am a detail man. Thats my job. And I see with her first step which leg is descended from the land of Erin, so to speak. Her left. She has started from her right leg she would surely start from her good side and her left leg then follows a tiny bit slowly, perhaps dragging just a very little, almost imperceptibly, and its true if I werent looking for this and if I werent a detail man, Id never know, but I am and I am and I do. Now under way, she seems quite natural. She has a blanket draped over one arm. Many of the girls have blankets. I noted that with envy when I first arrived. It is mid July, and though it can get a bit chilly in the valley even in July, I know these blankets are for spooning, and now Minnie is approaching me and shes been moved to bring a blanket. This is too much on my mind as she arrives before me.