I don’t see where being a newsboy and learning that people are pretty mean or that people don’t have enough money to buy things with is gonna make you a better person or anything. If anything, it’s gonna make a worse person out of you, ’cause you’re not gonna like people that don’t pay you. And you’re not gonna like people who act like they’re doing you a big favor paying you. Yeah, it sort of molds your character, but I don’t think for the better. If anybody told me being a newsboy builds character, I’d know he was a liar.
I don’t see where people get all this bull about the kid who’s gonna be President and being a newsboy made a President out of him. It taught him how to handle his money and this bull. You know what it did? It taught him how to hate the people on his route. And the printers. And dogs.
PREFACE III
THE MASON
CARL MURRAY BATES
We’re in a tavern no more than thirty yards from the banks of the Ohio. Toward the far side of the river, Alcoa smokestacks belch forth: an uneasy coupling of a bucolic past and an industrial present. The waters are polluted, yet the jobs out there offer the townspeople their daily bread.
He is fifty-seven years old. He’s a stonemason who has pursued his craft since he was seventeen. None of his three sons is in his trade.
As far as I know, masonry is older than carpentry, which goes clear back to Bible times. Stone mason goes back way
before
Bible time: the pyramids of Egypt, things of that sort. Anybody that starts to build anything, stone, rock, or brick, start on the northeast corner. Because when they built King Solomon’s Temple, they started on the northeast corner. To this day, you look at your courthouses, your big public buildings, you look at the cornerstone, when it was created, what year, it will be on the northeast corner. If I was gonna build a septic tank, I would start on the northeast corner. (Laughs.) Superstition, I suppose.
With stone we build just about anything. Stone is the oldest and best building material that ever was. Stone was being used even by the cavemen that put it together with mud. They built out of stone before they even used logs. He got him a cave, he built stone across the front. And he learned to use dirt, mud, to make the stones lay there without sliding around—which was the beginnings of mortar, which we still call mud. The Romans used mortar that’s almost as good as we have today.
Everyone hears these things, they just don’t remember ’em. But me being in the profession, when I hear something in that line, I remember it. Stone’s my business. I, oh, sometimes talk to architects and engineers that have made a study and I pick up the stuff here and there.
Every piece of stone you pick up is different, the grain’s a little different and this and that. It’ll split one way and break the other. You pick up your stone and look at it and make an educated guess. It’s a pretty good day layin’ stone or brick. Not tiring. Anything you like to do isn’t tiresome. It’s hard work; stone is heavy. At the same time, you get interested in what you’re doing and you usually fight the clock the other way. You’re not lookin’ for quittin’. You’re wondering you haven’t got enough done and it’s almost quittin’ time. (Laughs.) I ask the hod carrier what time it is and he says two thirty. I say, “Oh, my Lord, I was gonna get a whole lot more than this.”
I pretty well work by myself. On houses, usually just one works. I’ve got the hod carrier there, but most of the time I talk to myself, “I’ll get my hammer and I’ll knock the chip off there.” (Laughs.) A good hod carrier is half your day. He won’t work as hard as a poor one. He knows what to do and make every move count makin’ the mortar. It has to be so much water, so much sand. His skill is to see that you don’t run out of anything. The hod carrier, he’s above the laborer. He has a certain amount of prestige.
I think a laborer feels that he’s the low man. Not so much that he works with his hands, it’s that he’s at the bottom of the scale. He always wants to get up to a skilled trade. Of course he’d make more money. The main thing is the common laborer—even the word
common
laborer—just sounds so common, he’s at the bottom. Many that works with his hands takes pride in his work.
I get a lot of phone calls when I get home: how about showin’ me how and I’ll do it myself? I always wind up doin’ it for ’em. (Laughs.) So I take a lot of pride in it and I do get, oh, I’d say, a lot of praise or whatever you want to call it. I don’t suppose anybody, however much he’s recognized, wouldn’t like to be recognized a little more. I think I’m pretty well recognized.
One of my sons is an accountant and the other two are bankers. They’re mathematicians, I suppose you’d call ‘em that. Air-conditioned offices and all that. They always look at the house I build. They stop by and see me when I’m aworkin’. Always want me to come down and fix somethin’ on their house, too. (Laughs.) They don’t buy a house that I don’t have to look at it first. Oh sure, I’ve got to crawl under it and look on the roof, you know. . .
I can’t seem to think of any young masons. So many of ’em before, the man lays stone and his son follows his footsteps. Right now the only one of these sons I can think of is about forty, fifty years old.
I started back in the Depression times when there wasn’t any apprenticeships. You just go out and if you could hold your job, that’s it. I was just a kid then. Now I worked real hard and carried all the blocks I could. Then I’d get my trowel and I’d lay one or two. The second day the boss told me: I think you could lay enough blocks to earn your wages. So I guess I had only one day of apprenticeship. Usually it takes about three years of being a hod carrier to start. And it takes another ten or fifteen years to learn the skill.
I admired the men that we had at that time that were stonemasons. They knew their trade. So naturally I tried to pattern after them. There’s been very little change in the work. Stone is still stone, mortar is still the same as it was fifty years ago. The style of stone has changed a little. We use a lot more, we call it golf. A stone as big as a baseball up to as big as a basketball. Just round balls and whatnot. We just fit ’em in the wall that way.
Automation has tried to get in the bricklayer. Set ’em with a crane. I’ve seen several put up that way. But you’ve always got in-between the windows and this and that. It just doesn’t seem to pan out. We do have a power saw. We do have an electric power mix to mix the mortar, but the rest of it’s done by hand as it always was.
In the old days they all seemed to want it cut out and smoothed. It’s harder now because you have no way to use your tools. You have no way to use a string, you have no way to use a level or a plumb. You just have to look at it because it’s so rough and many irregularities. You have to just back up and look at it.
All construction, there’s always a certain amount of injuries. A scaffold will break and so on. But practically no real danger. All I ever did do was work on houses, so we don’t get up very high—maybe two stories. Very seldom that any more. Most of ‘em are one story. And so many of’em use stone for a trim. They may go up four, five feet and then paneling or something. There’s a lot of skinned fingers or you hit your finger with a hammer. Practically all stone is worked with hammers and chisels. I wouldn’t call it dangerous at all.
Stone’s my life. I daydream all the time, most times it’s on stone. Oh, I’m gonna build me a stone cabin down on the Green River. I’m gonna build stone cabinets in the kitchen. That stone door’s gonna be awful heavy and I don’t know how to attach the hinges. I’ve got to figure out how to make a stone roof. That’s the kind of thing. All my dreams, it seems like it’s got to have a piece of rock mixed in it.
If I got some problem that’s bothering me, I’ll actually wake up in the night and think of it. I’ll sit at the table and get a pencil and paper and go over it, makin’ marks on paper or drawin’ or however . . . this way or that way. Now I’ve got to work this and I’ve only got so much. Or they decided they want it that way when you already got it fixed this way. Anyone hates tearing his work down. It’s all the same price but you still don’t like to do it.
These fireplaces, you’ve got to figure how they’ll throw out heat, the way you curve the fireboxes inside. You have to draw a line so they reflect heat. But if you throw out too much of a curve, you’ll have them smoke. People in these fine houses don’t want a puff of smoke coming out of the house.
The architect draws the picture and the plans, and the draftsman and the engineer, they help him. They figure the strength and so on. But when it comes to actually makin’ the curves and doin’ the work, you’ve got to do it with your hands. It comes right back to your hands.
When you get into stone, you’re gettin’ away from the prefabs, you’re gettin’ into the better homes. Usually at this day and age they’ll start into sixty to seventy thousand and run up to about half a million. We’ve got one goin’ now that’s mighty close, three or four hundred thousand. That type of house is what we build.
The lumber is not near as good as it used to be. We have better fabricating material, such as plywood and sheet rock and things of that sort, but the lumber itself is definitely inferior. Thirty, forty years ago a house was almost entirely made of lumber, wood floors . . . Now they have vinyl, they have carpet, everything, and so on. The framework wood is getting to be of very poor quality.
But stone is still stone and the bricks are actually more uniform than they used to be. Originally they took a clay bank . . . I know a church been built that way. Went right on location, dug a hole in the ground and formed bricks with their hands. They made the bricks that built the building on the spot.
Now we’ve got modern kilns, modern heat, the temperature don’t vary. They got better bricks now than they used to have. We’ve got machines that make brick, so they’re made true. Where they used to, they were pretty rough. I’m buildin’ a big fireplace now out of old brick. They run wide, long, and it’s a headache. I’ve been two weeks on that one fireplace.
The toughest job I ever done was this house, a hundred years old plus. The lady wanted one room left just that way. And this doorway had to be closed. It had deteriorated and weathered for over a hundred years. The bricks was made out of broken pieces, none of ‘em were straight. If you lay ’em crooked, it gets awful hard right there. You spend a lifetime tryin’ to learn to lay bricks straight. And it took a half-day to measure with a spoon, to try to get the mortar to match. I’d have so much dirt, so much soot, so much lime, so when I got the recipe right I could make it in bigger quantity. Then I made it with a coffee cup. Half a cup of this, half a cup of that . . . I even used soot out of a chimney and sweepin’s off the floor. I was two days layin’ up a little doorway, mixin’ the mortar and all. The boss told the lady it couldn’t be done. I said, “Give me the time, I believe I can do it.” I defy you to find where that door is right now. That’s the best job I ever done.
There’s not a house in this country that I haven’t built that I don’t look at every time I go by. (Laughs.) I can set here now and actually in my mind see so many that you wouldn’t believe. If there’s one stone in there crooked, I know where it’s at and I’ll never forget it. Maybe thirty years, I’ll know a place where I should have took that stone out and redone it but I didn’t. I still notice it. The people who live there might not notice it, but I notice it. I never pass that house that I don’t think of it. I’ve got one house in mind right now. (Laughs.) That’s the work of my hands. ’Cause you see, stone, you don’t prepaint it, you don’t camouflage it. It’s there, just like I left it forty years ago.
I can’t imagine a job where you go home and maybe go by a year later and you don’t know what you’ve done. My work, I can see what I did the first day I started. All my work is set right out there in the open and I can look at it as I go by. It’s something I can see the rest of my life. Forty years ago, the first blocks I ever laid in my life, when I was seventeen years old. I never go through Eureka—a little town down there on the river—that I don’t look thataway. It’s always there.
Immortality as far as we’re concerned. Nothin’ in this world lasts forever, but did you know that stone—Bedford limestone, they claim—deteriorates one-sixteenth of an inch every hundred years? And it’s around four or five inches for a house. So that’s gettin’ awful close. (Laughs.)
BOOK ONE
WORKING THE LAND
PIERCE WALKER
An autumn evening in a southern Indiana farmhouse. The city, Evansville, industrial and distending, is hardly fifteen miles away—and coming on fast.
It’s a modern, well-appointed house. A grandfather’s clock, tick-tocking, is the one memento of a “country” past. His father and his grandfather worked this land. “My father was born on the same spot this house is sittin’. And I was born here. We tore the old house down.”
His wife, who has a job in the city, and their fourteen-year-old daughter live with him. His older child, a son, is elsewhere. Though he has a few head of beef cattle, soy beans and corn are his source of income. He describes himself as “a poor farmer.”
I farm about five-hundred acres. I own in the neighborhood of two-hundred. The rest of it I sharecrop. I give the owners two-fifths and I keep three-fifths. They’re absentee. One would be a doctor. And a bricklayer. One would be a contractor widow. (Glances toward his wife) What would you call Roger? An aeronautical engineer. I guess all of ’em have inherited from their parents. They hold it for an investment. If I owned a lot of farm land myself, if I had that much money, I don’t think I’d be farming it. I’d let somebody else worry with it.
For a farmer, the return on your investment is so small now that it isn’t really worthwhile. A younger person cannot start farming unless they have help from the father or somebody. ’Cause you have to be almost able to retire a rich man to start out. The only way the farmers are making it today is the ones in business keep getting bigger, to kinda offset the acreage, the margin income. I don’t know what’s gonna happen in the future. I’m afraid it’s gonna get rough in time to come.