Holding the Stakes

•

It was so early the sun's rays came through the trees almost level with the streets and sidewalks. Porch railings and grape arbors cast long shadows. Fence pickets showed through tangles of honeysuckle and morning-glory. Light pooled along the brick streets as though rain had just fallen.

The boy rode in back of the pick-up. They were headed for the mill district on the south side of town. The tin mill had shut down years before, but the old wooden houses had held up, and the workers had found ways to hang on during the Depression, and then during the War. Things were slightly better now.

They pulled up in front of one of the houses. From somewhere in a run behind the house a rooster crowed. An elderly man came out and walked toward the truck. He was not in a hurry. He wore a worn flannel shirt and bib overalls on a day that would easily reach 85 degrees. But how he was dressed did not matter. He was the one they wanted, the one they had come to get.

His name was Caruthers. He was tall and angular, with leathery skin and gray hair, and eyebrows that had the texture of steel wool. He was at least seventy years old, and he had been a laborer all of his life. He wore a cap made of striped blue cloth with a soft, crumpled bill, the kind favored by farmers and railroad workers.

Without a word he climbed into the back of the truck and sat down on a keg of nails. In one hand he clutched a brown sack that contained his lunch. With the other he grabbed hold of the overhead rack. He looked over at the young man sitting across from him and grinned. The truck pulled away from the curb.

At the job site, the previous afternoon, the carpenter had sawn a stack of two-by-fours into a small mountain of pointed stakes. There were two or three hundred in all. The first couple of dozen had been loaded in an old cement-caked wheelbarrow. The contractor had set up his transit on the near side of the road, and was establishing level. Chalk lines already stretched across the grid of the field. Now it was time to drive the stakes.

This was why they had gone down and picked up Old Man Caruthers. He was retired, and too old to work at a steady job. His wife was dead and he lived with a daughter. But he was still the best man in town for driving stakes, especially if you had a lot of them, and they had brought him to the site for that reason.

That was why they had brought the boy, too. He was a neighbor boy who lived down the street from the contractor. He was going to be paid fifty cents an hour for holding the stakes. It was the first real job he had ever had.

From among the tools offered, Caruthers selected a five-pound sledge with traces of red paint on the handle. He motioned to the boy and they went out into the field. The old man showed him how to hold the stakes, one at a time, at the point where the strings came together to form an X. You had to flick the strings now and then to make sure they moved free and were not hung up on anything.

The old man would peer at each stake as though taking its measure. He seemed to be fixing it in his mind. Then he would hit it, and the first blow would drive it down so straight the boy seldom had to correct it, and could take his hands away when it was hit a second time, and a third.

After each stake was in place, the boy would set the story pole on top, and hold it vertical, and the contractor across the way, hunched over to shoot the target through the transit, would call to them - how close they were, how much farther it had to go down. Patiently, the old man tapped it into place. An inch, a half inch. A quarter inch. A nudge. Just a taste. And finally, "Right on it!"

Then they would move on to the next point, the place where in time a reinforced concrete pier would rise, one of many that would hold up the new factory. The boy would fetch a stake from the wheelbarrow, and position it, and the old man would study it carefully, and take aim.

The first few times the boy held out a fresh stake, he was afraid, but the old man never missed, and after a while it got to be easy. They did not hurry. They took their time. Already it was getting hot, and they had hundreds of stakes to hold out and drive down, slowly, carefully, until they were right on the money.

When the noon whistle blew at the can factory, the old man did not climb onto the truck with the other men, to go into town to the lunch counter where everybody went to eat. He sat in the shade of a scaffold, on a stack of lumber, and opened his brown sack. He brought out two pieces of fried chicken wrapped in wax paper and a hard-boiled egg. There was water from a hose.

The boy had brought his own lunch - a peanut-butter sandwich, an apple, and a Clark bar. He sat a slight distance away on a newly poured concrete wall. Neither of them spoke.

First the old man peeled and ate the egg. Then he ate the thigh and the drumstick. He crunched up the chicken bones and ate them too, and licked his fingers. Next, he wrapped the eggshell in the piece of wax paper, and folded up the sack, and tucked it in a pocket in the bib of his overalls. It was a time when you still saved eggshells to mix in with the feed for your chickens.

The boy ate the core of his apple. There was nothing left but the stem. He chewed on the stem. By this time the other workmen had returned, laughing and talking, and the contractor was there, and the boy and the old man went out into the field again and began holding and driving the stakes.

They worked through the afternoon, and past quitting time. The other workers left when the whistle blew, but the contractor, the old man, and the boy kept driving the stakes. Finally, along about dinner time, they were finished. The boy had worked ten hours, and the contractor paid him six dollars, on the spot, for doing such a good job.

The contractor drove the pick-up back to the south side again. When they got there, the old man climbed down from the truck. He looked at the boy. "You did good," he said. He turned and went up the walk toward the house. His daughter came out to meet him, and he gave her the packet of eggshells, to mix in with the feed for the chickens.