This is the story of a city boy who worked for a summer in rural Alabama shortly after World War II.
The story is fiction and it involves explicit homosexual activity. If such is offensive to you or if you are underage, please read no further. Otherwise, please enjoy.
I would love to hear your reactions to the story. Anything like a summer adventure you've had? All comments or criticisms are welcome, and will be politely answered. macoutman@yahoo.com.
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SUMMER JOB
By Macout Mann
I
I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama back before the Red Mountain Expressway was built. In fact our house, near Key Circle, stood right in the middle of what is now the expressway.
I was a good looking kid, brown hair and eyes, almost six feet tall, with a swimmer's body honed from almost daily summertime workouts in the country club pool and daily wintertime sessions at the school gym. I was popular with the girls, had made out a few times, and was well liked by most guys. I was totally straight. Was that is.
My name's Joel, by the way, Joel Estes.
My dad was a prominent attorney, and the summer I graduated from high school, he told me to find a summer job. That's what boys were supposed to do, and he was a firm believer in doing what you are supposed to do. I was looking forward to the fall, when I would head to Vanderbilt. That's where my dad had gone both to college and to law school and where my grandfather had been chancellor.
I was much more interested in playing around with the gals and having fun swimming and playing tennis with my best friend, Eric, than I was trying to get on at a gas station or a grocery store, much less being a grunt doing landscaping or construction work. Also, my dad was away in Atlanta, working on an important case, so I wasn't looking for work very energetically.
So you can imagine my surprise, when about ten days later I got a long-distance call from my dad, telling me to pack my bag and the next morning head for the bus station. There would be a ticket waiting for me, and I was to take the 7AM bus to Camden. There would be someone there to take me to Sykes, where I would be employed by the Sykes Sawmill Company.
I damned well should've looked harder for work at home.
It turned out that the Sykes Sawmill Company was a family owned enterprise and that Sykes was a company town in the truest sense of the word. It sat in the middle of a 197,000 acre Alabama forest, totally owned by the company. Cutting timber year round, the company milled both pine and hardwood. Starting to harvest trees on one side of the forest, and planting new trees as old ones were felled, the company had a never-ending supply of timber. Thirty or forty years later, when crews got back to where their predecessors had started, the new growth would be fully mature and ready to be cut anew.
The town consisted of a general store and post office, the company offices, the mill, a hotel, and a hundred or so assorted houses, all of which belonged to the company. The houses ranged from the Sykes' residences, which were large and comfortable, but certainly not opulent, to little more than sharecropper cabins, where the mill workers, timber crews, and their families lived. There were less modest homes for middle and upper management folk. But everyone but the Sykes paid rent to the company and bought and charged all their necessities at the company store. Everyone was paid once a month. Their pay was in cash, and it was what was left after taxes, rent, and what was owed to the store had all been deducted.
The hotel was American Plan and served visiting salesmen and others having business with the company, but was also the residence of unmarried employees who were not part of other employee families.
There was a battered pickup waiting when the bus stopped at Camden. It was driven by a guy in bib overalls and nothing else. He was maybe a couple of years older than me. He introduced himself as "Paul Earl." We shook hands and began the twenty-mile drive to Sykes.
Paul Earl told me he grew up in Sykes, left and joined the navy, decided not to re-up, and was back home at least for a while. He'd been working on a timber crew, but had hurt his leg, so was left to do odd jobs for a while. He was a blond with blue eyes, medium height, crew cut, well built. If I knew then what I know now, I would have been drooling like a sheep dog in heat.
I told him I didn't know what I'd be doing. He said it'd probably have something to do with the survey project. The company had lost track of where all their land was and had hired a civil engineering firm to resurvey the whole spread. I asked him what there was to do for fun in Sykes.
"Not a fucking thing," he answered. "There's only one unmarried gal in the whole town, and her older sister got knocked up by one of the boys; so her old man won't let her even look at a guy, much less date.
"Once a gal graduates from County High, she heads off to Selma or Montgomery. Most of the boys do too. There's only five or six white guys our age left in Sykes. Working for the company's the only thing there is to do.
"I'm heading out again as soon as I get enough cash to get away."
"Some of the guys that live at the hotel play poker every night. A guy comes every couple of weeks and shows movies for a quarter. The married men spend all their time off work fucking their wives or sleeping."
The truck pulled into town. I guess you could call it a town. We drove up to the office.
Paul Earl said he'd take "my shit" over to the hotel. "That's where you'll be staying," he told me.
With a great deal of trepidation, I climbed the six well-worn steps to the doors leading into the office. A plain Jane twenty some-odd woman with no makeup welcomed me. "Joel Estes?" she said, "Welcome to Sykes. I'll take you to Mr. Malone."
Bill Malone was the office manager. He was a thin, pasty-faced guy with a squeaky tenor voice. He seemed happy to see me and was pleasant enough. He wore a dress shirt with no tie and chinos, which I discovered was more or less the uniform for male office workers. That was good, because that's all I'd brought. It had been what all the guys wore at school.
He asked me if I was ready to start to work. I told him "yes," but that I had no idea what I was to be doing.
"You...?" He was confused. "Well, Mr. Ramsey Sykes called me and said to cancel all our ads, that you'd be here today. I thought..." After a long pause he asked, "You do type?"
"Well, I took a typing course, 'cause my dad said everybody needed to know how to type these days. I didn't do as well as the girls in the commercial program, but I did pass."
"And your map reading skills?"
"I passed geography," I said. "I can read a map good enough to get from one place to another."
He was becoming quite perturbed. "Does township,' range,' `section,' mean anything to you?"
"Land, you mean? I know my dad has some property that he says is about a section."
Malone picked up the telephone and a moment later said, "Kate, get Mr. Ramsey for me, please," and hung up. I noticed for the first time that the phone had no dial on it.
I sat silently. After a moment he said, "Nobody told you what this job entails?"
"I'm sorry, Mr. Malone," I responded. "All I know is that I got a phone call from my dad. He said I was to come, and I came. It can be very painful to disobey my father."
The telephone rang and Malone picked it up. "Yes, sir," he said. "Sorry to bother you, sir, but the Estes boy is here."
"But, sir, the reason I'm calling is that he is totally unqualified."
"Yes, sir, I think he can type."
So far, I could hear only Malone's side of the conversation. I was beginning to think I might get a reprieve.
As the call continued, however, I still couldn't hear what Ramsey Sykes was saying, but the crackle from the earpiece became louder and louder.
"Yes sir. We'll take care of it, sir. You can count on us sir. Thank you, sir!" The call ended.
"He says to teach you what you don't know." His was the sound of total defeat.
I later learned that Ramsey and Dorothea Sykes had moved to Chicago after their father died and only occasionally visited Alabama. Their younger brother, Matthew, was relegated to running day to day operations and was the only Sykes in residence. He usually came to the office for part of each day.
Malone ran the office, the store, that sort of thing. There were two accountants, both yankees, who made sure finances were in order. Sam Berger, a huge, gruff, sixty-year-old up-by-the-bootstraps s.o.b., was in charge of operations. And while Matthew was in charge of everybody, Ramsey was in charge of everybody and everything. Dorothea just amassed wealth and played the Grand Dame.
Malone led me to another part of the office, where there was a huge map spread on a table about six feet square. "This is a map of Wilcox and parts of Monroe and Butler Counties," he said. "The shaded areas are properties owned by the company, according to the Thornberry Reports. Those are a compilation of deeds and surveys made back in 1936.
"We can't afford to cut timber that doesn't belong to us, and so the Sykes have employed Hatfield and Associates, a civil engineering firm from Mobile, to resurvey the company's holdings. Capt. Hatfield and his crew have been here now for two months, and we have enough results to begin to plot what they have found against what the Thornberry map shows.
"It will be your job, if you can do it, to compare the Hatfield surveys against the map, and if you find discrepancies, to type out your findings so that lawyers can reconcile the differences.
"You will see that the map is divided by north to south lines and east to west lines. These define the townships and ranges that will be described in the land descriptions that you'll be dealing with. And within those are the sections and quarters that you'll have to find, if you can.
"I'll ask Capt. Hatfield to come over tomorrow morning to explain it all to you, and I hope you can understand."
Obviously Malone thought I was the village idiot, and at this point I thought I might be.
It turned out that little Miss Mousy who had greeted me when I arrived was also the desk clerk for the hotel and the credit manager of the store. I learned that her name was Miranda. She said my room would be number 18, that it was on the second floor, and that all the rooms opened onto the veranda. She said that all meals were included in the rate and that supper would be at 6:30, breakfast at 7, and dinner at noon. Anything I bought at the store I would just sign for. Room rent and purchases would be deducted from my pay. Mr. Ramsey Sykes had said he'd let them know what I was to be paid, but hadn't done that yet. They would see me at eight tomorrow morning.
I walked across to the hotel. Like all the other structures in town it was a white, wood frame building. It was bigger than the office or the store, with a veranda surrounding both stories and an outside staircase front and back. I walked to the main entrance and was greeted by a black woman, who told me my luggage had been put in my room.
I found myself in a large common room with comfortable sofas and lounge chairs and a couple of card tables with chairs for players. Since it was still before four, there was no one there. Beyond the lobby, or whatever they called it, was the dining room. It contained a long table which could accommodate probably as many as twenty people at a sitting.
I decided to go up to my room. It was large, containing an armoire, a dresser, a small table with a single chair, and a double bed with feather mattresses and pillows. There was also a basin with hot and cold running water (thank god) but no other facilities. Exploring the veranda I found a communal toilet adjacent to a shower. I decided to shower, and afterward returned to my room and lay on my bed, contemplating the worst, until I heard activity outside.
Back on the veranda I encountered Paul Earl. "Hi," he said, "you got settled in?"
"Yeah," I replied. "You live here too?"
"I do," he responded. "Costs me, but I don't wanna be cooped up with Mom and Dad. See ya at supper." His room, it turned out, was right next to mine.
I went back downstairs to the common room. There were now several people there, but I particularly noticed a middle-aged man, sitting with—I guessed—his wife. He was in his fifties, weather-beaten, dressed in matching khaki shirt and pants, with an urbane look that immediately attracted me.
When he saw me, he immediately got up and extended his hand. "Hello!" he greeted me, "I'm George Hatfield. You must be Joel."
"Yes sir," I responded.
"Good to meet you. This is my wife, Helen."
So this was to be the nemesis I was to encounter in the morning? He seemed pleasant enough.
He walked me around the room introducing me to the others: Sam Taggart, the accountant who was still single; Dick Massy, Hatfield's assistant; Otto Baumgartner, the head sawyer; and Walter Clement, another guy that worked at the mill. Later the group was joined by Maude Smith, whom I learned ran the company store. Paul Earl arrived just before the gong announcing dinner rang.
It was a motley group. Taggart, mid thirties, brown hair and eyes, was well-built and clean cut. He wore a polo shirt and Palm Beach grey trousers. Palm Beach was a summer weight fabric popular at the time. Massy was the same age as Hatfield, thin and black headed with a five o'clock shadow. Wearing a graying white t shirt and jeans, he sported a U.S. Army tattoo on his right arm. Baumgartner was probably the oldest, overweight and coarse. He had a gravelly voice and spoke with a trace of a German accent. Clement looked very much like Massy and was obviously local.
The two women couldn't have been more different. Helen Hatfield was svelte and confident. She had obviously been a beauty in her day. Maude Smith in her sixties was plain and always had been. She was dumpy and evidently no longer cared how she looked, if she ever did.
The food, however, was a wonderful surprise. It was country fare, served family style, but was plentiful, well prepared, and tasty. Roast chicken, candied yams, butter beans, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, both corn bread and hot biscuits, and apple cobbler. The meal was absolutely delicious, as was every subsequent meal. I could easily see why Baumgartner and Maude Smith were overweight, and wondered why everyone else wasn't fat too.
After dinner, the group broke up. Hatfield, Taggart, Massy, and Clement began a poker game. Mrs. Hatfield sat over in a corner knitting. I was invited to join the game, and said that I might later on but for now I'd like just to kibitz, if that was all right.
Some of my high school friends and I had played penny-ante from time to time, so I was familiar with the strengths of various poker hands; but I wanted to see how serious a game these guys were playing before I risked the few dollars I'd arrived with.
The game was five card stud. That was all they played. And it was a friendly game. The ante was a dime and raises ranged from a dime up to a dollar. That was plenty when the minimum wage was a dollar an hour, though.
The players didn't seem to be all that skillful, so I decided to join in the next time I was invited. Also, Mrs. Hatfield asked me if I played Bridge. When I said that I did, she told me that they had been looking for a fourth. Some evening soon we'd have to play.
Going up to bed, I noticed a light on in Paul Earl's room and on impulse I knocked.
"Oh, hi," he said. He came to the door wearing only skimpy briefs. The tinny sound of a cheap radio could be heard in the room. And he seemed very surprised to see me.
"Sorry to bother you," I said, "but I noticed you were still up. I was...well, I guess I was wondering why you didn't stay downstairs after dinner."
"Oh," he said again. "Come in, if you wanna," he added.
He motioned me to the room's only chair. He sat on the bed and lit a cigarette. "I dunno," he began, "I just aint got nothin' in common with them guys, and I sure as hell don't need to have nothin' to do with Miss Maude.
"I play poker, but I'm tryin' to save as much scratch as I can. I want to get outa here, but like I wanna be able to get up to Birmingham or Atlanta and hang out long enough to find me a half-way decent job. Don't wanna be on the fucking streets. I had enough of that in New Orleans 'fore I joined the navy.
"There's a black gal down the road that makes home brew. I'll spend a buck or two on that sometimes. And I gotta have my smokes. But that's about all."
"Well I was just curious, I guess. You'd rather have home brew than a Bud?"
"Shit, man, home brew's all you can get around here. This county, this whole part of the state's fucking dry."
I'd tried beer a few times. I could take it or leave it. Being a swimmer, I hadn't smoked. I didn't comment.
We chatted a few more minutes and he reminded me that morning comes real early around here, so I said "goodnight," headed next door to my room, set my travel alarm, and hit the sack. Damn, I could see how feather beds got such a good reputation.
Copyright 2013 by Macout Mann. All rights reserved.