Document text
/rpm
Mr. Charles Kerr, on whom I intend to call this afternoon,
is not at home, and I take the upper road leading from the
village of Reynolds Bridge to the main highway. About halfway
along I meet an old gentleman, neatly dressed and wearing a
slouch hat with the crown pulled to its highest possible peak
somewhat in the fashion of a sombrero, who hails me in this
manner:
"Hi, neighbor, can you tell me if August Koegel is still
alive?" Having seen Mr. Koegel within the papt five minutes
unquestionably alive and well, I amiable to answer in the
affirmative and under the Impression that the old gentleman is
a native son returned to look up friends and neighbors I ask
him if he has been away from the village long. "Hell, no,"
he says. "Haintt been away for any length of time for the past
twenty years. But I haintt seen August around lately."
Further questioning elicits the information that the old
fellow worked for a number of years at the knife factory, that
he holds knifemakers in toto in very low esteem, that he worked
for most of his adult life in the oil fields of Pennsylvania
and that women are "hell on wheels." His monologue becomes
rambling and disjointed at times, requiring gentle prodding to
get him back onto pertinent subjects, and he has a habit of
executing a stiff legged jig step to lend emphasis to what he
considers a particularly telling point. Says he:
"I'm a goddamn mongrel, that's what I am. Guess I'm mostly
Dutch, with a touch of Yankee. My father was high Dutch and my
mother was low Dutch —there's high Dutch and low Dutch. That
makes me a goddamn mongrel, don't it? Spent the first part of
W/50/41
my life a-workin, in saw mills. Then my brother-in-law he says
I'm a-goinl to make a rigger outa you, Gene. And he got me a
job on a lease where he worked. Twenty eight years I put in on
two leases. Made plenty of money. Then I come up here and
went to work firinl in the mill. Sorry I did. Then I went
in the knife shop. Knifemakers? Hell, yes, I knew plenty of
tem.
"Lowest goddamn, swinish, low-livin' people on earth them
Sheffield knifemakers. Suakin' booze and beer day in and day out,
the men and the women too. Know what they waled to call Shef-
field? The sink -hole of England, that's what Sheffield was.
My own daughter married Frank Platte. His father was one of
'em and Frank he had that no good lazy streak in him too. She
went to work teach n' school and kept him for five years. Know
what Ild've done? I'd've told him git to hell out and work or
starve. He's workin' now, though. I never had no woman work
for me in my life. What I brought in I give to the wife and she
spent, and what I didn't bring in she didn't spend, and we got
along fine.
"Them kids of Frank White's. He used to send tern to work
in the knife shop and stay home himself. Meet (3m on payday
and take away their money and spend it on booze, that's the kind
of people them knifemakers was, some of them.
"Then they got to makint stock, too much stock. Shelves
full of it. If I was in business I'd make what I could sell
and no more, ain't that the way? Frost got hold of the shop
-3.
and all he thought about was women. Him and his two brothers
got left a hundred and fifty thousand each, down in New York,
and he bought out the knife shop, but he never tended to
business. Went over to France and got runnin' around with the
French women and brought one back with him, and his wife sued
him and they straightened it out and he was all right for a
while, then he said he could live cheaper in France than he
could here, and he let the business go to hell again and went
over and got another Frenchwoman. Then they got the account-
ants up' here, lookinl into the business, and they took it
away from him. I think him and his wife got together again
last I heard they was livinl together.
"Women was his downfall. That's all they do, by God,
is tantalize a man from Hell to breakfast. ,Tells you right in
the Good Book, that Eve put the devil in Cain to murder Abel.
There's all kinds of ways of lookinl at things you read in
the Book. You don't want to believe everything the preachers
tell you. Never see one of them yet do a days' work. And don't
the Book say 'Man shall live by the sweat of his brow?'
"That's the way I lived, by God, by the sweat of my brow.
Maybe I wa'n't always smart, maybe I ought to have thousands
where I only got dollars, but I ain't broke yet, by God. Fore-
man down on the lease used to say to me, 'Gene, you've got more
money than I have and I be damned if I see how you do it.' I
says, 'Jack, you don't see me around here Monday mornings
throwin, up and sick and foggy, do you?' And he says, 'No, I
don't.' And And I says, 'I don't spend the week and sittin, in
some smoky saloon suckinl liquor and cigars.
"The big Mucky Muck come along in his car one day and he
sent me in after Jack, says he wanted to have a word with him.
Jack says I wonder what the hell I done now that I'm going to
get bawled out for. And he want out and the Big Gun talked
nice to him, asked him how things were goinl, and gave him a
cigar and everything. But when he left, he says: !Remember,
Jack, a man that everybody likes is no damn good to the Tide-
water Oil Company. jack come back and told me, and he says,
'What the hell do you make of that?'
"I never said anything. I never told anybody anything.
Got along better that way. They set me to cuttinl nipples one
time. I found out how to thread 'em so that the head wouldn't
flatten down and they wouldn't leak. Used to make 'em when
nobody else was around. One of the pumpers says to nm 'How the
hell is it your nipples leak just like ours when we watch you
make 'em, but the ones you make when nobody's around are perfect?
I never told him. Let 'em find out themselves. I kept gettin'
better jobs, finally they made me a pumper. Worked five wells
the first year. But I always had my own way of doin, things.
I used to take a piece of hemp and wind it around a stick and
dip it in oil and light it, then light the gas. The boss cane
around one day and saw me do it. He says, 'Gene that ain't no
way to light the gas.' He turned it on and lit a match and stuck
it in there and it lighted.
I says, 'Jack, you do it your way and I'll do it mine.'
One day I come in and there he was with his eyebrows burnt
off and his mustache and part of his hair. That damn gas
had blowed him clear back against the wall, lucky it didn't
kill him.
"We got along all right till he put his kid to work for
me. Unloadint rods. Damndest lazy kid I ever see. He could-
n't even unload lem without droppinl 'em all over. So I told
him to go home. Jack called me down to the office and told
me, he says, 'you sent my kid home, and now I'm sendin' you
home.' I didn't say nothinl, just took my tools and went.
But when they heard about it at the main office, they called
Jack in and they says, 'you sent Neff home, and now we're
sendin' you home.' They wanted me to come back, but I had a
job on another lease already.
"Twenty eight years I worked at it, and always made good
money. And then like a damn fool I COMB up here and went to
work in the knife shop."