Document text
Roaldus Richmond
41.ree4rer
-Petie444-4h4Abere-1---Pre-jefret.
DERRICKYAN
Recordoci fl
Writers' Section
The sky beyond sheer granite walls and jagged mountains of grout was
painted in lurid colors by the sinking stn. A twilight stillness was on the
wooded heights. A hundred feet below lay the abandoned Barclay Quarry, now
partly filled with dark water. Derrick masts and booms stood interlaoed
with guywires. Half -.buried in the ground were coils of cable and giant hooks
of rusted iron. A long boiler rested in the brush. Birds °ailed from the
outer slopes* and from the watery chasm below echoed the deep chunk of a bull-
frog. There was a lonely grandeur* a grim beauty in the seen*. There was
smoothing fearsome and EMOISQMO about it, as you remembered the strong men who
had labored and died there, cutting this great gorge through a mountain of
sold grante.
"I worked this quarry twenty -.one yeare," Jack Gillis said, looking down
at the abandoned quarry. He was Scotch -.Irish, long of limb and wide of
shoulder, over sixty years old now. His thin face was red and graven with
hard lines, his narrow blue eyes crinkled when he smiled, his lean jaws had
an arrogant thrust.
"I was head..derrickran. See that shack on the other side.- I operated
from there awhile. I worked all throuFh here. It was one of the 1pgFest
quarries on the Hill and there's still a lot of good atone left in it. All
kinds of rood atone. Back there by the first waterholes thatN where they
got what they called Sungyside Blue* the only blue granite on the Hill. It
was a beautiful blue, and the hardest granite of all. It wouldn't take a polish,
3
It went off just as he was crawling under. Jesus help me, I never want to
see anything like that again: Blew him out like a cannonball. Blew the
hair right off his head, the clothes off his body. Blew his eyes out, his
ears off, there were pieces of wood and stone blown right into his head and
body. I don't understand it but that man lived for two hours or more. He
lived screaming and cursing, blown skinless right into hell, but still alive.
Be kept screaming: *I'll get you "You dirty bastards: I'll get you all,
you sonsabitchese And then it would be just one long awful screech, so
your hair would priokle up, your stomach turn over, your heart sink. I
don't know why such a thing should happen to any man, by Jesus, I don't. But
it happened to that poor devil, I saw it and heard it. I get sick now
thinking of it.
"This quarry was ruined after Langley took it over. Be started selling
off a piece of land. hero, a piece there. Then he zot a junk man in and sold
the machinery to him, stripped off everything on the place. Be had a new
steam shovel that came from the World's Fair in Chicago. They took that.
They came in with blow -torches, cut everything down and apart, carried it
away. He sold all those thousands of dollars worth of machinery for eight
hundred dollars: I don't know why he did it unless he got funny in the head
as he got older, By Jesus, it was a crime: If the maohinery had been loft
some other company would have been in here long before this. Sure, sure,
they'd be working it today. Now it lays dead and idle, all that good granite.
I've been here in the quarries thirty years but I wish I'd never seen
them. The quarries are no good now. If ycu get laid off one job you can't
get on another. They just keep the same crew, hardly ever taking on a new
man.
4.
"I never stayed in one place very long until I came here. I wouldn't
have stayed, but it was here I met my wife. She's a Swedish woman, she made
me settle down. Probably I needed somebody like her, something solid and
steady to tie to. I used to drink too much, I was pretty wild and crazy.
I worked my way across the continent twice from coast to coast. I saw
plenty, but I'd be going yet if I hadn't met 011ie...
"1 still get restless once in awhile... Thirty years I've been here,
since 1909. I haven't got much to show for it except a little farm an the
Rill. I awn that, but we're not living on it new. I can make a little more
by renting it to a fellow and living in a flat in the village. 011ie and
I don't need too much room. But it's damn nice up on the farm, may Up an
the hilltop with maples growing in the yard and the mountains all around in
the distance. We have springwater up there too* It's a good place to live all
right, but there's not much money in farming for the work you put into it,
and IUm not the worker Imes.
"I was born up in New Brunswick. I was sixteen when I left home and
started across the continent* I worked in the copper mines, moving west
from one to another. I rode second class on the trains. They had no
cushions on the seats, just wooden benches like in a park. I gathered up
all the paper I could find for a cushion. At night you'd crawl up on the
aggate rack, put your coat under your head, and sleep or try to sleep.
All night the gravel fral the prairies out there was like hail on the roof.
They'd stop in some town, fifteen minutes for lunch. By Jesus you'd no more
have your food on the counter than the bell would start ringing and they'd
yell, aboard."
Some of leavers fOOls enough to leave their food there and
run for the trains but not me. I tock,mine with me, plates and all. No
goddamn railroad was going to make me starve.
6.
"That reminds me of a story. These two tramps were walking along the
road and they couldn't get a thing to cat nowhere. They were damn near dead
of stprvation. Every house they stopped at they'd sic the dogs on them. Well,
they came to some horse manure in the road, and one of them bent down and
picked up a curdle of it. "B0God I got an idea," he said. At the next place
he told his friend to wait. He rapped an the door and a lady came. "Lady,
I haven't eaten for two weeks. I'm starving to death. Will you give me some
salt to put on this?" She says, "Throw that dirty thing away* come in, wash
your hands* and I'll give you a real feed." And she did. The fellow went
back and told his friend it worked fne* so the next farmhousc they dame to
ie friend tried it. A big Scotch woman came to the door. "Lady, Pm dying
for lack of food. Would you give me some salt to put on this?" She looked
at his open hand. "Throw that dirty thing sway," the Scotch woman says. "Go
out to the barn and get a fresh piece. I'll go get the salt.
Jack Gillis threw his head back and laughed. "I'm part Scotch myself,"
he said and laughed again. There was an Irish brogue in his voice, mingled
with a trace of Scottish burr. The combination was as pleasant as his smile.
"When I was a kid*" he went on, "we used to play hooky from school and
øo down to the docks to listen to the sailors. Some of the stories I heard
I can still remember. Some days we'd r7o aboard, climb way up in the topsails,
make a mammock of the canvas and lay there all day. All we had to watch out
for was they didn't start unroofing the sail. I could sit for hours listening
to those sailors talk. Maybe that's where I got my roving feat.
"If you want a real experience, go to one of them herveeting excursions.
I went on one and by God I never saw such taes. Three.four thousand men on
that train. They'd dtop ten miles outside of town, unhook the engine, and
cabodse, and go in to pet water. They didn't dare bring us into town. All
6.
All those 7sn„ they'd turn a town bottom side up in no time, you know.
They did stop in a little place near Calgary. There was a saloon right
across from the station. You should've seen those fellows pile off that train
and into that saloon. They filled it solidftfull. The ones outside were yell-
ing to get in. They oame out of there with quart bottles piled in their arms
like cord wood. An old woman upstairs over the saloon started throwing dishes
and pots at them. She'd watch for a head to come out and let go a dish at it.
She must've thrown -everything she had in the pato.. There WAS a firehoso there.
A fellow came down the street all dressed up with nose glasses, a halfsoderby,
long coat, spats, and all, They turned the hose onto him and it knocked him
keeling end over end. The train stopped by a cattleyard full of sheep. They
started loading sheep onto that train. rihen the train started they bagan
heavng sheep out one after another, One place we stopped by a haymow. They filled
the oar with straw and lay around in it, j! -at like hogs.
"We went to work in a little place north of Winnipeg. The weather was
bad and there was no harvesting. Fourteen of us were in a bunch and a farmer
came in and hired us. He wanted us to stay in town and live at the hotel
but we wouldn't. He had to take us out to the farm. We lived in what they
call a caboose, a oar nn wheels with bunks inside, so it could be moved to follow
the harvesting. It rained for two weeks. That farmer got goddamn sick of
feeding us for doing nothing. All day we lay around the bunk house. At
night we'd go into town, get drunk, come back, and keep that farmer awake all
night, There was plenty of music, harmonicas, ruitars, banjos... That farmer
Was goddamn good and sick of us, but we did plenty of hard work after it
stopped raining.
"Then I rens out in Vancouver. Funny place out there n the coast, where
I was. Worked up in the mountains in a copper mine. You either had to hike
7.
up the mountain or ride up in the buckets* They had his *able rigged up
an big spindles, top and bottom, so the full buckets pulled the empty ones
back up the mountain. 14 used to ride up in buckets. Some places you'd
go over canyons hundreds of feet deep, and overhead were the mountains, all
rock and anow ageinst the sky, looking big as the whole world, as if any
minute they'd come down on you. After these mountains I didn't :And the
quarries here much. Well, I started there and I ended up here.
"Then less motorman an a street car in Boston. One time a fellow
left the whole payrotl for the Boil Rubbir Company in my car. I tell you
I did some tall thinking when I saw all that money. At the end of the run
at Harvard Square I told the conduotor. We got off with the bag and sat
down an a bench. We did a lot of thinking there, by God. He said we ought
to get out with the money. Be was an honest man too, it was lust the
temptation... I felt the same way. But finally I turned it in. Just as
I did the guy came mfter it, his face white as a ghost's. The funny part
was he didn't know my number, the car nunler, or what time he'd got on the
oars We could've got away with it easy. Well, he gave me five dollars out
of his pOket. Be was just trying to earn a day's pay like us.
"After that I came up here and I've been here ever since. A fellow
told me about Barre granite, steady jobs and good pay. I was sick of subways.
I wanted to get out in the open again. So here I am. Twenty.one years of
my life in that quarry hole. Nine more years in others just like it. Now
I'm out of work and I don't know what to do.
"By the looks of the papers tonight we'll he having war before long.
They been sharpening up their teeth a long time over there. They'll be at
it pretty soon**, They're still holding that blockade. The price of food
has jumed over fifty per cent already. Something's got to break, it sure
has.
"I did about everythinE in the quarries everything but run a channall.
ing machine. I never did that. All the other jobs I know* But what good's
that to ma now?
"What I'd like, by God, is a little business of my own. You know, a
grocery store or something, maybe a gasoline station. I've thought of putt-
ing a grocery store on wheels, running it around from house to house* But
I don't know. I only know I've got to do something. We'ra going to have a
short summer this year. After the Fourth of July yru have to begin think.
ing about wihter in this country. I'm not worrying too much. I always got
by all riEhts probably I always will. But things are different now than
they used to be. Once I could always go out and earn forty.fifty dollars
a week* Can't do that any more, by Jesus, not the way things are today.
"I don't care abort making a lot of money, I lust want to get by. We
haven't any children. Sometimes mellre lonesome, and then again, by God, I'M
glad I didn't bring any into this world. I wouldn't have missed living my
life with all the bad spots in it, but I had a better chance than kids do
now... If you start across the continent today you got to ride freight
trains or bum the highway, you can't jump from job to Job."