The Most They Ever Had
The Most They Ever Had
“They had the look of a people who had not lived life so much as endured it, as if they had walked out of a fire. I would learn not to flinch when some old man offered me a three-fingered hand, or stare at people who seemed to cough all the time, even in fine weather. I knew about work then, in the 1960s and ’70s. I swung a pick, ran a chainsaw, toted concrete blocks. But this grit, this sacrifice, was something else. I understood it, finally, one March night in 2001, when I saw a man I believed... to be unbreakable just taken apart, not by the mill he served, but something worse.
___ In our boyhood, my big brother, Sam, dug pieces of coal and scrap lumber from the red mud so my mother could heat a borrowed house. In the 1970s, he quit school to load boxcars with one hundred-pound sacks of clay and lime. He shoveled gravel and sand into the backs of flatbed trucks, cut pulpwood, and broke down truck tires with a chisel and a five-pound sledge. Then, he gave me a running start away from all of it.MoreLess
___ In our boyhood, my big brother, Sam, dug pieces of coal and scrap lumber from the red mud so my mother could heat a borrowed house. In the 1970s, he quit school to load boxcars with one hundred-pound sacks of clay and lime. He shoveled gravel and sand into the backs of flatbed trucks, cut pulpwood, and broke down truck tires with a chisel and a five-pound sledge. Then, he gave me a running start away from all of it.MoreLess
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