Title image by Pam McKnight, The Depot, 8″ x 8″, Acrylic on Paper, 2024.
The Line
by Eric Roe
The house she lived in all those years—each November, the shadow of the plant’s smokestack fell across the front door at sundown for a few days before moving up the block. The plant itself was only visible near the end of the street, where the neighborhood was fenced off from the highway. Gayle could walk to and from work, fifteen minutes from front door to locker room—five if she hopped the fence and jaywalked across the highway. Andrea would have said, “You’re such a rebel, Mom.” The hustle of most mornings dictated a hop in the car, dropping Andrea off at school, then backtracking to the plant.
Ham Slice was where she’d worked longest. She sat on a counter chair and placed stacks of sliced ham into plastic bubbles, then placed the bubble sheet on a conveyor, then took another sheet from the rack above the line. She did this eight hours a day, minus potty breaks—they called them potty breaks—minus line stoppages, breakdowns, safety meetings, the sanctioned twenty-minute morning break, and with a half-hour lunch splitting the day into unequal halves.
She still dreams endless bubble sheets, numbed gloved fingers, off-key songs in a language her mind insists is Hmong but is in all likelihood gibberish. She still dreams a flickering incandescence disfiguring the darkness above the trees at the end of her street.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The plant closed in June. Gayle was already five years out and far away by then. She hadn’t been following the news. Her brother, Todd, called to tell her about the upcoming closure. He was still in Wisconsin. He mixed the news with vitriol for the president. “I guess your local meat packing plant doesn’t meet the definition of too big to fail,” he said. “It’s just one city. It’s just a few hundred workers. They didn’t vote for him anyway. Fuck ‘em.”
Gayle had worked at the plant twenty-six years. She knew how the Company operated. She doubted any president could have done a thing to change the outcome.
“That’s almost half your life in that place,” Todd said. “More than half of Dad’s life. Gone.” Gayle heard him snap his fingers.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Songs in Hmong—it wasn’t an everyday occurrence, but she remembers it as if it were. She remembers Foom. His job was to supply bubbles to the rack above the line. He worked in a blur. He took the bubbles out of their box, peeled them apart, stacked them with every other row upside-down so they wouldn’t stick back together, then carried stacks more than half his height up a step stool and lined the rack with bubble sheets. Sometimes he’d be singing some Hmong song when he marched up the steps. Sometimes the Hmong placers on the line would join in, a spontaneous Hmong choir set to the chug of the belt and swoosh of the ham slicer. And then Clifford would try to get them to sing whatever was popular on the radio. All the Hmong workers singing I will always love you and then laughing so hard the Bluehat came over to make sure the commotion wasn’t impeding production.
Gayle tried to learn one of the Hmong songs. She couldn’t get a single word. Dib sat across from her on the line. She tried to show Gayle what to do with her mouth to make the right sounds. “Ooo un jun-now nyah low nah tay”—that was as far as Gayle got. “Am I even close?” she asked. Dib shook her head, giggling. “Well, tell me at least what it means,” Gayle said.
“I’m an orphan,” Dib said, smiling. “I live a life in darkness.”
“Thanks for cheering me up,” Gayle said. “Good grief!”
Dib nodded enthusiastically: “Yes! A good song about grief!”
On Gayle’s last day, Dib came down the locker room aisle to congratulate her. Gayle was changing out of her whites for the last time. Dib brought a Tupperware full of Hmong sweets: finger jello striped green-white-red, sesame balls, pink sweet rice cakes. “We have family in North Carolina too,” Dib said. “We can visit!”
Gayle should have told her to get out while she could. Even then, talk of mass layoffs was rampant among the workers. Every corporate merger heightened the possibility. Get out before you’re all competing for the same handful of jobs in town. “Take care of yourself,” Gayle told Dib, hugging her.
“We all take care of each other,” Dib said. She beamed a worry-melting smile. “Happy for you!”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Gayle imagined the lights of the plant going out section by section. How dark it would be in the depths of that building where not even the vague daylight that filtered through safety glass windows would reach. The silence when the buzz and hum of the machines cut out and every last fan stopped spinning.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Goodbye to the O’Grady Meats packing plant, where her father worked most of his life, where her first husband, Andrea’s father, worked right up until closing day, where Gayle worked, a span extending from Andrea at two years old through Gayle’s first divorce, her second marriage, the death of her mother, her second divorce, through Andrea’s high school graduation and moving away to North Carolina for college, Andrea’s wedding (too soon, too young), her college graduation, her entry into med school, the birth of a grandson, Andrea’s becoming an MD, and the death of Gayle’s father. And then there was nothing to keep Gayle here.
Before she left, she had dinner with Todd and his wife, Diane. “Well,” Todd said, “it’s about time you got out to see the rest of the world.” As if he himself had ever breached the borders of Wisconsin on anything but family vacations and a honeymoon trip.
Todd and Diane said the obligatory things about not being a stranger and coming to visit. Gayle gave them the obligatory Of course I will.
She hasn’t yet.
Todd mangled his way through a fake, exaggerated Southern accent: “Maybe y’all will find yew a sweet-talkin’ Southun man down there.” Gayle saw Diane’s body jerk ever so slightly. Todd winced and looked at his wife in aggrievement. “What was that for?”
“Kick him again,” Gayle suggested. “Just for asking.”
Todd had been the one who introduced her to Rich, who would become her reckless, steamy affair and then her second husband. And then, in the first couple years after that divorce, Todd invited different men along for dinners and outings to try to set Gayle up again. He thought she was vulnerable and lonely. The men he picked irritated her, reminded her of Rich. Diane said, “He means well,” but Gayle had never heard anyone say that when someone’s actions had worked out well for everyone involved. Gayle finally laid it on the line: No more. When Todd tested her, inviting some beefcake in a backward baseball cap to what was supposed to be a family cookout, Gayle took one look and said, “You thought I was kidding?” She decamped with her bean casserole and Andrea to a nearby park. They found a picnic table and ate the casserole by themselves, right out of the baking dish. “Jeez, Mom,” Andrea said. But she admired her mother. She told her so years later. Gayle’s marriage to Rich had been no kind of wonderland for Andrea either. Andrea knew they were better off, the two of them together. They were both stronger.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
“Come to Carolina, Mom,” Andrea said. “Zachary would love to have his grandma around.”
In North Carolina, the winters were mild. Gayle had to learn not to laugh when people complained of cold. When it snowed, even a dusting, people stayed home. In spring, yellow-green pollen blanketed cars, concrete, and buildings, and in strong winds swirled cyclonic among the trees. Gayle could have done without the resultant congestion and sneezing, the sight of the stuff liquefied in her Kleenex. She could have done without the drawn-out heat and humidity of the summers.
In Raleigh, she got a job at a furniture outlet warehouse. Some of the guys flirted with her. They joked about her asking where she could find a bubbler. Once they figured out what she meant, they put up a sign over the water fountain in her honor: This here’s a bubbler. Gayle flirted right back. She was forty-nine then. She kept her hair long and curly—and brown, despite nature’s efforts to the contrary. She was fairly fit—curvy, she would call it—but the dawning creaks in her body had begun to testify to the wear of gravity. Andrea was a physical therapist at a Duke Clinic. She talked Gayle into training for healthcare office work. Some of Andrea’s patients had repetitive motion injuries from packing and shipping jobs. The ache that had crept into Gayle’s shoulder after years on the Ham Slice line would only get worse at the warehouse. The health insurance was next to useless.
Gayle took classes and got her certification to be a medical records specialist. A small clinic hired her. She was sorry to say goodbye to the warehouse guys so soon. But then there was the novelty of unscheduled downtime, being able to pause work and chat with coworkers without a Bluehat marching out of the office to see why production had stopped. The freedom to stand up, stretch, go use the restroom without having to make an announcement or check the clock. Every switch from the computer’s work screen to Facebook or personal email felt like a major coup. She savored these little triumphs to offset her isolation. Gayle couldn’t relate to the other office staff. Their concerns struck her as petty trifles latched onto for want of something to complain about: favoritism, rude doctors, having to attend meetings, deal with new software. “Oh, boo-hoo,” Gayle would say. Conflicts over three-degree temperature differences on the thermostat. “Try sitting eight hours on a production line in fifty degrees,” Gayle would say—offering perspective, she thought. But later, heading to the break room, the receptionist’s voice drifted into the hallway and stopped her: “You young people got it easy. Back when I was on the line, boy, we had it rough back then.” Giggling, then another voice, a data entry clerk, “Yeah—If you had to work on the line, you’d know a thing or two. Jesus, she’s worse than my granddad going on about workin’ in the mill.” The receptionist again, a vicious whisper, “And if it was so freaking bad, then why did she stay for twenty-six years like she’s always reminding us? Masochistic much?” Gayle detoured into the restroom. She scowled at her reflection for a minute, then told it, “Fuck ya if you can’t take a joke.” Which is what she would have told anyone on the Ham Slice crew—and they’d have laughed and merrily tossed an insult right back at her, and so the time would pass.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The September after the plant closed, she got a Facebook message from Clifford:
Hi Gayle! Should I say Hey how ya all doin now that you moved down to the
south. I bet you miss the snow ha ha. But I bet you do miss it when deer
hunting, I sure would. I’m sure you heard Ogradys closed down. I feel lucky that
I got out a couple years ago and started a hunting and fishing guide business.
Its going well. I’m organizing a reunion picnic for ham slice folks. I almost couldn’t
find you to send an invite but my daughter said I should check facebook and
there you are. You’re looking pretty which is a compliment not a pick up line.
We have to take those kind of compliments where we can get them at our age,
ya know? The picnic will be September 29 at Warner Park. So far we got Jensen,
Betty, Mike, Jesus, Georgia, good ol Schooner, even Ralph (he’s the only Bluehat
so far whose replied) and Gordon the sanitation guy, and Foom Kaboom will all
be there. Foom drives a semi truck now if you can believe it! Almost the whole
Hmong gang will be there. So I hope you’ll be able to come but I know its a long
ways. Either way don’t be a stranger and friend me on facebook if you want!
The eyeglasses in Clifford’s profile picture were new. He was in a coat and stocking cap, his breath a visible cloud. His whiskers were gray. There were lines in his face that Gayle didn’t remember from before. Clifford was younger than her by several years, but Gayle, fifty-four now, felt younger than Clifford looked.
She thought about the Ham Slice crew the rest of the day. What came to her first was the relief she’d felt to see them all again after the power plant fire, when the plant reopened and they were back on the line. The jokes—Should’ve let it burn—Missed the whole thing!— were all undermined by the hugs going around, the high-fives, the palpable joy at seeing each other again, here, back on the clock, getting paid for their work. There had been a low-boiling terror that this might not happen again if the fire was not brought under control. Mike saying, “They coulda let us have just one more day, you know, let all the smoke and gas clear out real good. I woulda spent it fishing.” Which made Gayle remember Mike’s fish story, the bass that jumped out of the water and clamped onto the dangling lure and hooked itself in the air while Mike was taking a break to open a can of beer. That picture he carried around to show everyone: “See this bass? Let me tell you about this bass.” She thought of Schooner, coming back to work after the birth of his son. He beamed for a week, but then fatigue hit. He turned to the ladies on the line for advice on how to quiet a crying baby. The guys were no help. Jensen’s suggestion: Take home a box of earplugs. “Sing to him,” Gayle said. “That always worked for Andrea.” Betty’d had four babies and so far three grandkids. She told Schooner it was different for every kid, but an automated chair swing seemed to be a common miracle-worker. “Just don’t leave the baby in there for more than a half hour,” she instructed, “or you’ll squish his brain.” Then Gayle recalled Schooner doing the Chicken Dance at Jensen’s wedding. Betty and Georgia taught the moves to Dib and Kawm, who giggled as they stumbled through clucking their fingers together, flapping elbow wings, shaking their heinies, clapping, spinning each other, skipping arm in arm while Foom and the other guys laughed and raised glasses in various Hmong salutes. Gayle thought about Foom. They’d called him Foom Kaboom! Big kaboom from a little man! He’d always seemed to like it. He would smile when they said it. Sometimes he even filled in part of it: Big boom! he would say, soft-spoken. None of the other Hmong on the crew ever called him that. Gayle thought they had their own nicknames for each other in their own language. The Hmong called him Fong. Gayle asked Dib what it meant once. “It’s a nickname, right?” Gayle asked.
“No,” Dib said. “It’s his name.”
“Oh,” Gayle said. “So Foom is a nickname?”
“No,” Dib said, shaking her head. “That’s what you call him.”
“But that’s the nametag on his jacket,” Gayle said.
“Yes,” Dib said. “Fong.”
“Are you trying to confuse me, Dib?”
“You don’t need help getting confused!” Dib groaned. “His name, on his jacket: Fong. You say it wrong.”
“Fong,” Gayle tried. “Fong? Well, why didn’t he tell us?”
Dib shrugged. “Nobody listen.”
“But we listened to you when you made us pronounce your name Dee,” Gayle protested.
“I don’t take shit!” Dib said, grinning.
Gayle tried setting the others straight. “It’s Fong,” she told them, one by one. But Fong was no fun. He would be Foom Kaboom as long as they remembered him.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The plant’s shadow followed her everywhere, but hunting belonged to Wisconsin, to Kickapoo Valley. For home base, there was a family cabin on a few acres in La Farge. Halden Schuster, Gayle and Todd’s big bald bear of a dad, taught them to shoot and hunt when they each turned twelve. Todd’s skills never matched Gayle’s. He blamed it on her three-year head start. His jealousy boiled whenever Gayle killed a deer and he didn’t. Halden was no font of sympathy. “If your sister consistently gets deer and you don’t, it’s because she’s a better hunter than you,” Halden growled. “And if that bothers you, you got two options: Get better or quit.”
Todd took griping as a third option. Blame for his underperformance shifted over the years. It was Gayle somehow sucking all the luck out of the air so Todd couldn’t hit anything. Later, it was all the rich assholes coming up from Chicago to ruin everything. Eventually it was the Hmong. Rich helped fuel that particular grudge. Called them cockroaches swarming the Kickapoo Valley forest. “It isn’t even their forest,” he’d say. “Most of the little dog-eaters don’t pay taxes.” Gayle knew better. She sometimes helped Dib or Foom or the others interpret their paystubs. Their checks were just as gutted by taxes as Gayle’s was.
Todd and Rich were buddies from way back. Todd owned a pest management company. Rich was a sales rep for a trap manufacturer. That’s how they knew each other. The first time Gayle ever talked to Rich was when he called her house and said, “A friend of mine told me I should call you. He said you’re nice and you might want to go out for a good time because maybe you’re bored.”
Gayle was home alone with Andrea, who was three years old and in bed already. Dave worked nights, just as he had when she’d met him. He seemed content with that. If Gayle had known how completely the spark could be snuffed after rows of nights in a cold, empty bed, would she have made the same choices? But it wasn’t like that. Anyway, the guy on the phone sounded obnoxious. “First of all, I’m not bored,” Gayle lied. “Second of all, I’m not nice. So don’t call here again.” And she hung up.
But that next November, Dave wasn’t able to get off work for gun season, and when Gayle went to the cabin by herself, there was Rich: square-jawed, pretty blue eyes, head of curly hair, a towering six-foot-three. Todd had brought him along as a hunting buddy. Gayle’s mom was beside herself with admiration. Later, in the kitchen, her mom gushed, “He’s so handsome!”
Yes. Yes, he was.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
When Halden started sitting out hunting seasons in the late Nineties because of his health, that’s when Gayle quit too. What she missed later was the ritual. Cleaning her Weatherby, taking it to the rifle range to reactivate muscle memory. Sharpening her knife, packing supplies. She missed the drive from Madison to La Farge, especially after the divorce, when Rich was gone and she was on her own. Singing along to Waylon Jennings in her pickup truck. Stacking the wood and lighting the fire in the cabin fireplace when she was first to arrive. She missed getting to Kickapoo with Halden just as the sky was fading from indigo to blue.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
In 2004, a Hmong hunter who’d wandered onto private property up north shot six white hunters dead after a confrontation over his trespassing. The Ham Slice Hmong were very quiet for the next couple weeks. In the plant cafeteria and hallways, they were painted with open contempt. Tessa, who worked third-shift Sanitation and spent the last half-hour of most shifts smoking in the locker room—she said, “Goddamn they give me the creeps. Always smiling and shit, but they got murder behind their eyes.” Gayle was getting out of her street clothes and into her whites. She said, “That’s a load of shit, Tessa. Not one of the Hmong on my crew is like that.” She wanted to say something to Dib and the others to put them at ease. But what? It’s okay, we don’t ALL hate you, honest! On the Ham Slice line, Clifford tried to keep things light. He joked to the Hmong workers about not wanting to get on their bad sides. None of them joked back. Not even shy smiles. “Just want to work,” Foom said once. It seemed out of the blue. Gayle wasn’t even sure who he was talking to. Maybe all of them, all the white faces on the line. “Just here to work,” he said. “Raise families. No trouble.” Three years after that, there was another murder, this time in the northeast, this time a Hmong as victim. An encounter between two squirrel hunters. The white one blasted the Hmong with a shotgun, stabbed him several times. Todd’s reaction, next time Gayle talked to him: “Five more to go.”
Gayle had already made her decision to move to North Carolina by that point. She was already formulating plans, pricing moving trucks. After her talk with Todd, she set an actual date. Sooner rather than later.
Andrea’s best friend through middle school and high school had been a Hmong girl, Lisa Khang. When Andrea was a teenager—this would’ve been in the mid-Nineties—she brought Lisa to one of the family cookouts. “You’re Hmong?” Todd asked. When Lisa nodded, Todd quipped, “Better make sure we know where the dog’s at when she leaves.” Diane, sitting next to him, slapped his thigh and said, “Shame on you!” Gayle could read the fury in the set of Andrea’s jaw, but Lisa kept her cool. Andrea turned to her and said, “So, I guess I was wrong when I said my uncle was just a little bit racist.” Todd tried to turn it around. “Hey,” he said, “it was a joke. She knows it was a joke. You getting upset because they eat dogs—that’s racist. It’s just their culture, right?” Halden was over at the grill and didn’t hear any of this. Gayle jumped up from the picnic table and kicked the leg of Todd’s lawn chair so hard it almost folded up with Todd still in it. “Apologize!” she commanded. Todd was indignant, but he said, sincerely, “Lisa, I’m sorry. Fuck, it was a bad joke. I know you people don’t go after pets. Right?” Lisa smiled sweetly. She said, “We won’t eat your dogs if you don’t fuck our pigs.”
Andrea and Lisa were still in touch. Lisa lived in Maryland now. She was a grants administrator at the National Institutes of Health. “She gets funding to scientists,” Andrea explained. Sometimes Andrea went to Bethesda or DC for medical research conferences. Whenever she did, a visit to Lisa was a non-negotiable part of her itinerary. Lisa was Andrea’s maid of honor at the wedding. Todd wasn’t invited. Andrea’s husband and their son, Zachary, would never meet Uncle Todd. Zachary wouldn’t have even known there was such a person if he hadn’t once asked Gayle whether she had any brothers or sisters. The withering look Andrea gave her when Zachary started exclaiming, I have an uncle! He’d been five then. His friend from kindergarten had a legendary uncle who was always taking him for ice cream, playing video games with him, teaching him to play harmonica. Zachary is never meeting Uncle Todd, Andrea said. Not ever.
The way the blood drained from Todd’s face as he sat there in his lawn chair. Diane covering a shocked gasp with her hand. Before either of them could scold Lisa, Gayle said, “See, you didn’t think she’d bite back, did you? You had that coming, Todd.” On the drive home, Lisa apologized anxiously for what she called being rude. “Please don’t tell my mom,” she implored. Gayle assured her she wouldn’t. “But,” she said, “you’ve got to be careful who you talk to like that.” Todd was all armchair bluster. He was easily shut down. But if Rich had been there? Andrea filled in the blank for Lisa: “My ex-stepdad would’ve backhanded you into next week. No joke.”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
In North Carolina, Andrea adopted an idea of the South. Screened-in porch, mint juleps, the glass sweating in her hand. She wore sundresses. She sometimes wore a broad-brimmed straw hat. In Wisconsin it had been shorts, T-shirts, a green-and-yellow Packers baseball cap. Her hair had been curly and never reached past her shoulders. Now it was straight and long, down to the middle of her back. She looked like a Carolina girl, like the ones in Chapel Hill who put on makeup and dresses for college football games. She’d absorbed traces of the accent. She said y’all without irony. Gayle wondered how much of it had been carefully constructed, how much was unconscious assimilation over the fifteen years she’d been here. Almost half her life.
Gayle told Andrea she was thinking about going to Wisconsin for Clifford’s reunion. “That’s a long drive for a picnic,” Andrea said.
“I could visit Todd and Diane too,” Gayle said. “I promised I would.”
“Or,” Andrea suggested, “you might could just skip that part and enjoy yourself.”
They were sitting on Andrea’s porch. Zachary and his dad were at Jordan Lake for a long-awaited fishing trip on a rented pontoon. The heat and humidity collaborated in belligerent denial of summer’s end. The oak in Andrea’s yard kept the porch in shade.
“Clifford says pretty much the whole gang will be there,” Gayle told Andrea. “It would be neat to see everyone again. The drive might even be nice.”
“You could make a road trip out of it. Listen to Waylon all the way up.”
“Waylon’s good for road trips. I can sing along. Keeps me awake.”
“You used to sing Waylon to me for lullabies.”
“You were a baby,” Gayle said. “You don’t remember that.”
“I swear I do,” Andrea said.
“You remember me telling you.”
“I remember ‘Dreaming My Dreams with You.’ I remember your voice singing it, Mom.”
“Your dad used to sing Waylon to you too,” Gayle told her.
“Did he?”
“He couldn’t get you to stop crying, but it was his turn. I told him try singing Waylon.”
“Have I ever heard Dad sing?” Andrea screwed her face up, trying to recall.
“You did then,” Gayle said. “‘Ladies Love Outlaws.’ That’s the one he sang to you.”
“Because Dad’s such an outlaw.” Andrea rolled her eyes.
“You were mesmerized,” Gayle said. “Every time. With me, when it worked, you’d get peaceful and smile a little. But with your Dad, you looked at him like the world as you understood it had turned upside down. You just stared at him wide-eyed the whole time.”
Andrea sang the words faintly, half-humming them: “Ladies love outlaws…” She sighed. “I wish I remembered that.”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Rich had been Gayle’s outlaw. Rich was flying past other cars on the highway with the windows down, the two of them singing along with wild abandon to Merle Haggard’s “Legend of Bonnie and Clyde,” cigarette smoke streaming out the windows like contrails. Rich was making love at a cliff’s edge at Devil’s Lake, the landscape and sky cascading around them, Gayle’s sweaty tired body igniting, fingers digging into dirt and rock, she was Gaia-like, she was the mountain trembling and cracking open. Dave, Andrea’s father, was timidity and shame. This is a public park, he would have said. Someone will see us. Besides, do you really wanna get gravel down your underpants? Dave was getting flustered when a car flew by on the highway, sputtering, Jesus, that’s dangerous! Dave was wordlessly letting a couple cut in line at the corn festival, despite his imposing size, and then fuming about it all the way home. Rich would’ve spun the man around and punched him to the back of the line.
But Rich was also leaving a prank hundred-dollar bill as a tip for a waitress who’d been running behind because the place was short-staffed. Unfolding the bill revealed a laughing cartoon jackass with the message HA-HA-HA! HOPE DIES LAST! Rich was also smashing a Hmong hunter’s handcrafted tree stand and then brandishing his rifle when the hunter and his friends confronted him back at the truck. “Not gonna be threatened by a couple of Ha-mung assholes,” he muttered. Gayle defused the standoff by getting in the truck and driving away, forcing him to run after her. “You pull another stunt like that,” he told her, “I’ll put your face through that windshield.” Rich was a kick to a neighborhood dog, a hole punched in the wall, a belt yanked in rage from its loops, and he was the reason Gayle started making after-work stops at the shooting range with her Glock Seventeen. He was a reflexive backhand to Andrea’s cheek once when she ran through the kitchen and bumped into him and made him spill a drink. And somehow Gayle had had to marry him to actually see any of that.
Dave was a sympathy card in the mail when Gayle’s mother died. There was a handwritten quotation inside by someone named Rilke: Just once, and never again. But to have been here this once, completely, even if only once, seems beyond undoing. Gayle had never known Dave to be poetic back when they were married. It turned out he still wasn’t. He admitted to Andrea that he’d asked a fellow worker for help because he didn’t know what to write. Bookworm came up with that, Dave said. But I thought it was good. Gayle thought it was good too. Dave was a wreath of lilies and chrysanthemums sent to the funeral home. Rich was an excuse the day of the funeral: Can’t get out of this trip for work, babe. No sorry. No card, no flowers, no sympathy. When Gayle broke down crying at the initial news, Rich said he guessed she could use some time to herself and went out for a beer. It was left to her twelve-year-old daughter to offer consolation. When Gayle finally went to her room, Andrea called her dad for advice. Just be there for her, Dave told her. Treat her tenderly. Your mom’s in pain.
Then Gayle saw Dave coming out of the plant as she was on her way into work. It was a week or so after the funeral. It wasn’t yet six, so he must have been leaving early. His face was pale behind his reddish beard. He held onto the sidewalk rail as he walked. Gayle thanked him for the flowers and the card. When he replied, his voice tremored, eyes moist. “Sorry about your mom, Gayle,” he said. Gayle was touched by how much he seemed affected. He shook his head and apologized. There’d been an injury that night at work, he told her. His room partner, a summer-hire kid, had gotten caught in a machine that tore a circular strip of flesh from his forearm. Dave sat with the kid and gripped his arm above the wound. The blood wouldn’t stop flowing. They were sitting in a pool of it by the time EMTs arrived. Dave had tried to go back to work afterward, but he had the shakes and couldn’t hold on to the hose. He told the foreman he was going home, but then he had to sit in the locker room for another hour before he thought he’d be steady enough to walk, let alone drive. There was still dried blood in the grooves of his knuckles, under his fingernails. His hands still tremored. Gayle reached up and put her arms around him, pulled him in close. The handrail between them made the embrace awkward. Dave’s body shook. Gayle held him until the shaking stopped. Then she held onto his arms and waited for his eyes to meet hers. “You’re a good man, David,” she told him. When he started to shake his head, she said it again: “You’re a good man.”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
When she first met him, she didn’t know he was a plant worker. She’d joined a softball league with a girlfriend. Dave was on an opposing team. He flirted with her mildly while he stood on second base and she stood ready with her mitt. She was barely nineteen. He was a few years older. That beard. That tall frame. His strong, gentle voice. “If you can tag me out, I’ll buy you a drink,” he said, laughing. Like he was giving her the benefit of the doubt but believed there was no chance. She could already see where laugh-lines would form around his eyes. After the game, he bought her a drink. “That’s the last time I underestimate you,” he said. When Gayle found out he worked at the plant, it felt like of course. There’d been something already familiar about him. After Andrea was born, Gayle started working at the plant too, instead of going back to school—because house payments, car payments, food, utilities, doctor bills, a little girl growing out her clothes one size after another. Her first day, following her first boss down the stairs and into that long brick hallway, Gayle’s fellow new hires were terrified. To Gayle, it felt like a homecoming.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
She booked rooms in two hotels, one for halfway through the trip and another in Madison. She hummed “I’ve Always Been Crazy” and packed a suitcase. And then she was on the road, pursuing the source of the cheesehead accent she’d never shed, the plant drawing her back to itself as it had drawn every Wisconsin memory back to itself since she’d been away. Even her childhood memories spun around the plant. When she and Todd were kids, Halden worked in the Kill Room. The nature of his job had never been a secret. “Your bacon, your ham, your salami, your hot dogs—they all come from pigs,” he told them. “My job is to kill the pigs.” It had been no shock to Gayle. Her dad had always brought home deer meat in hunting season, from a deer she knew he’d killed, and he brought home pheasant, turkey, sometimes rabbit. That we kill what we eat had always been made clear.
The Company had still done tours back then. Halden took them once. Gayle was ten or eleven. Todd must have been seven or eight. Halden drove them first through the neighborhood across the highway from the plant, as if it were part of the tour. He told them the neighborhood had been built as housing for plant workers and soldiers coming back from World War II. Most of the people who lived here, he said, worked either at O’Grady Meats or over at Rayovac. It was a nice neighborhood, but the houses were small for growing families. It was a badge of honor for Halden that hard work had enabled him to grow his family in a larger house up in De Forest. After the neighborhood tour, Halden drove his kids across the highway to the plant. It was difficult for Gayle to separate what she actually remembered of the tour from what she later saw every day walking through the same halls for work. She remembered DANGER signs everywhere, because she could remember pointing them out, one after another, and asking the tour guide why it was such a dangerous place to work. The guide said cheerfully, “It is just the nature of this particular beast.” The tour stuck to the final product lines, like Ham Slice. The guide never said a word about the Kill Room. Gayle remembered entreating her dad to take her to the room where he worked. He must have said it wasn’t part of the tour.
By the time Gayle started working at the plant, the Kill Room hadn’t been on-site for a long time. They contracted that work out by then. Halden had transferred to Production, becoming the smokehouse operator for a comparatively cushy ride to retirement.
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The house was still light blue. Gayle and Andrea had painted it that color after Rich was gone. They made the house new, reclaimed it. It had been white when Gayle and Dave bought it. A starter home, right there in the same neighborhood her dad had shown her when she was a girl. It was a brief bus ride to the technical college. Gayle was taking classes to become a dental assistant. But then Andrea surprised them with an early arrival. She was born right in there on the bathroom floor. Gayle could conjure every room behind every window from where she sat in her Bronco, parked at the curb. The driveway was empty. Whoever lived there now had turned half the tiny front yard into a flower garden. It probably looked nicer in spring. Flower pots fringed the steps and front stoop. They’d swapped out the mailbox for a bigger one that had roses painted on a white background. The satellite dish on the roof was new. How jarring it would be to peek through the windows and see the changes inside. How alien it all was, even from here.
That feeling of estrangement from the house—it was like the day she and Andrea returned after the power plant fire. The police had come knocking in the middle of the night. She smelled the smoke as soon as she opened the door. There’s a fire at the O’Grady’s power plant, the officer told her. They were evacuating the neighborhood. He spoke through a fabric respirator mask. Smoke and ammonia gas were blowing this way. They had to leave now. How many others in the house? There was only Andrea. The divorce from Rich had been finalized a few weeks before. Gayle woke Andrea, they struggled into their clothes. Outside, the police were moving down the street, moving farther from the plant. Gayle could see the strobe of blue and red lights above the houses on the next street too. She couldn’t see the plant from here, only a smoky orange glow above the trees. Residents were being directed to an evacuation site. Gayle ignored that. She and Andrea got in the pickup, and Gayle drove up to De Forest, where Halden lived, the house where she had grown up. By the time they arrived, she’d driven herself to something approaching a panic attack: How long would they be out of work? What if it all burned up and the plant didn’t reopen? Should she get a newspaper and start looking for a job now, before everyone else at the plant was doing the same thing? What would happen to the rest of the Ham Slice crew?
Halden made coffee. The three of them huddled around the kitchen table and watched the news. The TV showed aerial views of the burning power plant, footage of the neighborhood being evacuated, the long column of cars. Ammonia gas had been released when the power plant compressor exploded at the outset. Workers had been sequestered outside at the west gate, away from the drift of smoke and gas. Lost pressure in the cooling units had caused ammonia leakages inside the plant too. “Why don’t they just let them go home?” Andrea kept asking. “Why are they keeping them all inside the gate?” She was growing frantic. Fourteen—not yet the age where a display of worry would be uncool. Her dad was at the plant. Halden explained that a good number of third-shifters parked on the east side of the plant. It wouldn’t be safe to send them to their cars. Footage shot through the fence showed a crowd of workers in white career clothing and white bump caps and hard hats, standing around, talking, pacing. The fire couldn’t be seen from here. There was a glimpse of Andrea’s dad. He was sitting on the pavement, playing cards with a trio of other workers. They recognized him by his beard and the army-green baseball cap he was wearing instead of a bump cap. He was in a T-shirt instead of the white jacket. If anything, he looked annoyed. “See?” Halden said. “Your dad’s fine.” Dave would tell Andrea later that he had gone straight to the roof when he first heard of the fire. Other guys had gone to the roof for a better view of the blaze. He’d gone up because he wanted to see which way the smoke was blowing. His first thought had been for Andrea and her mother. He was relieved to see the neighborhood being evacuated.
When Gayle next saw her in the locker room, Tessa, the Sanitation worker, said she’d been playing sheepshead in the cafeteria when it happened. There was a big bang outside, and then all light and sound in the cafeteria suddenly switched off: no humming from the fluorescents or vending machines, no steady exhalation of air from the vents. There wasn’t enough light to see the dots or numbers of the playing cards. The flickering glow of the fire drew them all to the windows. After while a flashlight bobbed into the room. It was the Sanitation Bluehat. Everybody out! Let’s hustle, people! They threaded down the stairwell into a darkness so absolute it was like tunneling through the floor of the world into some kind of in-between afterlife space.
In a few hours, the firefighters got the situation under control. The locker rooms were determined to be free of ammonia gas, so the third-shifters were allowed to go in, get into their street clothes, and go home. The fire was out by daylight. Residents in Gayle’s neighborhood were allowed to return home mid-morning. Gayle put it off. She wanted to avoid the crowd, she said, everyone pouring back into the neighborhood at the same time. She let Halden take her and Andrea out to lunch. Andrea talked through the meal about the dangers of smoke inhalation. It was something she’d been learning in biology class. “Steam can get, like, four thousand times hotter than air,” she said. “And smoke has all these compounds in it that aren’t in air, these little particles, and they’re hot, so it’s not just that you’re breathing in chemicals, it’s that they actually burn your airway tissue. They fry your alveoli just like little broccolis in a fry pan.” Gayle looked at her dad, who coughed a lot these days. He’d been retired for a few months by then. She tried to remember if she’d ever seen the smokehouse operators wearing masks.
The neighborhood was quiet when Gayle and Andrea returned. It had an emptied-out feel, as if no one else had returned yet. Gayle pulled into the driveway. Their little white house, paint faded by years, turned light tan in places, moss-green in spots—it seemed off, like an approximation of their house with some key ingredient missing. They sat in the pickup a minute, Gayle and Andrea both studying the house. Déjà vu. This was how it had felt when they were returning home and sensed Rich in there, steeping in unexplainable rage that he would unleash when they walked inside. The house’s quiet façade harboring malevolence instead of safety and comfort. That’s what it was now: As if the smoke and ammonia and chemicals were lying in wait in there.
“Let’s paint the house,” Gayle said, still gazing through the pickup’s window.
“Blue,” Andrea said. “Like a light sky blue.”
“A light sky blue,” Gayle said. She nodded. Then she said, “We go in and open the windows. Every single one.”
“Roger that, Mom.”
And now these flowerbeds and potted plants, these weeds. This other person’s home.
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The reunion was a potluck. Gayle brought Wings & Drummies from Pizza Pit and set the boxes on a picnic table crowded with green bean casserole, potato salad, tater tot casserole, sloppy joes in a battery-powered crockpot, cashew casserole, a basket of rolls, and several bags of chips. Clifford was grilling brats. Dib brought her green-white-red finger jello and a Tupperware of sesame balls. A baking dish held Foom’s savory concoction of pork, tomatoes, ginger, and lemongrass. Clifford joked that everyone should be careful—it could be Fido in there. He winked at Foom: “I’m just messin’ with ya.” Gayle thought of Andrea’s friend Lisa, her jab at Todd. Foom shrugged, good-natured. “It’s pork,” he said. “From Pick ‘n Save.”
It was so good to see the crew and catch up after five years. So easy slipping back into conversations. New gray hair, softened bellies and hips, surprising slim-downs. New jobs. Only a handful of the people here had still been on the Ham Slice crew when the plant closing was announced, and most of them got out and into new jobs before the actual closing. Schooner was operating a forklift at a dairy plant. Jesus and Mike were at Goodyear. Jensen was a mechanic at a printing press. Ralph, who’d been their favorite Bluehat, got a job in quality assurance at a place that manufactured lab supplies—the same place Andrea’s dad had finally landed a job. Betty and Georgia had worked right through the Ham Slice line’s final day of operation, and then Betty retired. Georgia was waiting to hear back about a job in the Emerson Elementary cafeteria. Gordon the Sanitation guy started his own handyman business. Kawm was working at a McDonald’s, but Dib got a job as a mix room operator at a juice plant, where she was a union rep as well. And it was true about Foom: He was driving for a local trucking company.
“Am I the only one who graduated to office work?” Gayle asked.
“Sounds cushy,” Betty said.
“So does retirement.”
“Gardening,” Betty said. “And I am catching up on scary movies. They’re fun if you watch them during the day.”
“Foom Kaboom!” Mike said. “This pork stew or whatever—it’s A-okay!”
Schooner was telling Gordon, “You know that stink when you’d come to O’Grady’s sometimes and how it was so bad you had to hold your nose until you got inside? It’s fifty times worse when something goes bad at the dairy plant.”
Jesus asked Kawm if she ever spit on a rude customer’s hamburger patty. “No,” she said, blushing. “But one time I drop the whole bag on the street, out pick-up window.”
“On purpose?” Georgia asked.
“Very rude customer. So sorry! You go park over there and wait, okay?”
“Did you get in trouble?”
“Me? I look too innocent.” Kawm batted her eyelashes.
Jensen chuckled, pleased. “Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke,” he said.
Foom was explaining to Ralph, “Pedal extenders and a seat cushion. No problem.”
“Do you get to talk on a CB radio?” Ralph asked. “I always wanted to talk on a CB.”
“My first day,” Jensen told Mike. “Ink everywhere. My hands were completely black.”
Gordon asked Dib if she was keeping the company in line over at the juice plant and striking fear in their hearts as a good union rep should do. He’d been a union steward for the third-shift Sanitation cohort. Dib smirked wickedly. “They tremble,” she said.
“That’s exactly as it should be,” Gordon said.
“Good Lord, some of the clients, though,” Clifford said. He was talking to Gayle. “I had this one guy wanted to take a shot when there was a hunter way back on the other side of this buck. He starts to raise his rifle, and I push it down and tell him he can’t shoot because that other hunter’s there. And he just cusses me up and down. That’s my buck, he says, It’s the first decent shot there’s been all day and you want me to ignore it? I says, You don’t take the shot when there’s somebody in your zone-of-fire. Worst review I ever got on Yelp was from that guy.”
“Clifford,” Ralph called over, “these brats are delicious.”
“Simmered ‘em in beer and onions before I came over,” Clifford said.
Gayle told Betty, “I’ve been at the clinic now for about four years, and I still feel like I’m getting away with something. The others don’t seem to realize how good they’ve got it. And that actually makes me behave, because I’m like: This is such gravy! I don’t wanna mess it up!”
Schooner said, “It’s all relative, though.”
Gayle asked Betty, “Don’t you feel that way? In retirement? Like it’s just an extended vacation and any day now they’ll make you go back and clock in?”
Betty shook her head, and so did Georgia. “It’s different for us,” Betty said. “We were there when they shut the line down for the last time. When we clocked out. You have no idea how odd it was. How final. When we walked out and knew we’d never be going back in.”
“I cried,” Georgia admitted. “I got back out to my car and I sat there and cried.” Nobody said anything. “Well, shit,” Georgia said, “don’t everybody go silent on me now. I depend on you guys for wisecracks in moments like this!”
Jensen obliged: “Maybe when you’re the school lunch lady you can scare kids into eating healthy by telling ‘em what’s in the meat.”
Georgia smiled. “I knew you’d save me, Jensen.”
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Clifford talked them into going out for karaoke at the end of the picnic. Dib and Kawm were the first to give in. They talked Foom into going, and then Georgia was talking Betty into being her duet partner, and Jesus, Mike, and Schooner committed. Gayle begged off, saying she was tired from the trip. The picnic had been nice; going to a karaoke bar might be pushing it, inviting disaster to taint a perfect reunion. She wished them all a good time, gave out hugs and goodbyes. “Friend us on Facebook!” Clifford told her. “I’m making a Facebook group for us!”
“Post cute pictures of your grandson!” Dib told her.
“Keep us in your heart,” Betty said.
When Gayle started the Bronco, Waylon picked up singing in the middle of “That’s What You Get for Loving Me.” She drove down Sherman, turned onto Aberg, which would take her to 151 and the hotel, but first it took her straight past the plant. She saw that the lot was not blocked off, and she turned the Bronco into the drive before she could question herself. Waylon softened his tune and started “Dreaming My Dreams with You.” Gayle drove at a crawl through the lot, looking up at the building through the top of her windshield. She parked directly across from the guard shack so she could see the whole thing: the dark windows of the offices and cafeteria in neat rows, the safety glass windows and brick walls of the plant itself, the smokestack, the power plant back behind the trees and the fence, the long row of engineering shops. The flag poles out front were empty now. The fountain pool they stood behind was dry. The thousands of times she’d walked through that guard shack. It was different for her when she left—the plant was still here. There was still this place connecting them all. Now, the tethers had been cut; they’d all been scattered. No Facebook page was going to gather them back together.
The sun was going down behind the plant. It blazed across the red brick and burned its reflection into the windows. The smokestack’s shadow stretched over the Bronco and across the highway into her old neighborhood, but when that line connected to her house it would not find her again, and whoever lived there now probably wouldn’t even realize where that shadow was coming from. Waylon kept singing. Gayle held onto the wheel, watching the sky turn orange above the power plant. She watched ghosts flicker up the sidewalk and through the guard shack turnstiles. She heard their voices, and she watched and listened until the light dimmed and it all faded. This desolate, magnificent, indelible place.
Someday I’ll get over you.
Eric Roe’s stories have won Chautauqua’s Editors Prize and The Bellingham Review’s Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, have been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes, and have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Story, Redivider, december, and Best American Fantasy. Eric Roe lives in Chapel Hill, NC, and is the editorial assistant at The University of North Carolina’s Marsico Lung Institute. Eric spent a decade working in a Wisconsin meat-packing plant, and that experience is where “The Line” comes from.
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