Stone Table Paper Mill

It was built in the winter of 1939 right beside what would become the Leotie Military Cemetery, and appears at night as a house for the ghosts of the buried and it was built originally as a part of The New Deal to manufacture U.S. Army uniforms before being converted into a paper mill.

It’s one of the oldest businesses in town still operating and will soon become forgotten. It’s employed somewhere over 3000 hard-working and not so hard-working citizens over the years.

There’s still three bathrooms on the plant floor from the days of segregation, and Sydney who’s been working there since 1964 remembers those days. The third one which hardly anybody uses anymore is beside the junk machinery that hasn’t been sold yet, where there’s no ceiling lights, and covered in cobwebs and dust flurries, with a broken door lock and broken flush lever and where a few rats will die every year.

Through the cheap and plastic paned windows, you can look and see the world outside, the pine and oak trees and the endless roll of the Appalachian Mountains and the cutting waters of the wild streaming Leotie creek, all of it like an oil canvas.

Inside the plant is boiling hot. There’s no air conditioning and the heat contained within the cement walls chokes out oxygen, picks up the dust and hurls it into the everybody’s vision. On first shift there are forty-three employees.

Sydney cuts 16 x 16 sheeted stacks of paper and cardboard on the great steel knife, and he’s been doing it for forty-four years. The blade is two feet long and when Sydney cranks down on the lever the blade bites down at the paper like a shark’s jaw and every day he wipes down the surface with a tub of Pilgrim John’s brand grease so it appears almost brand new even though it’s as old as he is.

His father threatened to disown him when he was twenty because he almost told him he was in love and was fixing to ask for a black woman’s hand in marriage and so he ended up never doing it because he loved his father and held a great respect for him too.

The woman’s named Miss Loretta Flowers and she nearly saved Sydney all the way up from a pretty mean gambling problem and she married another man about four years after they had fallen in love, about a year before Sydney’s father died.

Sydney spoke at his father’s funeral and cried some when he spoke. Throughout his life he borrowed a good bit of money from him due to his betting habits and when he was growing up his father took him squirrel hunting which was mostly what they ate for their meals, and he’d lead his son through the woods of Southern Appalachia, and spoke to him about the blade of a knife, the old trees, the clay that is billions of years old upon which they walked, and about once a week since his father passed away, while sleeping at night he’ll dream up this image of following his father through the wilderness as a child, and he still thinks about Loretta most days and his father and he loves him still and will never forgive him either, still loves betting on football games every Saturday and Sunday, and loses most of his savings with every wager he places, and on the other days of the week he cuts the cleanest paper anybody ever wrote on.

***

This morning Wohali Clifton comes in late. The sun in the sky emerges like a newborn’s crown and he gets out of his wife’s 1991 purple Buick while she hollers at him and he slams the door as she peels out the gravel lot, tires dragged and spurting up stone, and the door swings open and then closes rapidly as she turns down the road. Wohali says to himself, Goddamn woman, dumb bitch.

They met in high school and were married at eighteen. Her father held a pistol that he carried upon the beaches of Normandy pointed up at him when he came and requested for his daughter’s hand in union.

Wohali walked with crutches and a limp and had a full braced cast wrapped around his left leg. “I’ll marry her,” he said.

“Well shit son I believe you’d best had.” She was sitting beside her father, with Wohali’s seed growing insider her womb.

The Autumn prior to their wedding, after setting records for scoring and assists, steals and rebounds over four years as a starting point guard and small forward, Wohali accepted a scholarship to play basketball at the University of Tennessee, and enjoyed the greatly the lifestyle that came with it. He promised his mother, at age fifteen, that he’ll get her out of the trailer park and buy her a house with a pool, make sure she doesn’t have to work another day in her life. He was certain as it was his own destiny that he’d be playing for the Boston Celtics in only just a few years.

His mother died, this past year, while working nearly sixty hours a week as she had done for fifty of her sixty-five years on earth.

While attending UT, Wohali met a cheerleader and she became pregnant a few months later. He gave her money for an abortion, which she kept and then kept the child too, and she told him about it four games into the season. He called up his hometown girlfriend and tried to break up with her over Christmas break, reckoning it the correct thing to do, when she told him she’s pregnant too and that he’s the father. In the first game of the new yew year, he broke his leg and they took his scholarship and he couldn’t afford an education anymore and moved back in to his mama’s trailer and took a job packing cartons at Stone Table.

This morning, thirty years later, he comes in a hundred pounds overweight and just about a minute late and it’s the third time this year. He wears a Larry Bird jersey that his grandchildren got him for Christmas three years ago and basketball warm-up pants. He’s balding and covers his head in a backwards orange UT hat and stands down by the shoot that spits out cartons of notebooks and packs them tight, and tapes them up and stacks them onto a pallet, knowing that the supervisor will keep him for ten of the thirty minutes given for lunch, to talk to him about being on time, about attitude. When the supervisor walks down the way past the machine, the LC-341, they nod at each other, each saying to themselves, ever so politely, Go sit on a fat one you bitch, and, Take it and shove up your ass lazy motherfucker.

The supervisor’s name is Johnny Bledsoe and back before he became supervisor, back when everybody liked him, they called him J.B. He worked in the plant for twelve years, starting out as a container loader, stacking fifty-pound cartons in the dark hellish heat of the trucks, eventually becoming a very skilled mechanic and operator of each of the twelve machines in the mill, which if assessed together, accumulates for over forty million dollars in value. He handled each of them, in the image of a cowboy breaking a wild stallion. Back then, he wore faded blue jeans, a pair of Georgia boots, and old t-shirts with beer and tobacco logos, Marines and Olympics and eighties southern rock band prints on them, the same shirts he wore during high school wrestling practice, where he got second in the state championship three years in a row, always losing in the finals in the last seconds of the match, being cursed his father told him, cursed. He was probably the finest mechanic ever to come through Stone Table and it’s how come he got promoted, and getting promoted is mostly the reason why nobody likes him anymore. He doesn’t care for the new title or the paperwork it involves, or having to tell somebody else what to do, but the job pays a little bit better and that’s the end of it. He misses coming in and keeping to his own and working with his hands and sweating out a hangover and drinking up the entirety of night with friends after the day being done. He won’t miss being supervisor on the day, God willing, in about a quarter century from now, he retires. I’ve busted my ass my whole life, he says to himself sometimes, then, maybe to God’ll say, “The hell does any of it even mean?”

Part of his job description is to take the flood-piss from the company’s general manager, Mr. Renell Lonnie.

“Goddammit J.B.,” Mr. Renell says, “we got three trucks coming in this afternoon and you don’t have half enough product ready for what they’re picking up.” On his desk is a forest of paperwork, bills and order-forms and quarter reports and red ink bleeding all over. He shakes his head and looks up with led loaded eyes, veins pumping underneath the neck. “Do you like your job?”

It’s a hard thing for a grown man to have to say Yessir all day long like a child, but J.B.’s mostly gotten used to it.

“You like the money that comes on your check every two weeks that’s signed by me?”

“Yessir.”

“Well I’m glad somebody here doesn’t have any stake in the day’s work, because I’m losing money faster than an orphan loses faith in God. Now are you gonna have this order ready by four o’clock today.”

“Yessir.”

“Cause by God it’s your ass if you don’t. Do you hear me?”

“Yessir.”

Paper’s a dying industry and Mr. Renell knows it. His own father suffered a heart attack, cutting paper on the knife beside Sydney, in the plant and the time of death was called before they got him on the stretcher, and he can still feel the presence of his spirit in there, the cardboard and the dust, the aroma of shredded wood chips, the heat, the tuition that paid for his four years at Georgia Tech made by honest labor and long hours and more sweat than can be weighed, the voice of his father. There’s a great hurting involved in keeping the company from drowning. He loves it as though it were itself a part of his own blood.

***

He surveys the machinery down on the floor of the plant as a captain gazing upon the horizon, a storm of machine jam-ups and thunderous waves of 2500 pound paper rolls spinning through the ink cellars, perforation, knife and bands, wiring and cover slots, as though it were land ahead, the miracle that is the economics of productivity.

In the beginning of the process, before the rolls are delivered to Stone Table, there’s a company that comes to the forest and cuts down the trees and nobody hates it more than Mr. Renell but it’s how the paper is made.

Eventually the notebooks are shipped in forty-foot containers across the country and placed on shelves in dollar stores and purchased by millions where all those sentences will be written, the essays on Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, American Presidents and entrepreneurs, and the inner thoughts of those who each day in existence, struggle and suffer and search for something, like a missing soul, and then write it down from pen to paper in their journal, their Stone Table notebook, all of it as though it were a collage of humanity across the country.

***

Mr. Renell hired Jorge when he was eating dinner at Tetas y Cervesas, during the fourth bachelor party in twenty years for one of his college buddies, and just watched Jorge in awe, who was working as a bus boy and janitor at a pace inhuman, then asked him what he made and then asked if he’d like to make twice that much. He says it’s maybe the best damn hire he ever made. People’ll turn still and watch him work and wonder at such effort, the grace he moves with while setting up the machine and turning it at a speed past rate, checking the paper and adjusting the parts on the fly, always moving, very much like an athlete.

“How come is it a Mexican loves this country more’n anybody else? I mean I swear he just works and works and works, and every single second a the day likes he’s nothin’ but just the luckiest sum’bitch to get to do so,” Wohali says as Jeanie Fae walks past his machine on her way to take break. She is almost fifty and already in her life has lost all three of her husbands to a form of cancer and she wears cut-off blue jeans, and her hair long and in curled tips and permed and a softball jersey sponsored by Psychotic Stallion beer. When her mother was pregnant, she took mifepristone and misoprostol to get rid of the fetus inside her but the medicine didn’t take and Jeannie Fae came into this world with irreversible delayed motor skills, a godly gaze and a pre-destined speech impediment that stumbles and stutters out of her vocal cords with each syllable.

She says, “I reckon it’s just one a them ole conundrums.”

“Bullshit.”

***

She heads on outside to the benches to sit down for a few minutes and get some sunshine, and takes a seat next to another employee who works upstairs and they smoke Marlboro Reds, four of them each in the fifteen minutes allotted. There’re people all the time tell her those things will kill you and she says, “Maybe so, but I’ll likely kill you first, I tell ya, you keep on minding my business that way.”

She usually says when her smoke buddy asks how she’s doing that she’s alright, she just still misses all the time the men that she loved and lost. “It’s hard working,” she says, “but there’s nothing else you really can do.”

Usually on her third cigarette, she says, “but I’m really quite fortunate to be here, when it comes right down to it. I don’t wanna brag or nothin’, I don’t, really, I mean that, but I’m a miracle made by God and that ain’t even braggin’ neither, I’m just saying what’s fact. My mama done all she could to keep from havin’ me in this world but here I am.”

She’s working today at the end of the shoot for the machine that Jorge operates, next to Big Walt who they say doesn’t even know what soap is.

After a few hours and they start really sweating and it stains the body like a curse from God, she hollers out, Wheew-ah-mitey. “Big Walt, you stink boy. You need to go home and scrub all over once you get offa work. Don’t be ‘fraid a no soapy water neither. I take a bath each night, Big Walt and I clean myself up so I start to smelling nice. Every night, Big Walt, don’t take none off. Now when I get in the bath watur, I wursh everywhere, toes’n all. Need to wursh your ass too. Have the whole durn plant smellin’ like you down there ‘nless you wursh your ass boy.”

***

Mr. Renell comes down and cranks up the machine and then stands in as an extra packer beside them and he’ll stay there that night until midnight probably, running the math in how to keep the company staying in business, these walls where his father earned the paycheck that made him who he is, this place where his father finally up-and-died.

He decides to shut down production on the LC-341 and the mechanic shifts its gears and parts to run also the order due at the end of the day. Mr. Renell will have to bring a quarter of the workers back in on a Saturday to make up for this. He thinks about the money he’ll lose. He’s down there, this day, with them and packing notebooks up into cartons and stacking them down on pallets.

J.B. cleans one of the old junk machines and operates it at a condensed rate so that it doesn’t overheat and break down, and he has to place the covers, cardboard back slots and do all the wiring manually, to produce the product they’re about two days behind on for shipment this evening. He’ll stay over tonight five or six hours to finish the paperwork but his salary won’t allow for the overtime pay.

Over the course of eight hours, they make almost half a million notebooks as though their labor, their sweat, their lives and heartbeat were written down and laid upon the plates of earth.