The body knows the day. Monday lies in your bones different from Thursday, different from the urgency of Friday. But Sunday’s drag is the strongest no doubt, pulling like it means it, like it is working for its life. Sunday has to be the biggest day for suicides. If Henry was ever going to take his own life, he was sure it would be on a Sunday. The terrible struggle done. The struggle used to be all about work. Henry used to feel like he’d tried to swallow a pill that would not go down, that threatened to choke the breath out of him as he worked at his station at the furniture plant. He felt less of that now. Inside the red tape on the concrete floor that marked the territory of the machine, he was the owner and proprietor. If you are not Henry Bailey, do not cross the tape. Henry could get beamed up from that space and if the mother ship ever came they would know for sure where to concentrate the light. Henry took solace in the security of his routine, the work burnishing the stubby places off his life. He might not have long to work there anyway. The weeks before saw a new round of layoffs with more to come. Henry worried that his would be the next job cut, but everybody worried. The older guys who did the work of three were kept on, absorbed into other furniture factories, at least so far. Nobody worried too much about the kids, the twenty-year-olds, at least not when the first closings began. They needed to move around a little bit anyway. A twenty-year-old can take on a little adversity, they had time to recover.
One closing felt like lightning and not the first domino in the sequence. Most days Henry considered quitting just to stop the suspense, but there was nothing else a man like him could do but hang in there and hope the inevitable would pass him by. Years ago the first furniture plant had closed and moved to Vietnam. These things happen and nothing that an ordinary man can do about it. If anyone saw that closing as the end of an industry he kept it to himself. There were no signs. Business was good. Productivity was high. Probably even the line bosses didn’t know that the end was coming—ten years at most.
When Henry started on the line a couple of years before he got married he thought he wouldn’t be able to stand it. The first week he found any excuse to go to the toilet, sit in the stall, and stare at the pitted metal door. Never before had he been tempted to write a note on the walls of a bathroom, but the urge to speak almost overcame him. Almost. Every man on the line would know he was the author, and they already thought he was either lazy or had an abusive, bullying bowel. Henry had not known before the kind of misery he felt on that factory line. The smell of sawdust and furniture stain seeped into him, aging him twenty-five years with his head of silver hair. God almighty did he hate it. Under his fingernails a dirty dust line remained like the vein in shrimp. But that was nothing, nothing compared to the assaultive sound, the constant, crazy-making whirring from the saws that churned into his chest as they cut the tumbling wooden legs and tabletops another man loaded onto the conveyor belt. When the quitting bell rang, Henry sprinted like he was on fire, the first one to the time clock, oblivious to the shaking heads from the older men as he spun his car out of the gravel lot.
The only real choice for him was to work at one of the stinking chicken plants a couple of towns over. Eight dollars an hour was the starting rate back then—a good amount for the time and place. Everyone started in the blood and guts room, stood in a plastic apron all day while the yellow guts of chickens ran through their fingers. Many quit after a few days. A very few made it weeks. Some sturdy ones lasted a lifetime. But nobody who worked there ate chicken for months. Henry knew he would never survive the smell of the dead meat or the slick bloody floor and chicken viscera on his smock. But he tried. He clocked in a one and one-half hours. Plant Four by comparison was mostly dry, the particulates of wood as fine as snowflakes landing layer on layer in his lungs like the sludge in a drain a delicate violent process.
Henry had come home one night and told his mother he didn’t think he could stand it on the line another day. “Mama, it’s loud,” he said, sounding like the child he was. His mother had listened, hadn’t interrupted. Henry may not have known exactly what she’d say, but if he was being honest, he probably knew what she’d mean. “Don’t do it then,” she’d said, shrugging her shoulders. “You don’t have to eat.” His mother’s unsympathetic but sure grasp of the ways of the world had been just the thing Henry needed to hear. He hadn’t meant to think about her today.
But the body adapts, the mind adapts. Henry had seen it for himself with the guys on the line. Henry wasn’t one of the oldest guys in the group. Some of the men had spent decades at the machines. Randy Hightower, Alvin Lodermilk, Donny Goodman all had at least thirty years already and they showed no signs of leaving. Henry wasn’t a kid, but it made him feel better not to be part of the old guard. After nineteen years, he had a hard time convincing himself that the job was temporary.
Linda and Shelley, the white women in the main office, greeted him as they did as he took the side entrance into the building. Linda, the younger of the women, had been the subject of talk when she was first hired years ago. Her big chest highlighted in sweaters, her tiny little waist, thin blond hair dark at the roots that she fed into her mouth when she was nervous had all been noticed and discussed. If she liked the attention from the men, she gave no indication. She said nothing to even the boldest of them but smiled at them in a detached indulging way, like you might a child who had stepped on your toe. Henry never flirted with her. Shelley probably just seemed older than Linda. She’d come to the plant many years before Henry, looking like someone’s wife’s idea—a settled woman in elastic waist pants and sensible shoes.
A small maze of cubicles where the salesmen and low-level executives kept desks was one wall away from the machine room floor. Every day Henry passed by pictures of kids in baseball uniforms, ballerinas, and fat babies that looked like old men. Several of the men had plastic toys and fast food toys and dolls from comic books that Henry could not understand why grown men collected. The men on the line were supposed to come in the other entrance, but neither Linda nor Shelley minded him coming in the mid-management door. Henry needed that soft light moment before he entered the room and the grind of the machines.