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Chapter 8: The Fall from Grace
- TCU Press
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C H APTER 8 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 The Fall from Grace iT HAPPENED EARLY IN MY FOURTH GRADE, JUST BEFORE H ALLOWEEN, BECAUSE I remember having in my hand a sheaf of construction paper cut into the silhouettes of black cats and witches on brooITl5ticks as I arrived home that afternoon from schooL My father and mother were standing on the front porch of the house just off Detroit Street in Nederland, my mother was crying, and my father's face was even redder than its ordinary hue, a shade just this side of the red ball on the Japanese flag. The war had been over for several years by then, and bucktoothed Japanese soldiers had ceased to feature so regularly in my nightmares, but the color red still made me tllleasy. Big Willie, all six feet, five inches and 240 JXltlllds ofhim, had been told that day he was laid offfrom the employ ofthe Sun Oil Company. He was forryeight years old, he had turned down a short time earlier an offer to be made "time-keeper" of his crew, and he had done that because he knew the responsibilities of the post would make him tmpopular with the men whose time he would be keeping. Things were slowing down in 19!? economies of scale were kicking in, the burden ofsalary had to be cut- all these business realities were coming to bear, and the Sun Oil workers were proudly not tmionized. They had never before needed to band together for protection, so why should they now? I figured all this out years later, but at the time my father became tmemployed as a "hand" in the petro-chemical industry of the Texas Gulf Coast I believed the story he cltmg to and the one he told my mother and anyone who would listen to him. He had stood up to some unfair interpretation of work conditions, he had voiced what others of his coworkers, people named Little Willie and Hoodlum Red and Coutts and Commalander and Hollywood VanZandt and Dolphus and Tack Hammer, were afraid to say, and they had kept their jobs, but my father had not. He spoke out, and he was sacrificed. At the time I imagined the event to have been one in which all these men and others, along with my father, Big Willie Duff, were stood up in a line 34 THE FALL FROM GRACE 35 facing the Boss who had a piece of paper in his hand with the names of the winners and losers written on it. He read aloud from it, calling off the list of those allowed to stay on the job and draw their hourly wages and finally saying something like this: "Big Willie, you and Doucette and leBlanc and Brazile and Moye don't work for the Stm Oil Company no more. Don't come back here again, never." Then the ones who could still work picked up their tools, and my father and the others cast out from the Stlll walked toward the gate to the world outside , bleak and gray and plumb out ofpaychecks. He could have fotllld a job somewhere else in the Golden Triangle of Texas. Hiring was continual at that time so soon after the war, but my father couldn't accept the rejection by the Stlll Oil Company, a firm headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, way offup north, as he frequently told me, so he packed us all up: me, my sister Nancy, and my mother- pregnant at forty-one with her last child who would be Wilma, named for our father- and he took us off to Polk Cotmty, Texas, where he had gtown up and where no work for "hands" had existed since all the virgin pine and hardwood timber had been logged off to the bare ground during the previous fifty years. He took the loss of his job at Stm Oil as deeply as Adam must have done when he was expelled from Eden, and Big Willie retreated to Polk County, where liquor was outlawed and Texas's only Indian reservation was located, and Duffs of every description and small-mindedness lived and wandered, watching and critiquing each other's every deed, habit, thought, and predilection . Willie Duff was home again, and the starving time had begun. We moved into one side of my Atmt MayBelle's rent-house in livingston , Texas, the one next door to Atlllt Rosalie's house. Atmt MayBelle had never married, and she had...