When I got out there to interview these women it was about 100 degrees in the shade, and about 85% humidity. Lots of sheep, lots of green growing things, lots of bugs. There are six of them now, a new one was added a couple of years after Preacher left – she’s an inspector for an organic food co-op who used to visit to make sure that the farm wasn’t using any pesticides. All six of them are Worshipers, of course.
I could see that it was the kind of place that Preacher would love. I could also see that it was the kind of place that I would hate.
They let Karen do most of the talking, but they had this annoying habit of finishing one another’s sentences. I separated them to interview them individually but when I did that they seemed to be struck dumb. It wasn’t until they were all sitting in the same place that they became articulate.
Anyhow, that first day Preacher got a tour of the farm and put his back into a few routine chores and late in the afternoon Karen said to him, very bluntly: we’re going to talk about you for a few minutes, so why don’t you take Arthur (the dog) and go… over there, somewhere.
He laughed and did so. The dog had padded silently behind him everywhere they’d gone that morning. Whether Arthur was acting as the farm’s guardian or simply showing his devotion to Preacher was, at that time, unclear. He threw a stick for Arthur to fetch, then they wrestled on the ground like idiots.
What about him, Karen asked the other women.
What do you mean, what about him, Donna said.
She means as a hired man, Anna says. Like we talked about last week.
I don’t know, Cassie said, looking at him and raising an eyebrow. We don’t know him at all. He could be some psycho.
Arthur’s a better judge of character than that, Ellen said, also looking at the man. He usually doesn’t like anybody. Preacher and dog were playing tug-of-war with the stick.
Look, Karen said, we agreed we need someone. At least for a few weeks. We let the winter maintenance get way ahead of us. We have a cutting of hay to bring in, the shearers will be here in two days, we’ve got seed to put in the ground, and the barn roof is leaking like a sieve. If we knew what the hell we were doing, five of us would be plenty for all that, but we don’t. We’re better off than we were last year, but we’re still not there. Plus, Preacher can go into town for us – as hateful as some of these people are, they’ll respond better to him, I bet. And he’s got one advantage over anyone else we could hire locally.
What’s that, Cassie said.
He’s not a local, Donna said.
Exactly, Anna said.
They stood in silence for a moment, contemplating him, contemplating the risk they were taking. As a group they were still searching for their balancing point, and as a group they were still not sure that their little agricultural venture was going to last another year. Elizabeth’s departure had shaken their already rickety structure. And now to add some guy…?
Where would he live? Ellen said. Not the house.
I thought we could stick him in that old tack room in the loft, Karen said. It’s warm and dry, or at least it will be when we get the roof fixed. It’s got electricity. Right now it’s holding nothing but cobwebs and a few rusty old tools.
They looked at each other.
I would vote yes, with one provision, Cassie said. Which is that any of us can veto this at any time. We don’t know this guy at all. He might turn out to be a real asshole.
The others agreed.
What makes you think he’ll take it? Donna said.
He said he was looking for work, Karen said. In town. We can offer him a job and a place to stay. And not nearly as much abuse.
OK, Preacher, we’re finished talking about you, Anna yelled in his direction. Preacher got to his feet and he and Arthur ambled toward them, bits of grass and hay stuck to them in various places, and what looked like identical grins on their faces.
Do you know anything about roofing a barn, shearing a sheep, cutting hay or planting seed? Karen asked him.
Nope.
Neither do we, Donna said. How would you like a job?
They told me that he’d been hesitant to accept, at first. Not because he didn’t want it. But because he seemed to have the same idea that he had the potential to be a great big penis-bearing turd in the punchbowl of their little hippie experiment. But he liked the farm, he liked them, he liked Arthur… so he let them convince him.
Sunday, April 24, 2005
Monday, April 18, 2005
Part Thirty Three
From Preacher Haywood’s Internet Message #27:
When EVERYTHING you do is an act of worship, the concept of crowding into a church one day a week to worship seems kind of… pointless and redundant. There is much to be said for worship, and if it takes setting aside a particular hour of a particular day for you to do it, then by all means go to church or synagogue or mosque or whatever, but ask yourself: if you need a specific building and a worship-specialist standing at the front of the room to worship properly, aren’t you by extension excluding the Divine from the rest of your life?
If you need something specific to focus your mind on the real presence of God, might I suggest dinner?
The act of preparing a meal for yourself and others just gives you so many opportunities to caress the cheek of the Divine. First off, nothing recognizes the sacredness of others so much as feeding them – you are, in a sense, keeping them alive. Second, the ingredients themselves put you in communion with the Divine. You are handling all these formerly living things, fruits and vegetables and (if that’s your thing) animals who all lived and all carry the breath of the Divine in them, and you are transforming them, rearranging their molecules so that others can consume their essence and live themselves.
Surrounded, then, by life, doing Divine work of providing for life, how can you not feel the Divine around you? How can you avoid knowledge of the Oneness in such an activity?
Of course. It’s easy. We just have to willfully close our eyes and minds to it. But once you managed to force open just a little crack in that armor, nothing will make you feel closer to the Divine than standing in your kitchen with loved ones nearby, chopping vegetables and smelling bread rising in the oven.
(I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: when the messenger is a washed-up waiter, the message is going to take a definite culinary slant.)
So Worshipers – some of them, at least – don’t go to church. Instead they have Circles, Worship-Circles, and that suffices to focus them on the tangible, inescapable Divine. Once a week – Thursdays, usually, just out of habit – they meet at someone’s house and fresh food is prepared and they eat and talk and laugh and they have at least three different chances to feel that piezoelectric spark of God being squeezed to life inside – first, from the food they eat; second, from the humans around them; third, from the nurturing act of preparing food for others.
If you have four couples in your Worship Circle, you’re having people over once a month. Much more than that and you start to lose a sense of community. It works fine if you only have one other person in, but we’ve found that much more than four families and things start to break down.
And bring your kids to the Circles. It will keep them from building up that God-proof armor that you’re working so hard to tear down. I mean, they’ll still acquire it – that’s what the world does – but hopefully you can make it be Whiffle-armor, Swiss-cheese armor, with lots of dinner-shaped holes for the Divine to penetrate.
Yes, cooking for and visiting with kids can be a pain in the ass, but keep in mind also that your kids are an embodiment, not just of the Divine, but of a moment when you and another person tried to touch the Divine in yourselves.
Great, now I’m going to get sued by the Whiffle people. Bad enough that Pat Robertson wants me whacked, now Wham-O’s lawyers are going to be after me.
When EVERYTHING you do is an act of worship, the concept of crowding into a church one day a week to worship seems kind of… pointless and redundant. There is much to be said for worship, and if it takes setting aside a particular hour of a particular day for you to do it, then by all means go to church or synagogue or mosque or whatever, but ask yourself: if you need a specific building and a worship-specialist standing at the front of the room to worship properly, aren’t you by extension excluding the Divine from the rest of your life?
If you need something specific to focus your mind on the real presence of God, might I suggest dinner?
The act of preparing a meal for yourself and others just gives you so many opportunities to caress the cheek of the Divine. First off, nothing recognizes the sacredness of others so much as feeding them – you are, in a sense, keeping them alive. Second, the ingredients themselves put you in communion with the Divine. You are handling all these formerly living things, fruits and vegetables and (if that’s your thing) animals who all lived and all carry the breath of the Divine in them, and you are transforming them, rearranging their molecules so that others can consume their essence and live themselves.
Surrounded, then, by life, doing Divine work of providing for life, how can you not feel the Divine around you? How can you avoid knowledge of the Oneness in such an activity?
Of course. It’s easy. We just have to willfully close our eyes and minds to it. But once you managed to force open just a little crack in that armor, nothing will make you feel closer to the Divine than standing in your kitchen with loved ones nearby, chopping vegetables and smelling bread rising in the oven.
(I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: when the messenger is a washed-up waiter, the message is going to take a definite culinary slant.)
So Worshipers – some of them, at least – don’t go to church. Instead they have Circles, Worship-Circles, and that suffices to focus them on the tangible, inescapable Divine. Once a week – Thursdays, usually, just out of habit – they meet at someone’s house and fresh food is prepared and they eat and talk and laugh and they have at least three different chances to feel that piezoelectric spark of God being squeezed to life inside – first, from the food they eat; second, from the humans around them; third, from the nurturing act of preparing food for others.
If you have four couples in your Worship Circle, you’re having people over once a month. Much more than that and you start to lose a sense of community. It works fine if you only have one other person in, but we’ve found that much more than four families and things start to break down.
And bring your kids to the Circles. It will keep them from building up that God-proof armor that you’re working so hard to tear down. I mean, they’ll still acquire it – that’s what the world does – but hopefully you can make it be Whiffle-armor, Swiss-cheese armor, with lots of dinner-shaped holes for the Divine to penetrate.
Yes, cooking for and visiting with kids can be a pain in the ass, but keep in mind also that your kids are an embodiment, not just of the Divine, but of a moment when you and another person tried to touch the Divine in yourselves.
Great, now I’m going to get sued by the Whiffle people. Bad enough that Pat Robertson wants me whacked, now Wham-O’s lawyers are going to be after me.
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Part Thirty Two
OK, I’m going to temporarily suspend my little exercise in letting people speak for themselves about things I didn’t witness. That’s because to tell this next part would involve rambling and largely (but not entirely) duplicative interviews with at least eight different people.
So I’m going to reintroduce all my own prejudices and angles and agendas into this part of the story. Or at least put them out in the open for awhile.
In the spring of 1992 a man from Michigan, driving a blue Porsche, picks up a hitchhiker on a winding highway in Arkansas. The hitchhiker is Haywood, who had quit the job in New Mexico for ill-defined reasons and meandered his way eastward. In Texas he was hit by a bottle thrown out of a passing pickup and spent the day in a hospital, having glass picked out of his thigh and O-Neg blood pumped into him. Otherwise nothing too eventful happened – at least nothing that would, years later, cause anyone to get in touch with Preacher or the Worshipers once he became better known.
If the story of how the Michigan man in the midnight-metallic 944 came to be driving from Arkansas to Georgia was at all interesting, I would have just put his long and meandering interview in here instead of this summary.
At any rate, the guy – his name is Gary Ross, which is unimportant for our purposes – the guy picks up Preacher and they go hurtling through the heart of the Confederacy together, paralleling Sherman’s March and talking about music, food, and everything else. Ross recalled later that he, Gary, had done most of the talking. That there was something about Preacher which somehow drew things out of you, in a friendly, unhurried way. “It was like,” he said to me, “having a… a personal confessor. Not just kneeling in a booth but sitting there with someone who you could really unburden to, someone who understood where you were coming from and was able to offer insight and empathy, not penance.”
Ross is now a Worshiper. He’s probably not bullshitting about giving Haywood a ride – apparently he found Preacher by googling his name, years later, and sending him a “hey remember me” email. Preacher responded, and confirmed that Gary Ross did indeed give him a ride that spring day a decade ago.
Ross told me he became a Worshiper after reconnecting with Preacher. “I read some of the articles about him. To tell you the truth, there wasn’t anything particularly holy about him when I met him; he was just a good-natured kid. And a good listener. But I started reading up on it, and got the book, and then my oldest came home from college with one of those circle pendants…”
OK, so that’s another one in Preacher’s win column.
Anyhow they’re just outside the town of Barlow, Georgia, when Ross stops to get gas before heading into Athens. And Preacher gets out to stretch his legs, and he tells Gary, hey, it’s a beautiful Spring day, thanks for the ride, but I’m going to walk for awhile.
Ross tries to talk him out of it, but Haywood is insistent, and so they part company. Just a few hours out of Gary Ross’s life, that somehow stuck with him for years to come.
Preacher, then, starts walking down a road heading toward the tiny farming village. And he passes a flatbed truck on the road, and sees two women changing the front tire. He offers to help. They glare at him and tell him no. He shrugs and ambles on his merry way. Halfway into town the truck passes him.
He saunters into the town center. Inquires about a “Help Wanted” sign at the lumberyard; they don’t want him, it seems. Inquires about a “Help Wanted” sign at the diner; they don’t want him either. “It was,” he recalled later, “about the unfriendliest town I’ve ever been in.” He begins to regret whatever impulse, instinct, or intuition caused him to walk off the highway into Barlow. He wonders how long it will take him to hike all the way into Athens, a good 20 miles down the road. He knows that he always does well in college towns.
His footsteps lead him pass the Southern States, where he sees the same flatbed backed up to the loading dock and the two women loading sacks of feed and seed. There are three rather seedy-looking men standing nearby, doing nothing to help. Preacher assumes that their offers of assistance were treated the way his was. But as he draws near he overhears the comments made by the men; their exact wording is lost to posterity, but they are sufficiently vile that even Preacher – Mr. Live-And-Let-Live – is moved to exhibit his personal brand of low-key chivalry.
He starts helping the women load the truck. One of them hisses at him that they don’t need his help. He says, “clearly,” but continues working. The men aim a few comments at him, to the effect of (a) the women are lesbians, (b) lesbians and straight men cannot interact, therefore (c) he must be a homosexual himself. Haywood is not moved by this redneck syllogism.
As Preacher and one of the women – a short blonde woman – lash the stakes in place on the sides of the truck bed, the other woman – a tall, well-built brunette – argues with the manager of the Southern States, who comes out to tell them that they’ve blocked the loading dock for too long. The brunette points out that the seed was supposed to have been delivered, and over a week ago, and that they have nearly missed sowing season as a result of their delivery problems. The Southern States manager is unsympathetic.
Referring to them by their hair color is demeaning, isn’t it? Even though at the time, Preacher didn’t know their names. The brunette’s name is Cassie Shields, and the blonde’s name is Anna Peppersack.
Finally Preacher and Anna finish with the siderails. He asks for a ride back to the highway, and Anna nods once, curtly. Cassie signs for the seed and walks off the loading dock to get in the truck. Anna sits in the passenger seat. Preacher stays on the bed.
And one of the men put his hand on the door of the truck, and refuses to let Cassie in.
Cassie tells him to move. He refuses. She tells him to move again. He makes a vulgar suggestion. The other two men giggle. Preacher suspects he’s about to see some testosterone-fueled stupidity and stands up, to see if it’s too late to do that hand-on-the-shoulder, come-talk-to-me thing that he does so well. But before he can get off the truck Shields has the man’s wrist in a vise grip twisted behind his back and he’s trying not to scream. She marches him a few steps away from the truck and then pushes him away and turns to walk back to the cab. The man lunges toward her and she steps to the side, grabs the back of his head, and slams his face into the door of the truck as she whips it open. Then she jumps in and starts the engine, looks out the window at the man with the bloody nose sitting in the parking lot, and leaves.
Preacher hears a hearty “fuck you, bitch,” as they leave. He makes eye contact with the man but manages to avoid laughing. Barely.
A few miles outside of town – near where they had stopped to fix the flat – Cassie pulls the truck off the road with a cloud of gravel and gets out of the truck, screaming, cursing, and stomping. She marches away from them, up the shoulder, yelling at no one in particular. Anna hops out of the truck and starts to go after her.
Leave her be, Preacher says from his perch on the pile of canvas sacks. Anna jumps. She’s forgotten he’s there. She looks up at him.
Leave her be, Preacher repeats. She’s got a lot of adrenaline right now after all that. Back there in the parking lot she wanted to kick three asses, at least, and only got to kick one, so now she’s got a lot of unused ass-kicking energy to burn off.
Anna starts to go after her anyway, then stops and thinks better of it.
Thanks, by the way, she says to Preacher.
Don’t mention it.
No, really. Sorry we were rude to you before. It’s just that… she shrugs, words failing her. But Haywood understands. Fifteen minutes in Barlow and he understands.
He starts to climb off the truck. I’ll just hoof it the rest of the way to the highway, he says.
No, stay, Anna says. The least we can do is get you something to eat. She looks at him. He looks skinny. He is skinny.
Please. The others might want to meet you, anyway. Plus those assholes from Southern States might decide to ride down the highway later on, and you don’t want to be alone if they find you.
I imagine, Preacher says, I’d want to have her there. He points with his chin toward Cassie, who is still kicking up clods of weeds on the shoulder.
Anna laughs. That’s Cassie, she says. She used to be in the Army. I’m Anna.
Preacher, Preacher says.
Peter? the girl says, wrinkling her brow.
No, Preacher. That’s my actual name. What can I say, I grew up in California.
After awhile Cassie sits down on the shoulder and tries to act like she’s not crying. Like she hasn’t worn herself out. And Preacher says, now go get her. And Anna does.
When they walk back awhile later Preacher is still lounging comfortably on the seed bags.
Thanks, Cassie says. Her face is red.
Thank you, Preacher tells her, for beating that guy up. Where were you in the fourth grade and one of his spiritual cousins was taking my lunch money?
Long Island, she says to him, smiling a little. Assuming we were in the fourth grade at the same time.
She is actually a year or so older than Preacher.
They drive back to the highway and then down the highway and then down another side road and then they turn into a rutted driveway that was probably gravel at one time. They bounce under some tree branches and cross a little creek and then ride through fields waiting to be planted and fields holding sheep. Around a bend and through another stand of trees and there is a run-down and empty goat-shed on the right hand side of the driveway as the lane curves up to the big barn just pas that. A large white farmhouse sits on a pretty green lawn farther up the hill, on the left.
As the truck pulls in two other women come out of the barn. Their names are Ellen Smith and Donna Maith. And in the house is a woman named Karen Poole.
Cassie backs the truck into the barn and Preacher notices that the other women are looking at him with skepticism. Mixed with hostility.
“Was white boy on the list?” Donna asks Anna.
“It’s a long story,” Anna says.
Preacher helps them unload the truck. There are introductions all around. Anna tells them what happened. Karen has wandered down by this time; she is a very small, almost elfin woman. They are all in their mid- to late-twenties.
And a dog trots up, a big mutt with a lot of German Shepherd in him. He sniffs Preacher for a moment, and then head-butts the man’s hand. Haywood crouches and strokes the dog’s head good-naturedly, roughly. The dog wags his tail and sits down for more.
He doesn’t take to strangers, Ellen observes.
And I’m pretty strange, Haywood concedes.
The name of the place is Sappho Farms. Of course.
Karen Poole inherited the entire spread from her grandparents in her last year of law school at Emory. Donna was an undergrad there. Ellen was her significant other, an unhappy school-teacher who’d graduated with a history degree from University of Georgia a year earlier. In those days Karen had a lover named Elizabeth, a barista and aspiring poet. Cassie had gotten kicked out of the Army for the reason you would guess she was kicked out of the Army, went to Georgia Tech and majored in engineering, and met Anna – who had decided, a semester shy of graduating, that she didn’t want to be a software engineer.
Anyhow they pooled their money, fixed up the place, and tried to put their political and spiritual and cultural ideals to work in their own six-person agricultural cooperative. A year later Elizabeth left; farming life wasn’t for her. All of them found it much harder than they’d expected. And a few months after that… a few months after that, Anna and Cassie came home with Preacher.
Most of this – except for the part about Elizabeth – was explained to Preacher while they washed up and prepared for lunch. While the others prepared for lunch; they had Karen take him aside and pump him for information, mostly because there wasn’t room for six people in the kitchen at once.
Karen recalls that he was at once quite forthcoming and quite vague about what brought him to Barlow, Georgia. “He said he’d graduated from St. John’s a couple of years back, that he’d been knocking around the country looking for whatever it was he was supposed to do ever since,” she would recall later. “I remember thinking he was polite, articulate, and utterly indifferent to our little social experiment.”
They eat. Preacher entertains. He does that well. He tells them a funny story about Alaska. He asks them about the farm. He tells them that he looked for work at the diner and the lumber yard and neither of them would give him the time of day.
“Where,” Donna asks him – she’s very practical – “were you going to live if they’d hired you?”
Preacher shrugs. “Something would have come up,” he says. “It always does.”
“And why?” Ellen said, “why would you suddenly decide to look for work in Barlow, Georgia, of all the godforsaken places?”
He shrugs again. “When you have absolutely no reason to be anywhere in particular, it’s easy to act on the vaguest of impulses,” he said. “I lived in a town called Barlow once, and liked it.”
That would have been Barlow, Texas, where he lived for about six months when he was a kid. In case you’re keeping score at home.
So I’m going to reintroduce all my own prejudices and angles and agendas into this part of the story. Or at least put them out in the open for awhile.
In the spring of 1992 a man from Michigan, driving a blue Porsche, picks up a hitchhiker on a winding highway in Arkansas. The hitchhiker is Haywood, who had quit the job in New Mexico for ill-defined reasons and meandered his way eastward. In Texas he was hit by a bottle thrown out of a passing pickup and spent the day in a hospital, having glass picked out of his thigh and O-Neg blood pumped into him. Otherwise nothing too eventful happened – at least nothing that would, years later, cause anyone to get in touch with Preacher or the Worshipers once he became better known.
If the story of how the Michigan man in the midnight-metallic 944 came to be driving from Arkansas to Georgia was at all interesting, I would have just put his long and meandering interview in here instead of this summary.
At any rate, the guy – his name is Gary Ross, which is unimportant for our purposes – the guy picks up Preacher and they go hurtling through the heart of the Confederacy together, paralleling Sherman’s March and talking about music, food, and everything else. Ross recalled later that he, Gary, had done most of the talking. That there was something about Preacher which somehow drew things out of you, in a friendly, unhurried way. “It was like,” he said to me, “having a… a personal confessor. Not just kneeling in a booth but sitting there with someone who you could really unburden to, someone who understood where you were coming from and was able to offer insight and empathy, not penance.”
Ross is now a Worshiper. He’s probably not bullshitting about giving Haywood a ride – apparently he found Preacher by googling his name, years later, and sending him a “hey remember me” email. Preacher responded, and confirmed that Gary Ross did indeed give him a ride that spring day a decade ago.
Ross told me he became a Worshiper after reconnecting with Preacher. “I read some of the articles about him. To tell you the truth, there wasn’t anything particularly holy about him when I met him; he was just a good-natured kid. And a good listener. But I started reading up on it, and got the book, and then my oldest came home from college with one of those circle pendants…”
OK, so that’s another one in Preacher’s win column.
Anyhow they’re just outside the town of Barlow, Georgia, when Ross stops to get gas before heading into Athens. And Preacher gets out to stretch his legs, and he tells Gary, hey, it’s a beautiful Spring day, thanks for the ride, but I’m going to walk for awhile.
Ross tries to talk him out of it, but Haywood is insistent, and so they part company. Just a few hours out of Gary Ross’s life, that somehow stuck with him for years to come.
Preacher, then, starts walking down a road heading toward the tiny farming village. And he passes a flatbed truck on the road, and sees two women changing the front tire. He offers to help. They glare at him and tell him no. He shrugs and ambles on his merry way. Halfway into town the truck passes him.
He saunters into the town center. Inquires about a “Help Wanted” sign at the lumberyard; they don’t want him, it seems. Inquires about a “Help Wanted” sign at the diner; they don’t want him either. “It was,” he recalled later, “about the unfriendliest town I’ve ever been in.” He begins to regret whatever impulse, instinct, or intuition caused him to walk off the highway into Barlow. He wonders how long it will take him to hike all the way into Athens, a good 20 miles down the road. He knows that he always does well in college towns.
His footsteps lead him pass the Southern States, where he sees the same flatbed backed up to the loading dock and the two women loading sacks of feed and seed. There are three rather seedy-looking men standing nearby, doing nothing to help. Preacher assumes that their offers of assistance were treated the way his was. But as he draws near he overhears the comments made by the men; their exact wording is lost to posterity, but they are sufficiently vile that even Preacher – Mr. Live-And-Let-Live – is moved to exhibit his personal brand of low-key chivalry.
He starts helping the women load the truck. One of them hisses at him that they don’t need his help. He says, “clearly,” but continues working. The men aim a few comments at him, to the effect of (a) the women are lesbians, (b) lesbians and straight men cannot interact, therefore (c) he must be a homosexual himself. Haywood is not moved by this redneck syllogism.
As Preacher and one of the women – a short blonde woman – lash the stakes in place on the sides of the truck bed, the other woman – a tall, well-built brunette – argues with the manager of the Southern States, who comes out to tell them that they’ve blocked the loading dock for too long. The brunette points out that the seed was supposed to have been delivered, and over a week ago, and that they have nearly missed sowing season as a result of their delivery problems. The Southern States manager is unsympathetic.
Referring to them by their hair color is demeaning, isn’t it? Even though at the time, Preacher didn’t know their names. The brunette’s name is Cassie Shields, and the blonde’s name is Anna Peppersack.
Finally Preacher and Anna finish with the siderails. He asks for a ride back to the highway, and Anna nods once, curtly. Cassie signs for the seed and walks off the loading dock to get in the truck. Anna sits in the passenger seat. Preacher stays on the bed.
And one of the men put his hand on the door of the truck, and refuses to let Cassie in.
Cassie tells him to move. He refuses. She tells him to move again. He makes a vulgar suggestion. The other two men giggle. Preacher suspects he’s about to see some testosterone-fueled stupidity and stands up, to see if it’s too late to do that hand-on-the-shoulder, come-talk-to-me thing that he does so well. But before he can get off the truck Shields has the man’s wrist in a vise grip twisted behind his back and he’s trying not to scream. She marches him a few steps away from the truck and then pushes him away and turns to walk back to the cab. The man lunges toward her and she steps to the side, grabs the back of his head, and slams his face into the door of the truck as she whips it open. Then she jumps in and starts the engine, looks out the window at the man with the bloody nose sitting in the parking lot, and leaves.
Preacher hears a hearty “fuck you, bitch,” as they leave. He makes eye contact with the man but manages to avoid laughing. Barely.
A few miles outside of town – near where they had stopped to fix the flat – Cassie pulls the truck off the road with a cloud of gravel and gets out of the truck, screaming, cursing, and stomping. She marches away from them, up the shoulder, yelling at no one in particular. Anna hops out of the truck and starts to go after her.
Leave her be, Preacher says from his perch on the pile of canvas sacks. Anna jumps. She’s forgotten he’s there. She looks up at him.
Leave her be, Preacher repeats. She’s got a lot of adrenaline right now after all that. Back there in the parking lot she wanted to kick three asses, at least, and only got to kick one, so now she’s got a lot of unused ass-kicking energy to burn off.
Anna starts to go after her anyway, then stops and thinks better of it.
Thanks, by the way, she says to Preacher.
Don’t mention it.
No, really. Sorry we were rude to you before. It’s just that… she shrugs, words failing her. But Haywood understands. Fifteen minutes in Barlow and he understands.
He starts to climb off the truck. I’ll just hoof it the rest of the way to the highway, he says.
No, stay, Anna says. The least we can do is get you something to eat. She looks at him. He looks skinny. He is skinny.
Please. The others might want to meet you, anyway. Plus those assholes from Southern States might decide to ride down the highway later on, and you don’t want to be alone if they find you.
I imagine, Preacher says, I’d want to have her there. He points with his chin toward Cassie, who is still kicking up clods of weeds on the shoulder.
Anna laughs. That’s Cassie, she says. She used to be in the Army. I’m Anna.
Preacher, Preacher says.
Peter? the girl says, wrinkling her brow.
No, Preacher. That’s my actual name. What can I say, I grew up in California.
After awhile Cassie sits down on the shoulder and tries to act like she’s not crying. Like she hasn’t worn herself out. And Preacher says, now go get her. And Anna does.
When they walk back awhile later Preacher is still lounging comfortably on the seed bags.
Thanks, Cassie says. Her face is red.
Thank you, Preacher tells her, for beating that guy up. Where were you in the fourth grade and one of his spiritual cousins was taking my lunch money?
Long Island, she says to him, smiling a little. Assuming we were in the fourth grade at the same time.
She is actually a year or so older than Preacher.
They drive back to the highway and then down the highway and then down another side road and then they turn into a rutted driveway that was probably gravel at one time. They bounce under some tree branches and cross a little creek and then ride through fields waiting to be planted and fields holding sheep. Around a bend and through another stand of trees and there is a run-down and empty goat-shed on the right hand side of the driveway as the lane curves up to the big barn just pas that. A large white farmhouse sits on a pretty green lawn farther up the hill, on the left.
As the truck pulls in two other women come out of the barn. Their names are Ellen Smith and Donna Maith. And in the house is a woman named Karen Poole.
Cassie backs the truck into the barn and Preacher notices that the other women are looking at him with skepticism. Mixed with hostility.
“Was white boy on the list?” Donna asks Anna.
“It’s a long story,” Anna says.
Preacher helps them unload the truck. There are introductions all around. Anna tells them what happened. Karen has wandered down by this time; she is a very small, almost elfin woman. They are all in their mid- to late-twenties.
And a dog trots up, a big mutt with a lot of German Shepherd in him. He sniffs Preacher for a moment, and then head-butts the man’s hand. Haywood crouches and strokes the dog’s head good-naturedly, roughly. The dog wags his tail and sits down for more.
He doesn’t take to strangers, Ellen observes.
And I’m pretty strange, Haywood concedes.
The name of the place is Sappho Farms. Of course.
Karen Poole inherited the entire spread from her grandparents in her last year of law school at Emory. Donna was an undergrad there. Ellen was her significant other, an unhappy school-teacher who’d graduated with a history degree from University of Georgia a year earlier. In those days Karen had a lover named Elizabeth, a barista and aspiring poet. Cassie had gotten kicked out of the Army for the reason you would guess she was kicked out of the Army, went to Georgia Tech and majored in engineering, and met Anna – who had decided, a semester shy of graduating, that she didn’t want to be a software engineer.
Anyhow they pooled their money, fixed up the place, and tried to put their political and spiritual and cultural ideals to work in their own six-person agricultural cooperative. A year later Elizabeth left; farming life wasn’t for her. All of them found it much harder than they’d expected. And a few months after that… a few months after that, Anna and Cassie came home with Preacher.
Most of this – except for the part about Elizabeth – was explained to Preacher while they washed up and prepared for lunch. While the others prepared for lunch; they had Karen take him aside and pump him for information, mostly because there wasn’t room for six people in the kitchen at once.
Karen recalls that he was at once quite forthcoming and quite vague about what brought him to Barlow, Georgia. “He said he’d graduated from St. John’s a couple of years back, that he’d been knocking around the country looking for whatever it was he was supposed to do ever since,” she would recall later. “I remember thinking he was polite, articulate, and utterly indifferent to our little social experiment.”
They eat. Preacher entertains. He does that well. He tells them a funny story about Alaska. He asks them about the farm. He tells them that he looked for work at the diner and the lumber yard and neither of them would give him the time of day.
“Where,” Donna asks him – she’s very practical – “were you going to live if they’d hired you?”
Preacher shrugs. “Something would have come up,” he says. “It always does.”
“And why?” Ellen said, “why would you suddenly decide to look for work in Barlow, Georgia, of all the godforsaken places?”
He shrugs again. “When you have absolutely no reason to be anywhere in particular, it’s easy to act on the vaguest of impulses,” he said. “I lived in a town called Barlow once, and liked it.”
That would have been Barlow, Texas, where he lived for about six months when he was a kid. In case you’re keeping score at home.
Monday, April 11, 2005
Part Thirty One
Dalton Maynard said:
I got where I am by being a good judge of people. So when I say I offered Preacher a job – twice – it wasn’t because I was taken by his boyish charm. It was because I thought he could do the job I had in mind for him. In fact, I thought that he was one of the few people on Earth who could do it. And if he walked through that door right now I’d probably offer it to him again.
When my son Joey was a kid, about the only time we had together was Sunday mornings. I was busy building a company then. Hell, I still am, but you notice the time away more when your kids are little. But we had Sunday mornings together, and we would spend them watching old Westerns on the TV. So I guess that’s where he got it – the thing for cowboys, I mean. And he passed it on to his daughter Kelly. I remember when she was little – our first grandchild – she would come spend the night with us and she and I would spend Sundays watching Westerns, just like her dad and I used to.
Anyhow, that’s how I met Preacher. The summer Kelly graduated from high school she, Joey, and I spent two weeks at the Bar Nothing Ranch in Greenville, New Mexico. Playing cowboy with the rest of the rich folks. And Preacher was working there as a teacher and guide and cook and – toward the end of our stay, anyhow – a gunfighter.
In fact I remember the first time I ever laid eyes on him – not for him so much as for something funny Kelly said. We’d just gotten to the ranch and he was coming back from a trail drive, driving that wagon down the dusty track between the men’s and women’s bunkhouses. The three of us were heading to the mess hall and stepped aside for the trail riders and Preacher looked straight at us and nodded and touched the brim of his hat for Kelly. And – you know, Preacher was a good-looking guy, I guess, and so when the wagon went by Kelly turned to us and her eyes were wide and she had this big grin on her face and she said “I LIKE cowboys!”
Anyhow, we spent the next few days getting our cowboy diplomas, proving we could stay on a horse, proving that we could throw a lariat without choking ourselves – although I never once saw any of us dudes actually rope something. Takes more than four days to learn, I guess. And then it was our turn for the trail ride, four days and three nights, walking a hundred head of cattle around the ranch. There were two real cowboys, plus Preacher driving the chuck wagon, plus six dudes.
We didn’t know Preacher’s name, of course. We called him Chuck Wagon. Those guys did a good job of staying in character, and teaching you at the same time.
Anyhow, we rode around the ranch, and Preacher had coffee and biscuits for us each morning. And each night, a fire and some more filling grub at our camp site. He was qualitatively different from the other two real cowboys – more in the way he talked. You could tell he was an educated young man. Smart, and hardworking. I asked him, what’s a college boy doing out here making biscuits and gravy for a bunch of rich pretend cowboys? I figured he was working his way through school or something, but he told me he had graduated and was still trying to figure out where his niche was. He didn’t mind hard work, his brain was always engaged, and he knew how to keep his mouth shut and his eyes open. A rare combination in a college graduate.
So we all got to like Chuck Wagon on the ride, and I remember telling Joey that I’d take five Chuck Wagons over the last fifteen MBAs we’d hired at IM.
Anyhow, we survived the trail ride and made it back to the ranch. We still had a few days left there, but we’d book rooms at the Desert Rose in Greenville itself. Running water. Better food than the trail. From the outside the town, like the ranch, was 1885, but there were some modern comforts tucked away in the corners.
And Preacher was there in town. He did three trails rides in 21 days, and then had a week “off” – which wasn’t really off at all, but he got to sleep in a bed instead of in a wagon. In his off week he played a gambler in the Lodestar Saloon. Which is where I spent most of that remaining time, while my son and granddaughter learned how to churn butter and refill cartridges and work in a livery stable.
They let you gamble with this special scrip, which looked like 1885 paper money. I don’t know how it was legal, but apparently it was. Maybe one of the Greens was part Indian.
In town every other day there was a staged showdown in the middle of the town. A hired gun versus the aging sheriff. The latter was Big Pete, who owned the place. They told me that he got to be the sheriff because at 60 he was still the fastest draw on the ranch. Seems there was a standing bet, in fact – any staffer could put his week’s wages up against the 1885 gold piece that Pete Green kept in his hatband. Outdraw him two out of three, and you got the gold piece and his job as sheriff. But if he outdrew you, you worked for free for the next week.
His son, Little Pete, told me that he outdrew his dad once, but that nobody else had even taken one out of three, let alone two. I believed it.
Anyhow, over a couple days of poker I got to know Chuck Wagon better. Enough to know that his real name was Preacher Haywood, that he had a degree from some obscure East-Coast liberal arts college, and that he was a pretty unique guy. I ended up doing a lot more talking than I usually do. He was very good at that, at putting you at ease and, I don’t know, just sort of soaking things up. A listening sponge. And when he did speak up, it wasn’t just noises. He understood what I was talking about and got right to the heart of problems.
So I had already decided to offer him a spot in our executive trainee program. I knew he could more than hold his own against those business-school boys.
But before I could bring it up – the day before we left – we got word that someone was going to challenge Big Pete for the sheriff’s spot. All the workers were talking about it. We went over to the firing range and sure enough, there was Preacher with a six-gun on his hip, standing and waiting quietly.
He didn’t act like someone who had a week’s salary resting on a bet that nobody had ever won before. Didn’t act like someone who was in front of a pretty big crowd of his co-workers and a bunch of tourists. He stood there like he was waiting for a bus. Big Pete wasn’t exactly jumpy, either, but Haywood had icewater in his veins.
The way they did these things was pretty clever. They put two coffee cans up on fence posts. The duelists stood about a dozen feet away. When the judge said “draw” they both shot at their coffee cans. First can off the post, wins.
Little Pete was the judge.
The first round Preacher’s can jumped a half-second before Big Pete’s, and that got a big reaction from the crowd. Then they drew a second time and Pete won, and I could tell that the older man had held back a little that first round just to see what the kid was bringing. I remember thinking that Haywood had misjudged his opponent, had thought that he had been seeing Pete’s “A” Game all along.
Then they drew the third time and Preacher beat him clean.
There was actually a moment of silence as the staff tried to drink in what they’d seen. The guests didn’t know what a big deal it was, so we were cheering loudly right away, while the staff mostly stared in disbelief.
And I realized that Preacher had held back, too.
That night I offered Preacher the spot. I told him I didn’t know how much he was making as a cook, but I would double it if he came to work for Interglobal Materials.
Preacher knew who I was, and what IM was about. My old man died in 1958 when I was a year shy of graduating from the University of Chicago. I quit school and came home to take over his bankrupt scrap-iron company, and over the next 20 years I’d turned it into a multinational worth billions, mostly by making high-end, high-quality synthetic composites out of recycled metal and plastic. People paid me to haul away their trash, and then paid me again to get their trash back in a new form. God bless America. Anyhow, he knew about the company. I told him, we are getting bigger and richer every year, and there is nothing but potential for you at IM.
And he told me he was flattered, but that he couldn’t take it. He said, it’s very tempting – it sounds like interesting work – but I could only do it if I could commit 100%, and I’m not ready for that yet.
Joey and I tried to talk him out of it, but he wouldn’t be persuaded. What the hell. If he’d taken that job… I mean, who the hell knows, but I could see him being COO by now. No MBA, no engineering degree – I had a million of those. Preacher could learn what they knew without learning to think like them. That’s what I was looking for.
Anyhow – should I mention the second time? OK, we’ll do that later.
I got where I am by being a good judge of people. So when I say I offered Preacher a job – twice – it wasn’t because I was taken by his boyish charm. It was because I thought he could do the job I had in mind for him. In fact, I thought that he was one of the few people on Earth who could do it. And if he walked through that door right now I’d probably offer it to him again.
When my son Joey was a kid, about the only time we had together was Sunday mornings. I was busy building a company then. Hell, I still am, but you notice the time away more when your kids are little. But we had Sunday mornings together, and we would spend them watching old Westerns on the TV. So I guess that’s where he got it – the thing for cowboys, I mean. And he passed it on to his daughter Kelly. I remember when she was little – our first grandchild – she would come spend the night with us and she and I would spend Sundays watching Westerns, just like her dad and I used to.
Anyhow, that’s how I met Preacher. The summer Kelly graduated from high school she, Joey, and I spent two weeks at the Bar Nothing Ranch in Greenville, New Mexico. Playing cowboy with the rest of the rich folks. And Preacher was working there as a teacher and guide and cook and – toward the end of our stay, anyhow – a gunfighter.
In fact I remember the first time I ever laid eyes on him – not for him so much as for something funny Kelly said. We’d just gotten to the ranch and he was coming back from a trail drive, driving that wagon down the dusty track between the men’s and women’s bunkhouses. The three of us were heading to the mess hall and stepped aside for the trail riders and Preacher looked straight at us and nodded and touched the brim of his hat for Kelly. And – you know, Preacher was a good-looking guy, I guess, and so when the wagon went by Kelly turned to us and her eyes were wide and she had this big grin on her face and she said “I LIKE cowboys!”
Anyhow, we spent the next few days getting our cowboy diplomas, proving we could stay on a horse, proving that we could throw a lariat without choking ourselves – although I never once saw any of us dudes actually rope something. Takes more than four days to learn, I guess. And then it was our turn for the trail ride, four days and three nights, walking a hundred head of cattle around the ranch. There were two real cowboys, plus Preacher driving the chuck wagon, plus six dudes.
We didn’t know Preacher’s name, of course. We called him Chuck Wagon. Those guys did a good job of staying in character, and teaching you at the same time.
Anyhow, we rode around the ranch, and Preacher had coffee and biscuits for us each morning. And each night, a fire and some more filling grub at our camp site. He was qualitatively different from the other two real cowboys – more in the way he talked. You could tell he was an educated young man. Smart, and hardworking. I asked him, what’s a college boy doing out here making biscuits and gravy for a bunch of rich pretend cowboys? I figured he was working his way through school or something, but he told me he had graduated and was still trying to figure out where his niche was. He didn’t mind hard work, his brain was always engaged, and he knew how to keep his mouth shut and his eyes open. A rare combination in a college graduate.
So we all got to like Chuck Wagon on the ride, and I remember telling Joey that I’d take five Chuck Wagons over the last fifteen MBAs we’d hired at IM.
Anyhow, we survived the trail ride and made it back to the ranch. We still had a few days left there, but we’d book rooms at the Desert Rose in Greenville itself. Running water. Better food than the trail. From the outside the town, like the ranch, was 1885, but there were some modern comforts tucked away in the corners.
And Preacher was there in town. He did three trails rides in 21 days, and then had a week “off” – which wasn’t really off at all, but he got to sleep in a bed instead of in a wagon. In his off week he played a gambler in the Lodestar Saloon. Which is where I spent most of that remaining time, while my son and granddaughter learned how to churn butter and refill cartridges and work in a livery stable.
They let you gamble with this special scrip, which looked like 1885 paper money. I don’t know how it was legal, but apparently it was. Maybe one of the Greens was part Indian.
In town every other day there was a staged showdown in the middle of the town. A hired gun versus the aging sheriff. The latter was Big Pete, who owned the place. They told me that he got to be the sheriff because at 60 he was still the fastest draw on the ranch. Seems there was a standing bet, in fact – any staffer could put his week’s wages up against the 1885 gold piece that Pete Green kept in his hatband. Outdraw him two out of three, and you got the gold piece and his job as sheriff. But if he outdrew you, you worked for free for the next week.
His son, Little Pete, told me that he outdrew his dad once, but that nobody else had even taken one out of three, let alone two. I believed it.
Anyhow, over a couple days of poker I got to know Chuck Wagon better. Enough to know that his real name was Preacher Haywood, that he had a degree from some obscure East-Coast liberal arts college, and that he was a pretty unique guy. I ended up doing a lot more talking than I usually do. He was very good at that, at putting you at ease and, I don’t know, just sort of soaking things up. A listening sponge. And when he did speak up, it wasn’t just noises. He understood what I was talking about and got right to the heart of problems.
So I had already decided to offer him a spot in our executive trainee program. I knew he could more than hold his own against those business-school boys.
But before I could bring it up – the day before we left – we got word that someone was going to challenge Big Pete for the sheriff’s spot. All the workers were talking about it. We went over to the firing range and sure enough, there was Preacher with a six-gun on his hip, standing and waiting quietly.
He didn’t act like someone who had a week’s salary resting on a bet that nobody had ever won before. Didn’t act like someone who was in front of a pretty big crowd of his co-workers and a bunch of tourists. He stood there like he was waiting for a bus. Big Pete wasn’t exactly jumpy, either, but Haywood had icewater in his veins.
The way they did these things was pretty clever. They put two coffee cans up on fence posts. The duelists stood about a dozen feet away. When the judge said “draw” they both shot at their coffee cans. First can off the post, wins.
Little Pete was the judge.
The first round Preacher’s can jumped a half-second before Big Pete’s, and that got a big reaction from the crowd. Then they drew a second time and Pete won, and I could tell that the older man had held back a little that first round just to see what the kid was bringing. I remember thinking that Haywood had misjudged his opponent, had thought that he had been seeing Pete’s “A” Game all along.
Then they drew the third time and Preacher beat him clean.
There was actually a moment of silence as the staff tried to drink in what they’d seen. The guests didn’t know what a big deal it was, so we were cheering loudly right away, while the staff mostly stared in disbelief.
And I realized that Preacher had held back, too.
That night I offered Preacher the spot. I told him I didn’t know how much he was making as a cook, but I would double it if he came to work for Interglobal Materials.
Preacher knew who I was, and what IM was about. My old man died in 1958 when I was a year shy of graduating from the University of Chicago. I quit school and came home to take over his bankrupt scrap-iron company, and over the next 20 years I’d turned it into a multinational worth billions, mostly by making high-end, high-quality synthetic composites out of recycled metal and plastic. People paid me to haul away their trash, and then paid me again to get their trash back in a new form. God bless America. Anyhow, he knew about the company. I told him, we are getting bigger and richer every year, and there is nothing but potential for you at IM.
And he told me he was flattered, but that he couldn’t take it. He said, it’s very tempting – it sounds like interesting work – but I could only do it if I could commit 100%, and I’m not ready for that yet.
Joey and I tried to talk him out of it, but he wouldn’t be persuaded. What the hell. If he’d taken that job… I mean, who the hell knows, but I could see him being COO by now. No MBA, no engineering degree – I had a million of those. Preacher could learn what they knew without learning to think like them. That’s what I was looking for.
Anyhow – should I mention the second time? OK, we’ll do that later.
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Part Thirty One
Dalton Maynard said:
I got where I am by being a good judge of people. So when I say I offered Preacher a job – twice – it wasn’t because I was taken by his boyish charm. It was because I thought he could do the job I had in mind for him. In fact, I thought that he was one of the few people on Earth who could do it. And if he walked through that door right now I’d probably offer it to him again.
When my son Joey was a kid, about the only time we had together was Sunday mornings. I was busy building a company then. Hell, I still am, but you notice the time away more when your kids are little. But we had Sunday mornings together, and we would spend them watching old Westerns on the TV. So I guess that’s where he got it – the thing for cowboys, I mean. And he passed it on to his daughter Kelly. I remember when she was little – our first grandchild – she would come spend the night with us and she and I would spend Sundays watching Westerns, just like her dad and I used to.
Anyhow, that’s how I met Preacher. The summer Kelly graduated from high school she, Joey, and I spent two weeks at the Bar Nothing Ranch in Greenville, New Mexico. Playing cowboy with the rest of the rich folks. And Preacher was working there as a teacher and guide and cook and – toward the end of our stay, anyhow – a gunfighter.
In fact I remember the first time I ever laid eyes on him – not for him so much as for something Kelly said. We’d just gotten to the ranch and he was coming back from a trail drive, driving that wagon down the dusty track between the men’s and women’s bunkhouses. The three of us were heading to the mess hall and stepped aside for the trail riders and Preacher looked straight at us and nodded and touched the brim of his hat for Kelly. And – you know, Preacher was a good-looking guy, I guess, and so when the wagon went by Kelly turned to us and her eyes were wide and she had this big grin on her face and she said “I LIKE cowboys!”
Anyhow, we spent the next few days getting our cowboy diplomas, proving we could stay on a horse, proving that we could throw a lariat without choking ourselves – although I never once saw any of us dudes actually rope something. Takes more than four days to learn, I guess. And then it was our turn for the trail ride, four days and three nights, walking a hundred head of cattle around the ranch. There were two real cowboys, plus Preacher driving the chuck wagon, plus six guests.
We didn’t know Preacher’s name, of course. We called him Chuck Wagon. Those guys did a good job of staying in character, and teaching you at the same time.
Anyhow, we rode around the ranch, and Preacher had coffee and biscuits for us each morning. And each night, a fire and some more filling grub at our camp site. He was qualitatively different from the other two real cowboys – more in the way he talked. You could tell he was an educated young man. Smart, and hardworking. I asked him, what’s a college boy doing out here making biscuits and gravy for a bunch of rich pretend cowboys? I figured he was working his way through school or something, but he told me he had graduated and was still trying to figure out where his niche was. He didn’t mind hard work, his brain was always engaged, and he knew how to keep his mouth shut and his eyes open. A rare combination in a college graduate.
So we all got to like Chuck Wagon on the ride, and I remember telling Joey that I’d take five Chuck Wagons over the last fifteen MBAs we’d hired at IM.
Anyhow, we survived the trail ride and made it back to the ranch. We still had a few days left there, but we’d book rooms at the Desert Rose in Greenville itself. Running water. Better food than the trail. From the outside the town, like the ranch, was 1885, but there were some modern comforts tucked away in the corners.
And Preacher was there in town. He did three trails rides in 21 days, and then had a week “off” – which wasn’t really off at all, but he got to sleep in a bed instead of in a wagon. In his off week he played a gambler in the Lodestar Saloon. Which is where I spent most of that remaining time, while my son and granddaughter learned how to churn butter and refill cartridges and work in a livery stable.
They let you gamble with this special scrip, which looked like 1885 paper money. I don’t know how it was legal, but apparently it was. Maybe one of the Greens was part Indian.
In town every other day there was a staged showdown in the middle of the town. A hired gun versus the aging sheriff. The latter was Big Pete, who owned the place. They told me that he got to be the sheriff because at 60 he was still the fastest draw on the ranch. Seems there was a standing bet, in fact – any staffer could put his week’s wages up against the 1885 gold piece that Pete Green kept in his hatband. Outdraw him two out of three, and you got the gold piece and his job as sheriff. But if he outdrew you, you worked for free for the next week.
His son, Little Pete, told me that he outdrew his dad once, but that nobody else had even taken one out of three, let alone two. I believed it.
Anyhow, over a couple days of poker I got to know Chuck Wagon better. Enough to know that his real name was Preacher Haywood, that he had a degree from some obscure East-Coast liberal arts college, and that he was a pretty unique fellow. I ended up doing a lot more talking than I usually do. He was very good at that, at putting you at ease and, I don’t know, just sort of soaking things up. A listening sponge. And when he did speak up, it wasn’t just noises. He understood what I was talking about and got right to the heart of problems.
So I had already decided to offer him a spot in our executive trainee program. I knew he could more than hold his own against those business-school boys.
But before I could bring it up – the day before we left – we got word that someone was going to challenge Big Pete for the sheriff’s spot. All the workers were talking about it. We went over to the firing range and sure enough, there was Preacher with a six-gun on his hip, standing and waiting quietly.
He didn’t act like someone who had a week’s salary resting on a bet that nobody had ever won before. Didn’t act like someone who was in front of a pretty big crowd of his co-workers and a bunch of tourists. He stood there like he was waiting for a bus. Big Pete wasn’t exactly jumpy, either, but Haywood had icewater in his veins.
The way they did these things was pretty clever. They put two coffee cans up on fence posts. The duelists stood about a dozen feet away. When the judge said “draw” they both shot at their coffee cans. First can off the post won.
Little Pete was the judge.
The first round Preacher’s can jumped a half-second before Big Pete’s, and that got a big reaction from the crowd. Then they drew a second time and Pete won, and I could tell that the older man had held back a little that first round just to see what the kid was bringing. I remember thinking that Haywood had misjudged his opponent, had thought that he had been seeing Pete’s “A” game all along.
Then they drew the third time and Preacher beat him clean.
There was actually a moment of silence as the staff tried to drink in what they’d seen. The guests didn’t know what a big deal it was, so we were cheering loudly right away, while the staff mostly stared in disbelief.
And I realized that Preacher had held back, too.
That night I offered Preacher the spot. I told him I didn’t know how much he was making as a cook, but I would double it if he came to work for Interglobal Materials.
Preacher knew who I was, and what IM was about. My old man died in 1958 when I was a year shy of graduating from the University of Chicago. I quit school and came home to take over his bankrupt scrap-iron company, and over the next 20 years I’d turned it into a multinational worth billions, mostly by making high-end, high-quality synthetic composites out of recycled metal and plastic. People paid me to haul away their trash, and then paid me again to get their trash back in a new form. God bless America. Anyhow, he knew about the company. I told him, we are getting bigger and richer every year, and there is nothing but potential for you at IM.
And he told me he was flattered, but that he couldn’t take it. He said, it’s very tempting – it sounds like interesting work – but I could only do it if I could commit 100%, and I’m not ready for that yet. He made it clear that he understood how important the company was to me, how -- how personal it was for me to offer him this job, and said that all of his jobs so far had just been play, and that he respected me and what I'd accomplished too much to come and just play at Interglobal.
Joey and I tried to talk him out of it, but he wouldn’t be persuaded. What the hell. If he’d taken that job… I mean, who the hell knows, but I could see him being COO by now. No MBA, no engineering degree – I had a million of those. Preacher could learn what they knew without learning to think like them. That’s what I was looking for.
Anyhow – should I mention the second time? OK, we’ll do that later.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)