He was looking at me with that direct fixed stare. I just nodded.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Mr. Maddox had said he didn’t need me working for Doris the next couple of days, but he wanted Liz to come back, so the following morning, I rode my Schwinn over to the Wyatts’ to see if Joe was up to a little fruit scavenging.
Joe was finishing breakfast. Aunt Al made me a plate, too—gravy over biscuits and eggs fried in bacon fat until they were crispy as french fries. She poured Joe a cup of coffee, which he drank black, and asked if I wanted some.
“Ugh,” I said. “Kids don’t drink coffee.”
“ ’Round here they do,” Joe said.
Aunt Al gave me a cup of milk, then added a little coffee and two heaping teaspoons of sugar. “Try this,” she said.
I took a sip. The milk and sugar cut the bitterness of the coffee, making it like a soda-fountain drink with a tiny kick.
“Did you all ever find yourselves any work?” Aunt Al asked.
“Sure did,” I said. “Your boss at the mill, Mr. Maddox, he’s our boss, too, now. He hired me and Liz to work around his house.”
“Is that a fact?” Aunt Al set down her coffee. “I’m not too sure how I feel about that. Jerry Maddox can ride people hard. Sure does at the mill, where they all hate him. My Ruthie used to work for that family, but she just finally couldn’t take it anymore. And she gets along with everyone.”
“Mr. Maddox was the only one who offered me and Liz a job,” I said. “He hasn’t been too hard on us, but he does boss his wife around something awful.”
“That man would boss the calf out of the cow. Your Uncle Tinsley don’t mind you working for him?”
“We haven’t exactly told Uncle Tinsley,” I said, and took a glug of my milk-with-coffee. “He didn’t want us to get jobs. We’re Holladays, he said, and Holladays don’t work for other people. But we need the money.”
“I hear you there,” she said. “But you ought to know about the history between Mr. Maddox and your uncle.”
Mr. Maddox, Aunt Al explained, was one of the men the new mill owners from Chicago had brought in to run the place. Uncle Tinsley had worked out an arrangement with the buyers to stay on as a consultant, seeing as how he knew the operations of the mill firsthand and had a history with the clients and the workers. But in no time, he and Mr. Maddox butted heads. Mr. Maddox’s job was running the shop floor, and the new owners had told him to do everything he could to cut costs and raise production. He followed people around with a stopwatch, pushing them to work faster and eliminate any unnecessary movements, to fold each pair of socks in two and a half seconds, not three, hollering at them for taking bathroom breaks and insisting they eat lunch at their workstations. He announced that, every month, he was going to fire the five slowest workers until he’d cut the number of employees by half.
It was at Mr. Maddox’s recommendation that the owners did away with the baseball team and the free hams at Christmas. He then got them to sell off the houses that the mill rented to the workers, buying up a lot of them himself on the cheap and raising the rent.
The mill had never been an easy place, Aunt Al said, but for the most part, all the workers got along. They felt they were in the same boat. But after Mr. Maddox showed up and started firing people, former friends turned on one another, even selling out or ratting on their coworkers so they could keep their jobs and feed their families.
Mr. Holladay insisted that a lot of Mr. Maddox’s changes were doing more harm than good, Aunt Al said. He felt that Mr. Maddox was making the workers more miserable, which was making them less motivated. That meant they’d take less pride in the product, and from time to time, they would even sabotage the machinery just to get a few minutes’ breather from the backbreaking pace. He and Mr. Maddox kept locking horns, arguing about the best way to run the mill. At one point they got into a shouting match on the shop floor. Mr. Holladay took his complaints to the new owners, but they sided with Mr. Maddox and forced Mr. Holladay out of the mill.
“The mill with his name on it,” Aunt Al said. “The mill his family had founded, owned, and operated for the better part of a century. After that, a lot of people around Byler started avoiding your uncle.”
“But he didn’t do anything wrong,” I said.
“True enough. But Mr. Maddox won the fight, and he was holding all the cards.”
“I guess that’s why Uncle Tinsley sort of keeps to himself.”
“He lost his parents and his wife and his mill all in the space of a few short years,” Aunt Al said. “The poor man’s just had too much taken from him.”