“Get a move on,” Caines bellowed, pointing a meaty finger at Taylor. “I want that piece a shit torn down by the end of the day.”
“What for?” Taylor asked in surprise, crawling out from under the conveyor belt.
“In case ya didn’t notice,” Caines said, “it got hit by lightning.
Night before last. It’s a mess and it’s gonna take you most of the day to take it down.”
“No, no.” Taylor rose to his feet, shaking his head. “That thing’s mostly brick and stone. Even for two men, that’s a couple days work.”
Taylor towered above his turnip-shaped manager. He wiped the oil from his hands with an old rag he had found jammed under the sorter’s fuse box. Covered in grease and what appeared to be dried blood, the rag was still cleaner than his hands.
“Where the hell is Scotty then?” Caines demanded.
“I’ve no idea,” said Taylor, patting the dust from his jeans.
“Fine,” Caines snorted, turning to Juan Reger, who had just punched in and was sliding his time card back in its metal slot. “You’re late!” he shouted across the warehouse floor.
“Like hell,” said Juan, angling his thumb at the clock. “It’s still a minute to eight. I haven’t even started yet.”
Caines turned back to Taylor. “Take the kid with ya. It’ll do him good to try some real work for a change, instead of tinkering with his toolbox all friggin day long.”
Taylor grinned once Caines had turned away. After a week of steady drizzle, the prospect of working in the sunshine where the flowers were beginning to bloom was a welcome reprieve from another monotonous day inside, packing boxes and loading trucks with a forklift.
Juan was not nearly as pleased. He kicked the steel support of the conveyor belt with his torn running shoe. “I wanted to help with the bottling today,” he muttered.
Taylor grinned at his young friend. The bottling room was where the young girls Juan’s age would be working today.
“You’ll have more fun with me,” said Taylor. “It’s demolition work.”
“There aren’t any girls out there,” Juan said. “Just bugs and weeds.”
Taylor grinned. “Girls just get you in trouble anyway. Trust me on that, okay?”
Juan was still sullen after they’d finished hooking the wagon to the small Kubota tractor. His interests were limited to fixing machinery and girls. More precisely, he enjoyed taking machinery apart and trying, with limited success, to put it back together again.
As far as the girls went, he enjoyed watching them and doing things to try to get their attention, but did not yet have the confidence to have a genuine conversation with them. At the prospect of doing anything else, he reacted with undisguised boredom or contempt.
While Juan maintained that he was eighteen years old, Taylor figured sixteen was closer to the truth. Juan had come to work at Tanglewood Vineyards when his parents had signed him out of school a year ago, just a few months before Taylor had arrived. With blonde hair, blue eyes, and a Spanish first name, Juan was a German Mennonite whose parents had moved to Canada from the drought-ridden region of Chihuahua, Mexico, three years ago. His first name was Johann, but because he spoke Spanish so well, the Mexican workers on the farm had always called him Juan. He had happily adopted his Spanish name as an act of defiance to his father, who was the mechanic at the Weber farm a few miles down the road, and whose name was Johann as well.
Taylor piled two long chains into the wagon as Juan dropped a sledgehammer beside them.
“Why do we have to waste our time tearing that stupid thing down for?” Juan asked. “No one uses it.”
“Well,” Taylor began as he looked for more tools to load. “I guess it got hit by lightning the other night, so now they want it taken down.”
“I don’t remember any lightning,” said Juan.
“It was probably after you went to bed. It was late. Sunday night.”
Taylor remembered the storm. It had been the violent climax to a week of daily showers, as cool western winds fought with a warm front coming up from Lake Erie. Before the warm front finally prevailed, the first thunderstorm and tornado watch of the year were announced. There were no actual tornados reported, but the wind and rain had been violent at times, waking Taylor throughout the night with long swells of thunder stretching out from the south until they finally faded towards the east around three in the morning. Ben had heard of a few lightning strikes and some toppled tree branches in Thamesville and Ridgetown, but he hadn’t heard of any damage here.
The pump-house lay at the end of a narrow gravel laneway that separated the vineyard from a few dozen old apple trees. It had been constructed at least sixty years ago, at a time when both sides of the lane had been used for tobacco and when a river could still be trusted as a healthy source of irrigation. In recent years it had been used only to store irrigation pipes and a few supplies that came in handy when workers were this far from the winery and the warehouse. The pump-house was situated in a remote corner of the vineyard, hidden behind the small apple orchard. There was no reason for any of the workers to come by this area so early in the season. If it had been hit by lightning, it was doubtful anyone would have known for a day or two, unless they had seen the flames that night.
“So why make us take it down if it’s wrecked already?” Juan complained. “Doesn’t make any sense. Just let nature take its course, and it’ll all fall down anyway.”
“I imagine they’ll plant some more vines there, or a couple more apple trees. Besides, if the building is structurally unsound, they’ll want to make sure it’s down before some school kids sneak inside and have it collapse on them.”
“School kids would have to be pretty stupid to go into a shack that’s half-burned down and falling apart,” Juan said.
“Well, school kids aren’t as smart as us,” said Taylor, without realizing he had winked.
They loaded a couple of crowbars and a rusty hatchet onto the wagon.
“Did you ever like school?” Juan asked. As sullen as he tried to be, he was not comfortable with silence unless he was busy repairing equipment.
Taylor considered the question. He had graduated from university twelve years ago. Memories of high school had seemed to grow more fuzzy, but much warmer with each passing year.
“It was fun,” he answered finally.
“It’s boring,” the teenager said with a shrug. “My mom used to make me go. But they’d kick me out. And then they’d pull my Dad into the office to tell him how bad I was. And I’d get some time off and I’d go to work, which was what I wanted anyway. I hated it there.”
“You’ll have to finish high school if you want to get to college, you know.”
“I don’t see what good that does either. You used to work here when you were my age. And then you went to university, right? And now you’re back. If school is so great, why are you here with me?
Right back where you started from.”
“You can’t gauge your life by what you think other people are doing,” Taylor said, staring at the youth with all the seriousness he could muster. “You’re good with machinery, you know. With a little education or an apprenticeship, you could get yourself a good job. There’s more to life than working for farm minimum wage, you know.”
“I like farms,” Juan replied. “It’s better than working in a factory.
Besides, I want to go back to Mexico one day and work on my own farm.”
“But with an education…”