“And them three boiler heads you could poke a hole through with a sody straw,” Mr Harker said. “When I seen the gauge on the first boiler I never believed I would live to reach the injector.
“So when I finally got it into Turl’s head that that 100 on that dial meant where Turl wouldn’t only lose his job, he would lose it so good wouldn’t nobody never find the job nor him again neither, I finally got settled down enough to inquire where them safety-valves had went to.
“ ‘Mr Snopes took um off,’ he says.
“ ‘What in hell for?’
“ ‘I dont know. I just telling you what Tom Tom told me. He say Mr Snopes say the shut-off float in the water tank aint heavy enough. Say that tank start leaking some day, so he going to fasten them three safety-valves on the float and weight it heavier.’
“ ‘You mean,’ I says. That’s as far as I could get. ‘You mean—’
“ ‘That’s what Tom Tom say. I dont know nothing about it.’
“Anyhow they was gone; whether they was in the water tank or not, was too late to find out now. Until then, me and Turl had been taking it pretty easy after the load went off and things got kind of quiet. But you can bet we never dozed none that night. Me and him spent the whole of it time about on the coal pile where we could watch them three gauges all at once. And from midnight on, after the load went off, we never had enough steam in all them three boilers put together to run a peanut parcher. And even when I was home in bed, I couldn’t go to sleep. Time I shut my eyes I would begin to see a steam gauge about the size of a washtub, with a red needle big as a coal scoop moving up toward a hundred pounds, and I would wake myself up hollering and sweating.
“So come daylight enough to see; and I never sent Turl neither: I clumb up there myself and looked at that float. And there wasn’t no safety-valves weighting it neither and maybe he hadn’t aimed for them to be fastened to it where the first feller that looked in could a reached them. And even if that tank is forty-two foot deep I still could a opened the cock and dreened it. Only I just work there, Mr Snopes was the superintendent, and it was the day shift now and Tom Tom could answer whatever questions Joe Buffaloe would want to know in case he happened in and seen them thousand-pound screw plugs where safety-valves was supposed to been.
“So I went on home and that next night I couldn’t hardly get Turl to run them gauge needles up high enough to turn the low-pressure piston, let alone move the dynamos; and the next night, and the next one, until about ten days when the express delivered a box; Tom Tom had waited and me and him opened the box (It was marked C.O.D. in big black paint but the tag itself had been wrenched off and gone temporarily. ‘I know where he throwed it,’ Tom Tom said.) and taken them screw plugs out of the vents and put the three new safety-valves back on; and sho enough Tom Tom did have the crumpled-up tag: Mister Flem Snopes Power-plant Jefferson Miss C.O.D. twenty-three dollars and eighty-one cents.”
And now there was some of it which Mr Harker himself didn’t know until Uncle Gavin told him after Tom Tom told Uncle Gavin: how one afternoon Tom Tom was smoking his pipe on the coal pile when Mr Snopes came in carrying in his hand what Tom Tom thought at first was a number three mule shoe until Mr Snopes took it into a corner behind the boilers where a pile of discarded fittings — valves, rods, bolts and such — had been accumulating probably since the first light was turned on in Jefferson; and, kneeling (Mr Snopes), tested every piece one by one into two separate piles in the gangway behind him. Then Tom Tom watched him test with the magnet every loose piece of metal in the whole boiler room, sorting the mere iron from the brass. Then Snopes ordered Tom Tom to gather up the separated brass and bring it to the office.
Tom Tom gathered the brass into a box. Snopes was waiting in the office, chewing tobacco. Tom Tom said he never stopped chewing even to spit. “How do you and Turl get along?” he said.
“I tend to my business,” Tom Tom said. “What Turl does with his aint none of mine.”
“That aint what Turl thinks,” Mr Snopes said. “He wants me to give him your day shift. He claims he’s tired of firing at night.”
“Let him fire as long as I is, and he can have it,” Tom Tom said.
“Turl dont aim to wait that long,” Mr Snopes said. Then he told Tom Tom: how Turl was planning to steal iron from the plant and lay it on Tom Tom and get him fired. That’s right. That’s what Tom Tom told Uncle Gavin Mr Snopes called it: iron. Maybe Mr Snopes hadn’t heard of a magnet himself until just yesterday and so he thought that Tom Tom had never heard of one and so didn’t know what he was doing. I mean, not of magnets nor brass either and couldn’t tell brass from iron. Or maybe he just thought that Tom Tom, being a Negro, wouldn’t care. Or maybe that, being a Negro, whether he knew or not or cared or not, he wouldn’t have any part of what a white man was mixed up in. Only we had to imagine this part of it of course. Not that it was hard to do: Tom Tom standing there about the size and shape and color (disposition too) of a Black Angus bull, looking down at the white man. Turl on the contrary was the color of a saddle and even with a scoop full of coal he barely touched a hundred and fifty pounds. “That’s what he’s up to,” Mr Snopes said. “So I want you to take this stuff out to your house and hide it and dont breathe a word to nobody. And soon as I get enough evidence on Turl, I’m going to fire him.”
“I knows a better way than that,” Tom Tom said.
“What way?” Snopes said. Then he said: “No no, that wont do. You have any trouble with Turl and I’ll fire you both. You do like I say. Unless you are tired of your job and want Turl to have it. Are you?”
“Aint no man complained about my pressure yet,” Tom Tom said.
“Then you do like I tell you,” Snopes said. “You take that stuff home with you tonight. Dont let nobody see you, even your wife. And if you dont want to do it, just say so. I reckon I can find somebody that will.”
So Tom Tom did. And each time the pile of discarded fittings accumulated again, he would watch Snopes test out another batch of brass with his magnet for Tom Tom to take home and hide. Because Tom Tom had been firing boilers for forty years now, ever since he became a man, and these three for the twenty they had been there, since it was he who built the first fires beneath them.
At first he had fired one boiler and he had got five dollars a month for it. Now he had the three and he got sixty dollars a month, and now he was sixty and he owned his little cabin and a little piece of corn land and a mule and wagon to ride to church in twice each Sunday, with a gold watch and the young wife which was the last new young wife he would probably have too.
Though all Mr Harker knew at this time was that the junked metal would accumulate slowly in the corner behind the boilers, then suddenly disappear overnight; now it became his nightly joke to enter the plant with his busy bustling air and say to Turl: “Well, I notice that-ere little engine is still running.
There’s a right smart of brass in them bushings and wrist-pins, but I reckon they’re moving too fast to hold that magnet against. But I reckon we’re lucky, at that. I reckon he’d sell them boilers too if he knowed any way you and Tom Tom could keep up steam without them.”
Though he — Mr Harker — did tell what came next, which was at the first of the year, when the town was audited: “They come down here, two of them in spectacles. They went over the books and poked around ever where, counting ever thing in sight and writing it down. Then they went back to the office and they was still there at six oclock when I come on.
It seems there was something a little out; it seems there was some old brass fittings wrote down in the books, except that that brass seemed to be missing or something. It was on the books all right, and the new valves and truck that had replaced it was there.
But be durn if they could find a one of them old fittings except one busted bib that had done got mislaid beyond
