The View from Castle Rock

effects-the gloom, the fine dust in the air, the idea of there being places like this all over the country, in every town and city. Places with their windows painted over. You passed them in a car or on the train and never gave a thought to what was going on inside. Something that took up the whole of people’s lives. A never-ending over-and-over attention-consuming life-consuming process.
    “Like a tomb in here,” my father said, as if he had picked up some of my thoughts.
    But he meant something different.
    “Compared to the daytime. The racket then, you can’t imagine it. They try to get them to wear earplugs, but they won’t do it.”
    “Why not?”
    “I don’t know. Too independent. They won’t wear the fire aprons either. See here. Here’s what they call the cupola.”
    This was an immense black pipe which did have a cupola on top. He showed me where they made the fire, and the ladles used to carry the molten metal and pour it into the molds. He showed me chunks of metal that were like grotesque stubby limbs, and told me that those were the shapes of the hollows in the castings. The air in the hollows, that is, made solid. He told me these things with a prolonged satisfaction in his voice, as if what he revealed gave him reliable pleasure.

    We turned a corner and came on two men working, stripped to their pants and undershirts.
    “Now here’s a couple of good hard working fellows,” my father said. “You know Ferg? You know Geordie?”
    I did know them, or at least I knew who they were. Geordie Hall delivered bread, but had to work in the Foundry at night to make extra money, because he had so many children. There was a joke that his wife made him work to keep him away from her. Ferg was a younger man you saw around town. He couldn’t get girls because he had a wen on his face.
    “She’s seeing how us working fellows live,” my father said, with a note of humorous apology. Apologizing to them for me, for me to them-light apologies all round. This was his style.
    Working carefully together, using long, strong hooks, the two men lifted a heavy casting out of a box of sand.
    “That’s plenty hot,” my father said. “It was cast today. Now they have to work the sand around and get it ready for the next casting. Then do another. It’s piecework, you know. Paid by the casting.”
    We moved away.
    “Two of them been together for a while,” he said. “They always work together. I do the same job by myself. Heaviest job they’ve got around here. It took me a while to get used to it, but it doesn’t bother me now.”
    Much that I saw that night was soon to disappear. The cupola, the hand-lifted ladles, the killing dust. (It was truly killing-around town, on the porches of small neat houses, there were always a few yellow-faced, stoical men set out to take the air. Everybody knew and accepted that they were dying of
the foundry disease,
the dust in their lungs.) Many particular skills and dangers were going to go. Many everyday risks, along with much foolhardy pride, and random ingenuity and improvisation. The processes I saw were probably closer to those of the Middle Ages than to those of today.
    And I imagine that the special character of the men who worked in the Foundry was going to change, as the processes of the work changed. They would become not so different from the men who worked in the factories, or at other jobs. Up until the time I’m talking about they had seemed stronger and rougher than those other workers; they had more pride and were perhaps more given to self-dramatization than men whose jobs were not so dirty or dangerous. They were too proud to ask for any protection from the hazards they had to undergo, and in fact, as my father had said, they disdained what protection was offered. They were said to be too proud to bother about a union.
    Instead, they stole from the Foundry.
    “Tell you a story about Geordie,” my father said, as we walked along. He was “doing a round” now, and had to punch clocks in various parts of the building. Then he would get down to shaking out his own floors. “Geordie likes to take a bit of lumber and whatnot home with him. A few crates or whatever. Anything he thinks might come in handy to fix the house or build a back shed. So the other night he had a load of stuff, and he went out after dark and put it in the back of his car so it’d be there when he went off work. And he didn’t know it, but Tom was in the office and just happened