The Road from Gap Creek by Robert Morgan

Author:Robert Morgan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2013-07-28T16:00:00+00:00

Twelve

When Troy come home from the CCC after a year, he had a few weeks of leave before he went back to the camp. He’d signed up for another year of work on the road high in the mountains. Troy never had told us exactly what he done in the CCC until he wrote in a letter near the end of his first year and said that he’d been trained as a powder man. That meant he was in charge of the dynamite. Where they was blasting away rocks to make the road, men drilled holes into the rock. It was Troy’s job to place sticks of dynamite in the holes and set caps on them attached to a fuse. The cap was like a big firecracker, and when the fire reached the cap and made it go off, that shook the dynamite and made it explode.

The other way to set off dynamite was through a long electric wire. The cap was then set off by a spark of electricity. You could send the spark either from a battery or from a box that worked like a generator when you pushed down hard on the handle. Handling dynamite was the most dangerous job in the CCC. I’m sure they assigned the work to Troy because he was so calm and careful. If Mama had knowed that’s what he was doing she’d have been worried sick. I guess that’s why he told us only after he’d almost finished the first year.

Velmer said dynamite would go off if you dropped it or hit it with something. He said lightning or some other electric charge could set it off. He said when you was handling dynamite you had only one chance to make a mistake. There wouldn’t be a second chance.

Troy was coming home on Saturday while I was working in the dime store. So I wouldn’t get a chance to see how happy Mama and Papa and Old Pat was when he arrived with his duffel bag. Troy said that on Saturday evening he’d take Papa’s Model A truck and drive to town to bring me home for the weekend. I was excited all week knowing Troy was coming home, and on Saturday I couldn’t hardly wait for work to be over at six. Finally when they locked the doors and dimmed the lights I run to the back room where clerks kept their stuff and got my purse and my bag of clothes. Wilson the manager seen I was in a hurry and said, “Did you clean up your counter?” We was supposed to clean up our work space before we left every day.

“I cleaned it up,” I said.

“Let’s just have a look,” Wilson said. I hurried after him carrying my bag. I’d cleaned my glass display cases and swept the floor behind the counter, but I’d left a stack of paper bags on top of the counter. “Look at that, Annie,” he said. “That won’t do.” I quickly placed the bags on a shelf under the counter.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.