Editor Note: Steel Man springs from memory of a World War II-vintage steel mill—fiery, mysterious, and testing those who worked there. Harold, a young boy/man, is thrown into this world and romanticizes it; but he faces issues that make him turn, however irresolutely, toward manhood.
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I.
Rollers whirled and stopped; ingots marched forward in rows. Steam flashed in pulses from red metal, and a mechanical roar surrounded Harold. He hesitated before the entrance to the plant until the fiery smell of molten steel drew him into the mill’s world of shade and brightness where workers stalked the floor like warriors. Hard hat surged back and forth; asbestos gloves and aprons shielded proud and unyielding bodies.
Harold merged with the flow of men entering the locker room, bathed in sallow 60-watt light and with condensation glistening on the walls. He bent to tie his steel-toed boots and slipped into work clothes, crusty with flecks of metallic dust and sweat. As his crew drifted out to the production floor, he wondered if the other workers had once been young and inexperienced like him, intimidated by the danger and uncertain of their place within the factory’s hierarchy of men.
The lead man, an older guy, prepared to steer the first billet toward pounding presses that would squeeze the steel into concrete reinforcement bar. He stood 5 feet 9 inches and weighed no more than 170 pounds, but his arms rippled with muscles, hard like the metal he guided. Harold waved and shouted, “Hey, Nate, ready to wrestle steel?” Nate didn’t respond. Not even a nod. Harold’s arm drooped, and he wondered when the crew would ever accept him as more than the new hire, a “sweep” cleaning up after the real workers.
The foreman, gray and sliding into his late fifties, glanced at Harold, who leaned hard into his broom and pushed metal oxide shavings into piles to be disposed of in a 50-gallon drum. The slow rhythm of sweeping lulled Harold into dreaming as he moved down the walkway beside the still steaming rebar.
He hadn’t pictured a future working 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. in a hot rolling mill when he’d graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1969. His dad had worked in auto parts all his life. “Get an education, Harold,” he’d said. “Don’t do like me. Forty years in one business and shit to show for it.”
Harold had done okay in high school. They cut football players slack, and he’d been a star…well, maybe not a star, but one of the better linemen. Pop’s program sounded pretty good: go to college, avoid the draft, and graduate with a degree that would land him some cozy, white collar job.
By the middle of his second year at Portland Community College, his average grade hovered around “D,” probably because he wasted most of his time playing fantasy war games with four roommates in a shared two-bedroom apartment. They passed their hours moving knights, yeomen, and archers over a board dotted with leering wizards and divided into hostile medieval kingdoms. His dad paid for tuition and gave him a monthly stipend, but Harold washed dishes on Friday and Saturday night at the Thai Pagoda, a local student eatery, to cover his extra living costs—beer, dating, sweet weed, and miscellaneous items.
A dinner waitress at the Pagoda caught his eye when she flicked her long dark hair off her forehead and giggled after he dropped a dish. He couldn’t forget the sparkle of her green eyes. “Hey, Ms. Leslie, how about a movie tomorrow.” She hesitated, but he persisted. “I’ve cleaned my calendar, and I’m open anytime, both this week and next.” He smiled and shook his mop of brown hair like a puppy.
She laughed. Her teeth were straight and bright, and a little dimple puckered either side of her smile. “Well, Prince Charming, okay then. How about the Celtic Bards playing down at the Ranger this Thursday evening?”
“She’s the one,” Harold crowed when he told his roomies he was moving into her small apartment off Killingsworth a month later. He and Leslie talked and laughed late into the night. Afterwards they made love with Aretha Franklin playing softly. During the day, Leslie attended class and completed homework. “I enjoy both sex and school,” she informed Harold, but he only committed to the first half of her program.
When he teetered on the cusp of flunking out, she yelled at him, “Life isn’t just about screwing, smoking dope, and goofing off.” She was probably right, but he couldn’t decide what was more important than those three. Anyway, he would figure that out later, he supposed.
His dad wasn’t impressed either. Unlike Leslie, he didn’t smoke dope with Harold or find his insights about the universe particularly brilliant. “You ain’t worth a damn at school,” he said. “Might as well work and support yourself.”
That’s how Harold ended up as the new guy on the graveyard crew at Northwest Steel Mill two months after his twentieth birthday. Lucky to have any job with the economy in the shitter and wishing community college had gone better.
Electric arcs in the adjacent building fired with a jolt that shattered the night, and Harold’s heart thumped. Thank God I wasn’t assigned there, he thought, to shovel some witch’s brew of chemicals into the furnaces.
Later, when the boss wandered off to another part of the factory, Harold stopped again to stare. In front of five monstrous presses confronting him in a perpendicular line, Nate stood stolid as a matador. He gripped three-foot metal tongs in his asbestos gloves and nudged the next billet toward a v-shaped guide that fed steel into the mouth of the first machine looming above him.
Harold’s eyes followed as Nate moved down the row of presses. From the other side, a hulk of a man, with his belly slung low over his belt, returned the ingot through the second roller and the steel stretched like taffy. Nate caught the bar and nursed it into the opening of the third press. The die squeezed the metal, and he marched stiff-legged down the line to position himself between the final stands.
One-inch rebar surged from the fourth machine at a speed too fast to catch head-on. As if taunting a wounded bull, Nate stood with his back to the onslaught and grabbed the shaft with his tongs when it blazed past him. Momentum continued to whip the steel forward while he pivoted and eased the throbbing red tip of the metal into the mouth of the last press. A slight smile, almost of triumph, brushed Nate’s lips as the finished rebar tipped into cooling racks on the other side.
Harold stood riveted, envisioning doors thrown wide for Nate as he strode into the gleaming halls of Valhalla in Asgard, the land of warrior kings. In that moment, he yearned for nothing more than to become like Nate, a man bold enough to turn his back on steel. He pushed from his mind stories of workers burnt or crippled because they’d made the wrong step. When the foreman returned and interrupted his trance, he resumed sweeping vigorously.
At 3 a.m., the crew stood down for a repair. Harold noticed the boss’s head bob as he leaned against a pillar. Must have been carousing during his time off instead of sleeping. He smelt opportunity, headed for the day-shift lunchroom, and eased onto an eight-inch wooden bench attached to the table. His back overlapped the seat on both sides, and he struggled for a position where he would be comfortable and safe from falling. He yawned and remembered the evening with Leslie before he’d left for work. They’d been talking about music when he’d leaned toward her and pushed her hair back from her face. “You’re my natural woman like in sister Aretha’s song.”
She’d laughed and poked him in the ribs, but became serious before tickling ripened into something more. “I’ve decided to transfer to Portland State.”
“Huh?” Harold said. He knew she’d been thinking about returning to college for a bachelor’s degree, but he worried she might be slipping away.
“Don’t worry. I can catch the bus downtown two blocks from here.” Leslie read the unspoken question in his voice and reassured him she meant no hidden message.
“What do you need another degree for?” She was full of dreams, and they were so linear. He had dreams, too; but they weren’t clear and often pulled in different directions.
“To become a nurse.”
“How will you pay for school?”
“I’ll work as an aide in a hospital.” She paused. “I know you bust your ass at the mill. But....”
Harold figured she’d been nearing a “but” and waited for her to finish her thought.
"Working in a steel plant, is that what you want?”
He hadn’t been sure and still wasn’t; but by this point, he could no longer focus his thoughts as he faded toward sleep while clinging to his perch on the bench. Footfalls approached, jerking him back to awareness. He jumped up and pushed the broom with a sharp thrust as the door swung open. The foreman, broken nose floating above grim lips, lurched through the doorway.
“Got the other rooms done; thought I’d check this one.” With satisfaction, Harold noted a small cloud of dust hovered in the air.
For a moment, the boss remained silent and stared through Harold. “Guessed you was fucking off back here.”
“They must eat like pigs on day shift.” Harold kept his face serious. “There’s food and trash everywhere.”
The foreman appeared only half-convinced but grunted and walked off. Harold realized he needed to demonstrate how hard he could work if he was going to pass the six-month probation. Sure, he’d wanted clean work where you earn a salary and dress in nice clothes, and he partly agreed with Leslie that he should try college again. Yet a steelworker made decent money, and he liked the idea of being able to handle such a hazardous job. Not a store clerk like his dad, eating humble pie to please customers all day.
Harold returned to the thundering machinery and watched Nate, the conquering hero, descend from the finishing floor and fling his tongs aside like a bloodied battle axe. Nate noticed him this time and said, “Not as fun as it looks.”
Unable to fashion a snappy comeback, Harold stuttered. “Seems magical…what you do.”
Nate shrugged. “Make sure it’s what you want,” he called over his shoulder as he walked off.
Harold lifted his head at this challenge. Unsure of the options he still had, he craved respect and dreaded becoming some loser sneered at by everyone if he remained at the mill. He imagined how it would feel to be top dog like Nate, a man other men looked up to because of what he was unafraid to do. He saw himself weaving steel with the grace of a conjurer, inspiring the men around him by his ability to bend metal to his will.
II.
Waiting on the finishing platform at the start of shift, Nate beat a rhythm with the tongs on the toe of his boot. He’d heard the new broom jockey call to him, but he didn’t answer. Kid hadn’t paid his dues. Had he been green like that 35 years ago when he started? The broom seemed to hold the boy up, not the other way around. If the sweep had smarts, he’d ride his broom right out of the mill. Find another job that wouldn’t squeeze until no juice remained.
Furnaces in the next building shrieked as electric arcs fired, transforming scrap into molten metal. The furnace crew poured steel at 3000º F into molds, eight-feet long and nine inches square, and then left them to harden. His face twisted. Damn he’d been glad to use his seniority to bid out of the Melt. Six years stuck there at the start. He knew, they all knew, that the crap they used to line the furnaces contained asbestos. Hell, packages were marked with skull and crossbones. It didn’t matter. That’s what the boss told them to use. Nobody wanted to whine.
Billets stretched back to the Reheat Furnace, which fired them up until the steel became pliable. They approached in rows endless as the years he’d spent in the mill. He prodded the one-ton ingot toward the guides, and a ram slammed the metal into heat-resistant drums anchored in the first stand. The steel stretched through the opening and released on the other side in a 12-foot section. Oil lubricated the space between the rollers, and water sprayed the equipment to prevent overheating. Nate merged with the machines throbbing in an endless rhythm like pistons striking when a train pulls off.
Steam hissed and Nate backed away. Fuck, my foot hurts, he thought. Twenty years ago an ingot shifted, pinched his right foot and partially burnt through his work boot before the rest of the crew could free him. Three skin grafts and two broken bones. The pain built within him each shift, whenever he stood for more than an hour.
On the other side of the first stand, Joe blew his timing and took two attempts to get the steel seated and drawn into the second press. While Joe struggled, Nate shuffled down the row. He dragged his right leg and shouted above the roar of the machinery. “Hey, Joe, want we should wait until you say ‘ready’ before we send any more steel?” Everyone laughed, including Nate, but an acid taste rose in his mouth. He swore to lay off Taco Bell before shift.
Nate leaned against his tongs before the third press. His chest hurt when he rammed the metal back through the stand, and he hesitated, gulping for air before moving to his next position between the fourth and fifth machine.
A 60-foot length of one-inch bar surged toward Nate at 45 miles per hour. With his back to the stand and head cocked over his left shoulder, he listened for the sizzle of water and waited until he saw the red end of the shaft pass him before he grabbed with his tongs. He swiveled to feed the bar into the last stand. Pain surged up his right leg as the completed rebar, 120-feet in length and one-half inch thick, kicked into the racks on the other side to cool. How many thousands of times had he done this? He forced a half-smile to cover his exhaustion. No thrill left; work as tired as his body. He blew long strands of black snot out of his nose; the burnt odor of raw steel and tang of scorched oil clung to him. Stepping down from the extruding floor, which panted and hummed behind him, he tossed his heavy metal tongs aside. Done for another goddamn day.
The kid with the broom, eyes bright and nose flared with excitement, stared at him like a god or something. He couldn’t remember when he’d last felt good standing alone up there on the stranding floor. “Not as fun as it looks.” He tried to grin, but his lips collapsed under the effort. “Make sure it’s what you want.” He turned. Nothing more to say.
The day crew positioned themselves in front of the stands to catch the next ingot, and Nate rearranged his face into a smirk. “Hey, boys, maybe I should stick around, show you how?” They laughed, but everyone knew Nate was king when it came to spinning steel into rebar.
Shuffling to one of the garbage drums, Nate bent so no one could see him spit up a clot of phlegm. His insides seemed to rip, and he stared without moving at the rust-colored mucus lying on top of the trash. Shit, got to make a doctor appointment. He’d put this off for months because he sensed whatever the sawbones would have to say wouldn’t be good news. Should’ve stopped smoking. His wife Shirley ragged on him until he’d cut down to a pack per day. Finally, she’d told him, “Take it outside, you gotta have one.”
Nate remembered their first years of marriage when he’d started at the mill. If they weren’t giggling and petting, they’d been happy rehabbing their small house on an oversized lot; but time passed, and they discovered numerous failings in each other. He’d liked her better when they had sex more than four or five times a year; he missed the moments of closeness afterwards lying together quietly. It’d been a long time since he woke throbbing in the night and rolled over to snuggle with Shirley, kiss her on the neck, and slowly coax her open so he could slide inside, crowing softly, “Hey baby, Candyman’s here.” Most nights he felt too tired to even try.
Nate stepped back from the trashcan, sauntered to the clock, and punched out. He threw his hand up over his head in a backward salute as he moved toward the exit. “Night, ladies,” he boomed. He wheezed from the effort and hoped no one heard. Energy drained from him, and he tasted ashes as he walked to his Cadillac. Fumbling with the keys, he muttered, “Can’t even open the fucking door.”
III.
Nate never returned to the mill. Two months later he died. Cancer, they said, his lungs riddled with holes. Most of the men showed up at Grace Methodist off Lombard for the funeral.
Harold sat with the rest of the crew behind Joe, who turned and spoke softly. “Can’t believe it, Harold.”
Harold flushed with surprise. Joe remembered his name.
“Full of piss and vinegar. Suddenly, Nate’s gone.” Harold nodded, unable to find words to corral thoughts now escaping from hidden eddies of his mind.
“Went to see him in the hospital a week ago. Know what he said? ‘Gave my life to the mill. Not sure why.’ He’d lost 40 pounds.” Joe choked into silence. Harold shifted uneasily and thought about what Nate might have meant.
“Tough as nails,” Harold said to cover up the stillness. Joe’s eyes seemed to mist, and he faced forward quickly. Harold pretended interest in the handout at each seat—“In Memory of Nate Krieger”—and wondered if Joe was crying.
A balding man with long, gray-flecked hair ringing the sides of his head stepped to the dais. The rustling of the crowd gradually smoothed into silence. “Nate was a member of this congregation since before I became minister,” he said. “Not regular in attendance like Shirley,” he angled a slight smile to where she sat in the first row, “but we got acquainted over the years.”
The pastor talked for a long time about Nate’s boyhood in St. Johns, being a Marine in the Second World War, Shirley, and finally his work. Harold listened, but he figured the preacher didn’t really know Nate, except what he’d been told. He was surprised when he said, “He fashioned steel and formed himself into a man who faced life without yielding, where others bend or bow.” That sounded about right, Harold thought. He didn’t follow the rest of the preacher’s comments until he ended, “Shirley’s asked that his family, friends, and fellow workers tell us their stories of Nate.”
Joe lumbered down the aisle. “Not used to talking before a crowd,” he said. “Nate was a St. Johns’ boy; all the men he grew up around worked in factories or shipyards. He never made it beyond the railroad cut into the big city of Portland until he was out of high school. There was nothing fancy about him. Just a straight shooter. A guy you could depend on to carry his load, and then some.” A sound like a sigh filled the hall, and Joe struggled to finish. “Nate taught me the ropes when I started at Northwest....” This time it was sure; Joe sobbed and couldn’t speak anymore. It seemed all right to Harold, and he guessed to everyone else by the way they touched Joe as he maneuvered back to his seat.
Shirley walked forward heavily, tears caught in the creases of her face. She dabbed vigorously at her nose with a small, crumpled handkerchief. “Like Joe said, Nate was a stand-up guy. Life gets busy; sometimes we lose sight of things.” She paused for awhile as if she remembered what she’d had and what she’d lost. After talking about their family and friends over the years, she ended, “He anchored me.” She’d stopped crying and looked over the crowd with straight, clear eyes. Her face reflected the same calmness Nate had worn as he stared down steel.
Harold didn’t know Nate well enough to speak, and anyway, he was a rookie at the mill. While the others finished with their memories, he crafted a silent testimonial. Yeah, he’d dreamed of being like Nate, someone who didn’t grovel before what life dished out. Now he realized that was only part of what he wanted. If he’d been talking out loud, he might not have confessed to his growing conviction that it was not enough merely to remain unbroken and standing until the last round.
Harold contemplated the casket as the crowd rose to leave. Nate had been a rock, and that was one choice of how to be a man. But not the only one, he decided. He walked from the church still unsure of the direction in life to take, yet determined to follow a path from which, at the end, he could look back without despair at the person he’d become.