by Sean Thomas Dougherty

They pull out metal lunch boxes and spread out on the lawn, the fall light slanting cool and gold. The trees around these houses just starting to tinge maize and a pale pink. Across the street, I can hear the quiet phonemes of Spanish, as they eat and rest. I go back to reading, a good book by Caesar Pavese called Hard Labor, small stories about working people in Italy after the war. When I look back out the window, one of the roofers, the one who seemed like he was in charge, has brought out a soccer ball, or as they would say a futbol, and begins to dibble it with his feet, work boots unlaced, then up to his knees, and then lets it rest on his neck. The other men applaud, then put down their lunch boxes and stand, there are a half dozen men now dribbling the ball back and forth in a circle. These men in jeans and work vests, on break, and I remember on break when the presses were down at the newspaper plant, and the time dragged on, once Jean Djock, a strange mystical dude, who grew up in Guyana and then the Bronx, meticulously took pieces of broken plastic strapping then weaved them into a long rope and began to jump with it, singing absurdly dirty jump rope rhymes. I was sweeping up ink and dust under the presses and paused, a big grin on my face. Then Sullivan, the union guy, a big fat funny Irish man, said Jeano hold up, and called over to Stevie and Marnie. Jean held one end of the plastic hand-made rope, and Marnie held the other, and Sully said, No, a bit lower. Ok who’s in? I got five bucks that I win. Come on you weak unbalanced bitches! And Sal Mariano jumped up and shouted, I’m in, you fat fuck! And then all the Union guys reached into their billfolds, and there was even side action going on, as we clapped, Sully limbo’d under, then Sal, then Patrick, five of these guys who looking back weren’t that old, maybe in their thirties, but I was only twenty-two and what did I know, and so it went, as they moved slow. Sal was the favorite, but fat Sully turned out to have technique, leaning back and spreading his legs. Marnie said to me, you know he goes on vacation in the Bahamas every year. He’s probably been trained in this by some West Indian limbo pro. Yeah, I said, trained in Bacardi and Cokes. The light was too bright in that giant room, the ceilings high, they shone down on us covered in black ink from the paper, small cuts on our hands from the edges and the strapping machines. It was well past 3 a.m. All of us clapping as each man bent under the plastic rope. And sure enough there was Sully as Jean and Marnie lowered it, spreading his feet wide and showing a limber of limb I would never have guessed, and one by one as the other men fell on their copious asses, we clapped louder and louder until only Sully was left with a stack of money and then the horn blew for the presses were fixed, and it was back to work, stacking and lifting, and loading the trucks. The roofers across the street are finished now with lunch and are back climbing the ladders. Their bodies different now I notice, a bit more rhythm, a bit more rhyme, as they lay the tiles and hammer and staple it is as if what their feet performed on break has filled them with the most exquisite music, a measure of joy that reminds us labor is not all we are. I watch them balanced like precarious birds on the roof, envious they get to work so close to the sky.

Sean Thomas Dougherty‘s most recent book is Death Prefers the Minor Keys from BOA Editions. New poems and essays forthcoming in Midway Journal, Mount Hope, Poetry Ireland, and Talking River Review. He works the third shift in Erie, PA.