The day the mason threw up and kept on working

One summer late in high school, I worked with a brick mason as his “tender.”  Being this particular mason’s tender was sort of like assisting a surgeon, except I was constantly filthy and had to mix bags and bags of mortar in addition to moving and stacking a ton of bricks in an average day.  That’s a skill you rarely find a use for in the typical operating theater, but the job was similar in that I had to anticipate what he would need and have it ready for him when he asked for it.  He had a surgeon’s temperament, too, and those first two weeks were kind of rough as I learned his patterns and preferences.

The “surgical assistant” analogy would not have applied with almost any other brick mason, but this guy was a noted artiste.  When other masons turned down a job as impossible, or tried to change the customer’s mind about what could be done, this guy would fix them with a clear, blue eye and say, “Well, I reckon I can do that.  Gonna cost you, though.”

This was the late 1960s, and this guy had been around for most of the century already.  He was only a little older than I am now, but to a high school kid, anything over 40 is too close to death for comfort.  When he worked on a low section of wall, you could tell it hurt him.  He’d have to kneel in the dirt, supporting some of his weight with his toes.  When he stood from from time to time to shake out the kinks, his heavy boots would maintain the shape they had taken while he’d been kneeling.  At these times he sometimes said, “Well, I reckon those toes will turn up for the last time here pretty soon.”

We worked most of the summer on a single job.  We built a two-story ornamental brick wall on an addition to a house, and then another, less ornate wall around the entire perimeter of the lot.  It was a shady lot, luckily for us, near Peachtree Creek in Atlanta.  This area had been the site of the Battle of Peachtree Creek during the Civil War, one of the larger battles of the Battle of Atlanta.  You could walk around the area and find foxholes and earthworks dug by soldiers a hundred years earlier.  People with metal detectors found minie balls here all the time.

One day well into the summer, the work was going slowly–so slowly, in fact, that I started wondering what was up.  I got my answer about mid-morning when the old guy turned his head and threw up in the mud.    I was thinking, “Well, looks like that’s it for today.”  I asked if he was OK and started looking around for our tools so I could put everything away for the day.  He said, “Let’s see if that makes me feel better.  Will you run to the store and get me a grape Nehi?”

I got him his drink, and by lunch he was feeling better–almost chipper.  We finished out the day, cleaned up and loaded everything into his truck.  Climbing into the driver’s seat, his comment on the day was, “It’s hard, but it’s fair.”

Everybody has those days that don’t seem to be working out that well, and it’s easy to feel like quitting.  Everyone has those days, but not everyone has the advantage of having known a person who could teach valuable lessons, not with his words but with his simple actions.  That day has stayed with me all these years and has sustained me many times when things were not going well, even when things were hard and not particularly fair.

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