The Factory Worker

By R. Harlan Smith

The Factory Worker is the story of three couples in a midwest steel town. Victor finds his first real love, Patty, his boss's daughter, but only to lose her? Lacey has a haunting secret from his past. Will Caroline understand? And Roark, the oldest is married to Francine, who realizes her strength comes from her husband. Will he come back this time?

• Language: English
• Publisher: R. Harlan Smith
• Release date: Dec 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781519923233

R. Harlan Smith

I write, for the most part, in the paranormal genre. Ordinary people with extraordinary abilities make for more interesting, character driven stories that have greater appeal than plot driven stories.  My settings are usually in and around Gary, Indiana where I attended Lew Wallace high school, and lived the better part of my younger years through the 50's. My tendency to overdo descriptive passages comes from my fondness for the suburban areas south of Glen Park, the southern most part of Gary. The years I spent in Los Angeles also contribute to my settings. My characters are modeled after people I have known, and are rarely simply contrived, so everything I write is somewhat autobiographical by virtue of the setting and my relationships with the actual characters. My interest in the paranormal arises from my own personal experiences which led to researching them and finding some explanation for them from authors such as Carlos Castaneda and Jane Roberts, as well as my education (BA Behavioral Sciences). I will tell you truths you won't believe and fictions you'll embrace like the gospel, but I won't tell you which is which.

Book preview

The Factory Worker

by

R. Harlan Smith

––––––––

While those ingredients to produce a steel of quality have long been known, the ingredients to produce a man of quality will remain always a mystery.

1

Victor Schmidt removed his cap and his gloves, but he kept his jacket on, and his scarf wound round his neck, as he sat warming at the little white table in the middle of the kitchen to the rear of his father, Emil Schmidt’s house. He looked around. The room was still solemnly quiet; hushed as the day of his mother’s removal; petrified in silence, still, as the shrine his father had allowed it to become some twelve years past. And in such silence there arose the question Victor Schmidt would not dare ask his father: How long will you let yourself suffer?

The thin, white, vertical paneling that ran waist-high had taken on a yellowing of years, a dull patina that muted the shine it had when his mother kept it scrubbed. The walls of pale green, rising above the paneling, had no longer the memory of his mother’s soft singing or the kitchen mist of boiling cabbage or the mouth-watering temptation of his mother’s fresh-baked ciabatta. The entire room was left muffled as when Sarah’s dark, shriveled form had been lifted without ceremony from her bed and placed onto the gurney with the cold thump of a lifeless thing.

The human body is a clumsy mass to move about. The two attendants, although properly solemn in their task, were indifferent and used to the routine, and in their indifference, barely afforded Sarah Schmidt the dignity she would have shown them.

The flowered tin canisters for Victor’s cookies and flour and coffee and sugar and tea sat on the counter beside the sink in the graduated order Sarah had left them, untouched except for the one Emil Schmidt had to open on occasion to replenish his coffee. Sarah had chosen and ordered them from the pages of Sears and Roebuck. The matching breadbox sat vacant, a little haunted house, except possibly, for some remnant: a heel left over from a past loaf she had mixed and kneaded when her hands were strong. Victor had seen it and left it for his father only two days before his mother had passed, but his father could not remember and he could not bear to look.

And through the frosted window over the sink, the old garage in back, slumped empty, it too had lost its purpose, like the breadbox. The door often stuck, or refused to be raised altogether, and the old man cursed the soaking rain as he struggled in vain to raise it. He would finally drive round to the front of the house to park and he and Sarah would dash to the front door with their coats up over their heads. As time passed, the door did not get heavier so much as Emil Schmidt’s strength to raise it had waned. In the long run, the Packard was parked at the curb as a matter of course.

There was nothing to see through the kitchen window and its faded curtains. The wrought iron garden set, for tea and sweet cakes on soft summer nights, fallen to rust and layered with leaves, and now a scattering of snow, was no longer a place to sit. These days, Emil Schmidt sat his summer nights with his old friends and their cigars in the air-conditioning at Scarpelino’s. Victor knew his mother would have replaced the curtains, but Emil Schmidt, he was a man who held on to things, or maybe he could not let go of them.

The cabinets over the sink were never opened; it would be irreverent, like opening her casket. Sarah was in there, like the hanging cups and neatly stacked saucers and dishes shipped by an earlier generation from Trento. They were the articles of a woman’s place in the kitchen. He did not want to see these privacies of the woman. She was in them, like the unwound clock on the wall and the stove and refrigerator and the long silent file of dusty pots and pans on their hooks where she cut meat for sausage and vegetables for salads and stews. Victor knew his father could cook, and he could see they went unused.

The calendar Sarah had brought home from the St. Marcs bazaar still hung tacked in its place with the picture of Jesus for April, 1947, a lamb in his arms. It, too, had come to a stop, like the clock, like Sarah, and like something in the heart of Emil Schmidt. Emil liked to think of the lamb as his Sarah. He did not tell that to Victor. The joy of the room had been exiled, and even the light seemed paralyzed by the sorrow of Emil Schmidt.

The floor boards groaned under Emil Schmidt’s slippers as he paced the linoleum, waiting for the coffee. He didn’t like to sit at the table in the kitchen. It was no longer a family hub like most kitchens, but Victor sat there, and Victor thought his father was going too far with his reverence for the room. His mother wouldn’t have liked that, and it was fair to say he and his father each knew a different woman. Victor thought the kitchen should have been painted and modernized, and every evidence of his mother removed along with her. Of course, he would never say so, and for that his father was grateful.

Why don’t you sit down, Pop? You’re making me nervous, back and forth like that.

When the coffee was poured, the cream and sugar stirred in and the strudel cut, Emil Schmidt sat. Take all that off. It’s warm in here.

Vincent took off his jacket and scarf and hung them on the back of his chair. He ignored the frown and the grunt from his father, Don’t leave that there.

You got anti-freeze in the Packard, Pop?

Yah, I put the anti-freeze.

Should have had Hansen do it. He still owe you for pinochle?

Emil shook his head. No. Not no more.

He pay you?

He put the anti-freeze.

Oh, good. That’s good, Pop.

Emil looked