Order of Freemasons

May 15, 2008

Fourteen hundred pounds. I’d underestimated the weight of the furnace a bit, and since I adhere to a policy of accuracy in these writings, thought I’d set the record straight. Although I’d broken the different sections of the boiler up into fragments, the individual pieces were still quite heavy and required a good deal of effort to heave them off the back of the truck. Cast iron, or “sheet iron” as the scrap people designate it, comes apart after some liberal applications from a heavy maul-- in this case, one that weighed around twelve pounds. Here is the technique: First you put in earplugs to protect against the deafening racket, then smash the long-handled maul against the same spot again and again until fractures appear and a piece finally cracks off. If you’re lucky, it will be an especially big piece, and not just a little one that doesn’t do much at all to diminish the overall weight. Then you move on to the next section, have at it again, until you’ve accumulated a nice little pile.

At the salvage yard it was a landscape of truck axles, big steel wheels, tanks, big chunks of aluminum, whole buses that people just like me were towing in to be weighed and cashed in—and of course my red Dodge pickup with 1400 pounds of scrap. There is sometimes a line to get into this place, and I waited behind an old Ford pickup with leaning boards for sides, and junk heaped much higher than the boards themselves reached. The flimsy siding warped and leaned with the tremendous weight, and the whole truck listed to one side, straining to maintain an upright posture. A few tired ropes, slackened and useless, wound their way around the unstable load, with barbecues, a child’s bicycle, a washer and dryer, a vacuum cleaner and myriad other things making up the eclectic menagerie. It was a miracle that the truck made it over the potholed streets of west Baltimore without the whole business giving way. He made it to the scrap yard just in time.

As I pushed my offerings off the back of the truck, a scrap yard man in a little wheeled tractor drove up to the side of the truck, lowered the forks of the lifting machine in greeting. I looked up.
“You the one with the Masons?” he asked. The clatter and noise in this place is loud, to say the least, so I had him repeat his query. I still wasn’t getting it, even after a couple more times, at which point I would have been pissed off if I were doing the repeating. He maintained his good humor, however.
“Masons?” I finally said.
He said that I looked like a man who came in, belonged to the Order of Freemasons, a somewhat secret society, and one that is much in prominence in Poe’s “A Cask of Amontillado.” I didn’t bring all of that up.
“I know who the Freemasons are,” I shouted, “But I’m not one of them! You’ve got the wrong guy.”
He apologized, said he hadn’t seen this man for some time, but remembered that he had a red truck and was rather slim.
“I’ve only had this truck for a short time,” I said, just to be able to say something. But I wanted this scrap yard-man to be my friend, to talk to him about Freemasons, maybe even bring up Poe’s story if I could somehow work it in. That would be a challenge. Maybe he knew of it already, would want to recommend books to me, things I didn’t know about. What I REALLY wanted to know was how this yard-tender, driving around in his little forklift, tidying up, moving car axles, motors, the stray refrigerator, had come to be talking about Freemasons with a casual visitor—one of the many hundreds of people who come to unload their scraps for a few extra bucks.

At the exit they weighed my truck again, figured out how much lighter I was than when I first came in, and paid me for the stuff I dropped off. When I cashed in my ATM card there at the cash pickup, I was $150 richer and absolutely elated. Forgotten immediately was the toil, the bashing and pushing and shoving and struggling with the heavy things, ant-like, with a huge nibbled-off piece of a leaf on my back. “This is like getting money for free,” I thought.