I was eighteen years old and fresh out of high school when I went to work at the mill. I knew it wouldn’t be for long; every healthy guy in 1968 was either in college or eligible for the draft so I was just biding my time for the six months or however long it would be until I got called up. I was still a kid, really. At five-seven I was as tall as I’d ever be, but physically immature for my age. I was still skinny and didn’t need to shave but once every couple of weeks and then only to scrape off the peach fuzz so I wouldn’t look like a junior high kid. My older brothers had both been the same way at my age, as had my dad, and I knew it was just genetics and that I’d catch up eventually but that didn’t keep some of the other guys from giving me a lot of shit.

‘Hey, Fuzznuts,” Vern hollered, making himself heard over the din of the mill. “Get your sweet little ass over here.” Vern was what Dad called a Hairy Chested Nut Scratcher. He would have been the kid that started smoking and shaving in the Seventh grade and had dropped out of high school when he knocked up his girl friend. He was somewhere around thirty years old and had flunked the draft physical for some reason that obviously had nothing to do with his cock: even though he was married with three kids he continued to chase cooze, as he called it, and he considered himself God’s gift to women. He had been working in the mill since he’d turned seventeen and acted like he owned the place. His attitude pissed me off. I may have looked young, but below the belt I was very much a man and it was only by shear luck and the strength of latex that I wasn’t either in jail or a father myself. “Pop your thumb out of your ass and go pull number seven.”

Number seven referred to the position on the green chain where the heavy four by sixes were removed and stacked. The green chain was the conveyor that collected the lumber from the saws. It wasn’t any particular color but the lumber that came down it was heavy and wet, therefore green. It was actually a series of parallel chains that ran down a long low table. The chains ran on guides that were recessed into the wooden table so that only the upper inch of the chain links were exposed. Lumber from the saws was supported and propelled down the table by these protruding links, and workers on each side removed the lumber and stacked it according to grade and size. When the stack got full a forklift removed it and you started another stack. Pulling on the green chain was the heaviest and most mindless job in the mill. Although everyone started there only a few guys, like Vern, made a career of it. Vern was the senior guy, and as such had his choice of pulls and he assigned the rest. One by fours were easy, six by twelves were ass busters. I had been doing two by fours, and now he wanted me to pull four by sixes, which were the heaviest stuff we were cutting that day.

I had only been working a couple of weeks at that time, and in addition to being relatively puny I didn’t yet have the knack of pulling the heavier lumber. At first everyone tries too hard to muscle the lumber around instead of doing it the easy way and letting natural momentum and inertia work with you instead of against you. “Christ,” Vern chastised at break time. “My thirteen year old kid could pull lumber faster than you. Of course he shaves more often than you and probably has you beat below the belt, too. He’s a regular chip off the old block.” Vern held his hands about eight inches apart. “Probably gets more cooze than you do to. When’s the last time you got any? Or have you ever got any?”

That really pissed me off. First of all, my sex life wasn’t any of Vern’s fucking business. Second thing, I wasn’t getting anywhere near as much as I wanted. Chicks my age all seemed to go after the mature macho looking guys, which I definitely wasn’t. I had gotten laid several times but it was with a younger chick. Way younger. She told me she was seventeen, but I found out afterward she was fourteen and still in the eighth grade. Gulp. Her daddy would have cut my nuts off or had me arrested or both if he had caught me porking his junior high daughter.

“I do okay,” I answered in defense of my manliness.

“Yeah, with Mama Thumb and her four daughters.” Vern pumped his hand in front of his crotch. “Or maybe you like boys instead?”

The other guys laughed and I felt my face get hot. Like I said, my sex life was none of business but I was mad about letting him get to me that way. Not only that, but jacking off was in fact my primary form of release.

The whistle blew, signaling the end of break period and the noise increased as the saws in the head rig started back up, and a few minutes later the first lumber came down the green chain. They must have been sawing what we called a meat log, which was slang for a large old growth tree, because the timber that came off was almost all the large stuff that I was pulling and I quickly fell behind. As lead man, Vern’s job was to make sure that didn’t happen and he should have stepped in to help or at least assigned someone else to assist me, but instead he just stood on the opposite side of the chain line from me and bitched until it was obvious that I couldn’t keep up.

“Fucking weenie,” he said, jumping up onto the table. Walking across the moving green chain was a stupid thing to do, and was not only against posted safety directives but common sense as well. There was a catwalk on the head end of the chain just for that reason, or a person could also go around the other end, but Vern was a flamboyant asshole that had to make a big deal out of coming to help me, so he just jumped up and started walking across the table, dodging the moving lumber. He’d done the same stupid thing a hundred times and never got caught or had a problem, but this time something happened.

The bottom of the chain passed under the table on its way back to the head end and was supported by several idler shafts. Square holes were cut into the top of the table to facilitate maintenance on the center bearings of these shafts, and Vern, rushing across the table to help or harass me, stepped into one of these holes and fell straight down three feet and landed astraddle one of the chains. Ouch. That had to hurt. He would have been okay if his pant leg hadn’t got caught in one the lower chain sprockets, and he would have only gotten skinned up a little if the chain hadn’t been equipped with what we called sweepers. Sometimes the lumber came out of the saws so warped that it would only touch the table in one or two places, high and dry above the chains. To keep things moving pairs of steel prongs two or three inches long were placed every ten feet on the chains. Vern was facing down the chain, so he couldn’t see the approaching sweeper, and I was too dumb to hit the emergency shut down button. That was actually Vern’s fault: he had made it clear that nobody but him was to shut the chain down for any reason whatsoever. Anyway, the chain kept running and the sweeper went in between Vern’s legs with predictable results. He screamed and someone finally hit the shut down button, but not before the sweeper claw tore out the crotch of Vern’s pants along with his nuts.

Vern was extricated and laid out on a stretcher while the first aid team worked on him to stop the bleeding. His crotch was a bloody mess, but his dick, all three inches of it, hadn’t been touched. He was still cursing me even as he was being loaded into the ambulance, and the remains of his balls and hairy sack still adorned the sweeper claw.

Those of us who had witnessed the accident were interviewed and sent home for the rest of the day and reliefs were called in to finish our shifts. I drove to the city the next day and joined the Navy and never went back to the mill. I came home on leave a year later after boot came and advanced schooling and hung around with my old buddies and learned that Vern blamed me personally for his loss, claiming that I had just stood there watching, knowing full well what was going to happen. That was a lie; it never occurred to me that Vern was about to be castrated, and had I seen the danger I would have pushed the button myself. Probably.

I was overseas on the ship when Dad got transferred. He moved my car and all of my stuff to his new hometown, and when I got out of the Navy I moved there and went to school. The mill shut down and was demolished, and Vern was long gone the next time I visited my old hometown. The two weeks that I pulled on the green chain weren’t the only time that I’d seen a guy’s balls compromised, but that’s another story.