Carl was the foreman of the building crew. He was my father’s most valued employee and probably the most intelligent man I ever ran into. He was also the hardest worker of anyone on the crew, myself included. He knew just about everything about the building trades and was well versed in many other subjects as well. He could solve virtually any problem and he had a near photographic memory and likely could have went on Jeopardy and made Ken Jennings sweat if he had only known how to read and write.

Dyslexia wasn’t recognized in the 1940’s and it was just assumed that Carl was either retarded or just plain stupid. He learned how to write his name but that was about it. He did okay with numbers, so long as he didn’t have to write them down. He had some method of adding, subtracting, and even long division and multiplication, which he did with notches on a board that was almost a fast as pencil and paper. I don’t think that he read the numbers on a square or tape measure; it seemed that he just counted the marks. However he did it worked okay for him and he rarely miscut a panel or stud and his finish work was as accurate as anyone else’s.

Carl was fifteen years old and still in the seventh grade when he quit school and went to work in the woods. His first job was feeding the fire box and tending the water on a donkey engine, perhaps the last steam yarder in the state, then as soon as he turned sixteen he was upgraded to a choker setter, which is one of the more dangerous jobs in the logging industry. He got in a drunken brawl when he was eighteen, which was in 1949, and the judge kindly gave him the choice between jail and the Army. He was fully trained by the time Korea heated up but he spent the rest of his hitch on garrison duty in occupied Germany.

Carl had been on the crew just about forever and he used to ride me a little during my high school summers, in that I was slightly arrogant, not very motivated, and also the boss’s son and therefore not under his sole direction. After I got back from Viet Nam and flunked out of Washington State and rejoined the crew he knocked that off and started treating me just like any other apprentice, which is to say that he still got on my ass, but being as how we were both Army veterans who hadn’t seen combat he cut me a little slack.

He had a keen sense of humor was also very witty, and that fact, coupled with his excellent memory made the coffee breaks and lunch hours extremely entertaining. He would tell us stories of the French and German lovelies with their hairy legs that he had tumbled, and the one story of him losing his virginity in a logging camp whorehouse was priceless. He was always the butt of his own jokes and the self-depreciating way he told his stories led me to believe they were all true, and I never once heard anyone call bullshit on any of them.

I was the low man on the totem pole that summer and I had to take care of most of the grunt work and clean up on the job sites. I was pushing a loaded wheelbarrow up a narrow plank ramp to dump it one day when a board broke. Carl had warned me that it might happen, but I had read a book that said wood didn’t fatigue and get weaker through usage as metal does, and that as long as it didn’t get rotten or damaged it would always be as strong as it ever was. Provided it wasn’t overstressed, of course, by an overloaded wheelbarrow operated by a dumbass apprentice eager to finish up before lunch.

The center board broke in the middle, the wheelbarrow went down and the end of the board snapped up between my legs and thumped me hard right where it hurts. I sat down right there and stayed there. Carl and the rest of the crew saw it happen, and once they determined that there wasn’t any blood they all started chuckling. Note: Don’t expect any sympathy from a construction crew if you stupidly bash yourself in the nuts. It was noon, so they helped me walk to the shade and then they sat down to eat. I was too sick in my stomach to do anything but just sit there holding my gut. I decided to wait until after lunch, and then if I couldn’t function I’d get one of the guys to run me to the doctor.

“You know?” Carl said as he ate, “That’s the second worst shot to the balls I ever saw a guy take.” He then went on to tell us about the worst one.

“It was in 1950,” he began, “we were in Germany, right next to the East German border. It was just one day of guard duty after the next. The East Germans seemed okay to me, what little I had to do with them anyway, but the border guards were all hard core Russians and were mean son of a bitches and we made sure not to do anything to provoke them.

We had some West German civilian workers on the post, mostly just kids seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen years old, not much younger than we were, really. Too young to have been hard core Nazis or anything like that. I’d been over there for seven or eight months by then and I could understand most of what they were talking about, and I started listening to them, and one day they were all flicking crap at a kid named Rudolph, who looked like the youngest one there.

“Rudy had the hots for this gal, Gisele, who lived over the fence in East Germany. He had been sneaking over there to punch her ticket a couple of times a week. It seems that there was an old network of tunnels that the Commies didn’t know about and he didn’t have any trouble at all getting back and forth even though the border was shut tight and heavily guarded.

“A month later the guys were all celebrating. It seemed that Rudy had popped the question, and she had accepted, and he was going to bring her under the wire the next night. The day after that Rudy didn’t show up for work and the other guys all acted sort of sullen. I asked Herman, the only guy I really knew, if Rudy got high-centered on his new bride or something. He said that Rudy wouldn’t be in for a few weeks, if ever. I kept at Herman, and he finally said that Rudy and Gisele had been apprehended by the East German guards, and that they had turned Gisele loose but they had hurt Rudy really badly. I asked if he had been beaten or shot, or what, and he just said that he would live, but he’d never be a father and he would never be any good to a woman again.”

“Jesus!” Red, on of the carpenters said, “What’d they do, nut him?”

“My German wasn’t that good,” Carl answered. “I never found out what they did to him. I asked the sergeant if he could do anything, but he just said that it was a domestic matter and that we couldn’t get involved.

“A couple of weeks later I was on patrol, walking the border, when I happened to hear some noise coming from an old barn, so I went over to take a look. Herman and a bunch of other guys had another guy held down on the floor. They guy was naked, and I could see right off that he was a Commie.”

“How could you see that?” Red asked, “If he was naked?”

“Well, for one thing,” Carl replied, “He wasn’t circumcised so he probably wasn’t one of our guys, and also he had the round dog tags with the red star that all of the Russians wore. They had his underwear stuffed in his mouth and they had his legs spread wide. A piece of parachute line was tied around his balls and to a ceiling beam, and he was arched backwards, just barely touching the floor.”

“Christ!” Red interrupted, “Didn’t you do something?”

“The Sarge had already told me not to get involved with domestic disputes and by then I kind of figured out that was what this was.” Carl answered. “Anyway, they had this guy all stretched tight, with his balls pulled about a foot from his body, when Herman took a brick in each hand, spread his arms wide, and smacked the guy right in the nuts. I wouldn’t have thought it possible that a guy could crap while in that position, but he did and he also pissed all over. He was still hanging so Herman let him have it again. That time the line went slack and he dropped to the floor. The guys all stood up, took out their cocks, and pissed right in the poor guy’s face.

“Herman looked up then and saw me, but I just turned and walked away. That’s the end of the story,” Carl said, looking at his watch, “Let’s get back to work. How are you feeling, Jeff?”

I still ached like hell and couldn’t stand up straight, but I could walk, so I took the afternoon off and drove home and spent the rest of the day hooked up with an ice pack. My balls swelled up like lemons but there didn’t seem to be any permanent damage. I was sore all of the rest of that week, and from that time on I always took the foreman’s advice when he suggested that maybe I should brace up a plank.