The Yokel

by Lee Gomer

Things seemed at last to be working out. It had been a long haul for Lee *, but now everything seemed to be coming together.

He sat at his desk, looking out the window of the Crystal Sugar Plant in the small town of River City, beginning to feel at home. Well, not quite yet, but beginning to see where maybe pretty soon he would feel a part of the office force.

It had been a long six months since leaving home, back in Kansas, riding the freight to Sacramento, a long stay with his sister’s family, jobless, forever looking, hopelessly trying to find a niche in this depression-crippled economy of 1938. And then, after so many months, a call to take an exam at Crystal Sugar in Stockton. Weathering the terrible stress of a typing and shorthand test, and a ridiculously simple intelligence test; waiting with hope and hopelessness, fear and yearning, dread of not being chosen and equal dread of being chosen. Then getting the call. A job! A job!

He had been driven to River City by his brother-in-law, and settled into a room in a family home; settled in the only restaurant in town for meals, and he was set for work.

Steve, the bookkeeper, had been very helpful getting him started on the job. Teaching him the bookkeeping machine, a complicated contraption with a yard-wide carriage, with clamps to hold payrolls, individual pay records, and checks for one typing operation.

Malcomb, the chief clerk, had been equally friendly, and helpful. Malcomb had offered his car for Lee to drive to the Agriculture Office to pick up farm workers’ time-cards; seemingly as a gesture to help him feel more at home in the office.

Lee had been called into the office of the Agriculture Specialist to take long, rambling, complicated notes about sugar beet production procedures. All this in shorthand, and he had transcribed and typed it satisfactorily. He felt proud of his work. He was using his recently-acquired business college education and becoming part of the business world.

Yeah, it wasn’t quite here yet, but Lee felt that in the not-too-distant future he would really become a part of this life. He could hardly imagine it after such a long and disheartening wait. But he let himself believe it could be possible.

Steve stopped at the corner of his desk and laid a small object on it. Lee saw it was the core of an adding machine tape. The small wooden spool with a hole in the center, around which the adding machine tape had been wrapped.

“Will you store this away for me, please?” Steve said. “Just put it on the shelf over there on the wall.”

Lee picked it up and looked at it. “Where do you want it?”

“Oh, take that ladder and put it up on the top shelf, out of the way.” Steve motioned toward a high bank of shelves against the wall.

Lee rolled the anchored ladder over to a handy spot, climbed up and started to put the core in a bare spot.

“No. No. Not there.” Steve motioned with his hand. “Over to the right a little.”

Lee climbed down and moved the ladder to the designated spot, climbed up and again placed it where Steve pointed, and climbed down. But Steve didn’t seem to be satisfied, and indicated another location.

As Lee again climbed the ladder, trying desperately to please, he asked, “What do we save these for?”

“Oh, these? They are used as assholes for hobby horses!” Steve said, and his voice broke slightly, possibly from triumph, or was it regret?

Lee heard a sound from Malcomb he couldn’t interpret, as his world came crashing down. As he stepped down the rungs of the ladder, his whole being was screaming silently, “Dumb Kansas yokel! Dumb Kansas yokel! Rube! Hayseed! Chump! How could you ever being to believe that you belonged here!?”

As he reached the floor, he tried desperately to smile at Steve, but knew his frozen-faced grimace was horrible to look at. His face was so stiff he knew he wasn’t making it work. A gargoyle trying to appear a good loser; a poor sport too far gone to ever be convincing.

He returned to his desk, picked up a paper, and wondered why he had done so. He turned to the bookkeeping machine, but there was nothing to feed into it. He looked out the window at the view that, a few moments earlier, had appeared so welcome and inviting. It was a cold, late winter day outside. He was just an outsider who had somehow been misplaced into an office of strangers. He didn’t belong, and he never would belong. He was a Kansas Dust Bowl refugee who belonged at a dishwashing machine, not at a bookkeeping machine.

Of course, he survived. Gradually, so very gradually, the embarrassment lessened, faded, almost disappeared. But not quite. He could never disclose this experience to family or friends for many, many years. It was just too horrible to admit to.

His career was not with Crystal Sugar. Not because of the debacle with the hobby horse. He just didn’t work out with the devilish bookkeeping machine, and was laid off at the end of the sugar beet season.

In later years, he often looked back in wonder at how devastating the experience had been, and couldn’t understand it. It was simply a practical joke. One that he was sure the perpetrators regretted having been involved in, and mainly because of his poor acceptance of it. But in later years, he could not relive the times and be the person he was then. It was as impossible for him to understand how he could have been so gullible as it was how he could have acted so churlishly about the joke. He was no longer the battered, desperate twenty-one-year-old. He was an entirely different person.

He didn’t make a commitment of any kind. He made no promise to himself. But, throughout his long life (he lived well into his eighties) his consciousness never once entertained the idea of perpetrating a practical joke that had any possibility of being embarrassing to the victim; it just may be too cruel to an unsuspecting yokel.

* Although Gramps wrote this in the guise of a fiction piece -- in third person and using the transparent pseudonym "Roy" for the main character -- it's a story that actually happened to him that many of us remember him telling. I've therefore taken the liberty of altering Roy's name throughout.