Billy and Me

My cell phone rang with a number that I didn’t recognize. “This is Hal”, I answered the call as I usually do.

“This is Billy Pouncey. Remember me?”

Oh, yes. I remembered!

It was a cold, misty January morning back in 1976. I met Billy at the job for my first day working with him.

“Do you have a chalk line?” he asked.

“Yes, Sir.” I pulled the “Straight Line” box from my tool belt and the two of us began to “lay out” the house. The concrete slab was wet and there were puddles of standing water in several places. I didn’t understand how to read the plans at that infant stage of my education. I just held my end of the line on the pencil marks as directed.

When we finished “popping the lines” in chalk where the walls were to be located, he tossed the chalk box back and said, “You can throw that away. Once they get wet, they never hold chalk right again.”

In that instant, I knew that I didn’t like Billy. Who asks a kid to furnish a chalk box that you know you are going to ruin and then makes no offer to replace it?

A week or so later, we were framing a house for my dad. I was standing on the ceiling joists nailing jack rafters when Dad dropped by to check on things. He noticed something and mentioned it to Billy. I don’t remember what it was and couldn’t have seen it from my perch aloft.

“I think the slab is out of square”, Billy mused. He quickly took corner to corner measurements of the room he was standing in. “Yep! This room is three eighths out. The slab is out of square.”

Whatever it was, it must have been minor because Dad seemed to accept the answer and went on his way.

Well, that got me to thinking. I knew virtually nothing about the business at hand but I readily spotted a flaw in his logic.

“Mr. Pouncey, can I ask you a question?”

“What is it?”

“If you were to make a mistake laying the house out and you had one of your lines crooked, wouldn’t that make every room in the house out of square even if the slab was square?”

You would have thought that I had called his manhood and southern heritage and everything else into question! He lashed out at me for being a know-it-all and while I don’t remember everything he said, I will never forget how humiliated I felt in front of the other carpenters. My neck and face burned and I could feel myself trembling under his derisive tirade.

I glared down at him and he up at me. “You don’t have to act like such a smart-ass! I was just wondering!” It was not language that I normally used and even more so to an adult in authority. I was absolutely furious!

We broke for lunch a little later. “Where is Hal?” I heard Billy calling.

“Right here!”

“Well”, he began “I ought to fire you for talking like that to me, but I’m not. You need to understand that to learn, you first have to realize you don’t already know everything. Let’s just put that behind us and go on.”

I knew that if he had any reservations about firing me, it was purely from the question in his mind of how Dad might react. (As far as I know, nothing of the matter was ever discussed between them.)

“You don’t have to fire me. I’ve had enough of this!” My stomach was still queasy and I wanted with all my heart to slug that rude face of his. I gathered my tools and left, never to speak to him again for many a year.

As fate would have it, I got a job with Mr. Dan Gilliland. He was an old school carpenter who had suffered a devastating stroke but had no other way of earning a living but to hobble around the job and direct traffic. One day I offered to work for free if he would teach me to cut rafters. He took about a half an hour and showed me a few basic principals which I recorded in a small notebook. There are several ways to determine the length of rafters and he “stepped them off” with a framing square. I didn’t cut any, I just watched him. Then I went back to being a helper, “toting” joists, rafters, braces and decking.

A year or so later, I got a job with a crew building townhouses. The foreman taught me how to calculate and cut stairs. I went from unit to unit building the staircases behind the framers. The ability to cut in a roof or a set of stairs constituted the defining skills required to start my own crew and the first set of rafters that I cut was as a sub-contractor. It was not a smooth and easy process but I kept at it until I became as good as anyone out there.

I guess that I’m telling you all of this to prove that I could learn from others and that the willingness to THINK was not a bad thing at all.

For the next thirty something years, Billy would cross my mind from time to time and it was always with resentment for the way that I had been treated. And now, here was his voice on the phone.

“Hal, I’ve got a problem and I’ve been told by more than one person that you would be just the one to help me.” No mention was made of the past by either of us.

We set a time to meet and on the appointed morning he opened the door and we each looked intently at one another for a few seconds, taking in the effects of the many years in the other’s face. I shook his thick, hard hand and followed the old man as he limped to the breakfast area.

“Sit down” he gestured, “How about a cup of coffee?”

“Sure.”
“How do you take it?”

“Black.”

I took the chair that was offered and sipped the hot coffee that he poured for me.

“Billy, before we talk about your problem, I want to clear something up. I’ve always felt bad about the way we parted company. At the time, I felt that you were very unfair to me but I’ve gotten old enough that I can look back and see how immature I was. Maybe I came across as a brat but I certainly didn’t mean it that way.”

“What are you talking about?” He seemed genuinely puzzled.

What was I talking about? How could he have possibly forgotten that morning when we exchanged such angry words and I stormed off? How could he not be reminded of it any time he thought of my name just as I always had at the thought of his?

I recounted that incident of the crooked slab and the innocent question that had been my undoing all those long years ago.

Billy looked at me through eyes that squinted permanently from thousands of hours exposed to the blazing Alabama sun.

“Well…..let me say two things. First, I have no memory of what you’re talking about and second, I truly hope that you will forgive me. I was not only a very immature man, I was in way over my head with all of the things that I had going on. I’m not excusing my bad behavior, but I am sorry I acted that way.”

So, there it was. All of those years I was so certain that there was this breach between us and that he had thought just as poorly of me as I had of him. Meanwhile, he had forgotten all about it! In my mind, the issue needed to be addressed and resolved before we could go on to consider any kind of meaningful relationship.

This begs another question altogether: How many people have I crossed paths with who have been indelibly stamped with some negative memory of our encounter? No one could have been any less mature or hotter headed than I for a lot of those years! I cringe when I think about it because I can remember plenty of times that I was a total idiot and some of them are not very long ago!

It remains to be seen whether I can be of help to Billy or not but I will certainly do my best!

Yes, Billy. We all grew up, didn’t we? Now we’re two old men with a pot of coffee and a lifetime of “the way it used to be” memories.

God bless you, my friend!

Hal F. Leary
2-14-15