Courtesy Calls: The Better Business Bureau (3)

I also filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau, because redundancy is a professional habit and because a labor complaint arriving simultaneously with a BBB inquiry arriving simultaneously with a journalist's questions creates the kind of convergent pressure that teaches a man like Thurman Yow his problem is not a single point of failure. It is a system. The same kind of system he built. Aimed in the other direction.

I filed a third complaint with the Randolph County Labor Standards office, which handles wage disputes for unincorporated areas and which maintains a public record of complaints that the Courier-Tribune monitors as a matter of routine.

Three vectors. The reporter. The BBB. The county. None of them connected to each other. None of them connected to me. Each sufficient on its own to cause Thurman Yow a series of uncomfortable afternoons. Together they constituted what I would describe, if I were explaining it to a man I was training, as an environment in which the target's remaining options are compliance or escalation, and escalation requires deploying resources his books cannot survive the scrutiny of.

I thought about this while I repaired the fence section on the eastern pasture line that I had been meaning to get to since April. The post was rotted at the base. I dug it out, set a new one in concrete, restrung the wire. The physical work took most of a Saturday afternoon and was satisfying in the way physical work is satisfying when your mind is working on something else, which is something I learned a long time ago in a context I will not describe here. What my mind was working on was the pleasure of the three-vector convergence — the clean geometry of it, the way each vector reinforced the others without reference, the economy of the design. Whether that pleasure was about the justice or about the design is a question I have asked myself and answered differently depending on the evening, and the honest answer is that I do not fully trust the evenings when the answer is justice, because those are the evenings when the answer comes too easily.

The following Tuesday I was at Holt's at my usual time. Pearl had the coffee ready. She set the cup in front of me and moved down the counter to the man in the Caterpillar hat who comes in most mornings before his crew assembles.

I read the paper. The paper had nothing about Thurman Yow, which I expected. Journalists work on timelines longer than the events they cover.

Pearl came back with the pot.

"Refill?"

"Please."

She poured. She did not offer pie. I did not expect pie. The pie is not a transaction. It is Pearl's assessment, delivered in pastry rather than language, of what a particular morning requires. This morning required coffee and the counter and the particular quality of sitting in a room where you are known without being known about, which is what Holt's has been for me for eleven years.

"You look like you finished something," Pearl said, passing with a plate for the booth behind me.

"Might have," I said.

She moved on. I watched Fayetteville Street through the glass door. I finished my coffee. Three dollars on the counter. See you Thursday, Pearl. See you Thursday.

I came home that evening to a cat on the porch rail.

I had not seen it before, though the twelve acres host things I do not see — deer in the wood line, the occasional fox, a family of raccoons under the outbuilding that has been there since before I moved back and that I have reached an understanding with involving mutual indifference and a secured trash can lid. The cat was new, or new to the porch. These are different things.

It was a short-haired tabby, lean in the way of animals that feed themselves, with ears that had been through a few seasons and a face that had the particular narrowness of a thing that survives by being faster than what it eats and more cautious than what might eat it. Its eyes were conducting a survey of the yard with the focused attention of a creature that has decided this space is relevant to its interests and is now cataloging the space against criteria I was not privy to.

It sat on the rail near the corner post, in the spot where the rail is wide enough to sit without adjusting, and it looked at me with the expression of an animal that has noted my arrival and is assessing what I intend to do about it.

I had no plans for it. I walked past and went inside. Through the kitchen window I could see it still on the rail, still surveying, apparently satisfied with whatever it had concluded about me, which was presumably that I was not food, not a threat, and not interesting enough to vacate the rail for.

I stood at the sink. The glass bird was in the window, catching the last of the evening light the way it does in May — the low angle finding the blue and doing something with it that makes the glass less visible than the color, so that what you see is not an object on a shelf but a quality of light that happens to have the shape of a bird. It looked the way it usually looks. I ran the water. I washed my hands.

I thought about the file and about the woman at Holt's whose voice had started this and about Sheryl wiping the counter with the small automatic circles of a person who has cleaned enough surfaces that the motion lives in her hands. I thought about the tip jar with the narrow slot and about Thurman Yow, whom I have never met and do not intend to meet, because what I had done to Thurman Yow did not require his acquaintance. It required information. The information was gathered. The information was delivered. The rest was solving itself, or would, in the way that information solves things when it finds the right hands — not immediately, not dramatically, but with the mechanical patience of a thing that has started and will not stop.

I dried my hands. I made dinner. I read for a while — a book about the history of furniture manufacturing in the Piedmont, which is a subject that interests me in the way that anything about how work gets organized interests me, and which I was finding more absorbing than I expected, particularly the chapters about the mill closures and what happened to the people who had organized their lives around work that decided, one Tuesday, to be somewhere else. The twelve acres settled into evening. Outside, the cat had gone from the rail without my noticing, which meant either speed or silence or both, and I filed this under the category of things I did not need to know but intended to observe further.

The blotter item appeared three weeks later.

I read it at Holt's on a Tuesday. Pearl brought the coffee. I read the item twice. Folded the paper.

Through the glass door, Fayetteville Street was conducting its business. The air through the door smelled like pavement and cut grass and the distant mineral note the Uwharrie carries into town in June when the river is low and slow and moving toward a destination it has known about for longer than anyone in Randolph County has been paying attention.

I finished my coffee. Three dollars on the counter. See you Thursday, Pearl. See you Thursday.

I drove home on roads I know. The twelve acres were quiet. The fence I had repaired that month was holding. The wood line was dark and full. The evening had the particular weight of a North Carolina June when the humidity has committed but has not yet become what it will become in July, which is a condition you negotiate rather than a season you inhabit.

I went inside.

From The Courier-Tribune: The Randolph County Labor Standards office confirmed this week that a complaint has been filed against a local food service employer regarding tip pool practices and scheduling irregularities. The investigation is ongoing. No charges have been filed.