The Most They Ever Had by Rick Bragg Read Free Book Online

grim memory. But you do not imagine a missing hand.
    Yet in that disdain for the people who served him, Greenleaf really was no better or worse than a hundred others, no more oblivious to suffering. They forgive him—even the worst of the tragedies—as a fact of life. There was a Greenleaf everywhere there was a mill.
    “As many times as I went down to that house, I never did go inside,” said Homer Barnwell, who grew up with Greenleaf’s children and played with one of his sons, Russell. “Me and Russell went to school together. We were good buddies.” He cannot explain, exactly, why he always stopped beneath the columns. “I don’t know if they told me I couldn’t go in. I just knew I wasn’t supposed to.”
    But the power Greenleaf held over them seemed to swell, somehow, as the Great Depression settled on the town, and he did things that made no more sense than a small boy salting worms. He let their company houses rot down around them, would try to cheat workmen out of a dollar, for the sport of it, and was so arrogant he believed that he got to say where the sun should hang in the sky.
    ___
    To carve away outside interference on how the mill was run, Henry and Greenleaf reduced the board of directors from eleven to three and installed Greenleaf as vice president, superintendent and, most importantly, bookkeeper. The mill continued to report little profit, on paper, but Greenleaf grew wealthier. That prompted minority stockholders to demand to see company books. “Greenleaf refused to deliver said papers…and refused to allow the auditor to make examination of said papers,” stated a lawsuit filed by the minority stockholders. Greenleaf, after losing his appeal in the Alabama Supreme Court, just bought the stockholders out so he could run the mill as he pleased. The Henry family still held financial power over him and his mill, but to the working people here, Greenleaf was the monarch of the mill.
    He made money even as the Depression began to squeeze and starve the people of the foothills. As people here lost everything they had, as banks foreclosed on farms, family homes, and timberland, Greenleaf was collecting deeds.
    John Pruett, a young man then, was Greenleaf’s next-door neighbor and friend.
    But any rose-colored glasses he used to peer at his friend shattered a long time ago.
    “Back then, Greenleaf was the only one buying things,” said Pruett, who can still hear the bombast in Greenleaf’s voice. “Nobody else had any money…and he didn’t think much of you if you didn’t.”
    Pruett, who had gotten to know the patriarch through the Greenleaf children, found that he was somehow acceptable to the old man. He was not a mill worker’s child—his father ran the county retirement home—and he was welcome inside the Greenleaf home. In a time of prohibition and starvation, there was good bourbon at the Greenleaf table, and Friday night dances in the dining room. Greenleaf waltzed with the teenage sweethearts and friends of his sons, and, John Pruett said, liked to pat the young ladies on their derrieres. He would tell Pruett, as he left on a date, to “think of ol’ man Greenleaf” if he got to second base.
    A biplane pilot who dusted crops and barnstormed around the South, Pruett had stories to tell of daring loops and deadly crashes, and as he got older the two of them sat alone, just drinking, talking. “He was a colorful old bastard,” Pruett said. But in time, he would see the man sitting across from him on the veranda as cold, uncaring.
    “I felt sorry for the people,” said Pruett, who sometimes toured the mill with Greenleaf. “They didn’t even have a break for lunch,” and ate standing at their machines. “It was filthy. The latrines were stinking and dirty.” Greenleaf did extend credit, he said, so that his employees could eat, but they labored in perpetual debt. “What the company took out ate up their paycheck,” Pruett said. Greenleaf called it good business.
    He