Nashville Chrome Read Online Free

jammed, followed by the groan of the engines shutting down and the quiet cursing of the operator, would have been a part of not just their auditory lives from the beginning, but the pattern and pulse of their every breath, whether they knew it or not: the incessant low-level anxiety of waiting for the sound of disaster, or failure.
    The children and some of the adults crept through the days finely tuned to sound; and when the pressure of the revving-up of the engines was released, the children would have been able to hear once again the shrilling of the seven-year locusts, a sound coming from the forest, as if the forest were healing itself.

    Once daily the sawmill operators would shut down for lunch in the rising heat of the day. The engines would fall silent and songbirds back at the shadowy edge of the forest would resume their calls. The locusts would be sawing, but that was a lulling sound.
    The workers' meals, while much of the rest of the country was starving, were fit for kings and princes: cold biscuits with blackberry jam and honey, thick sandwiches stuffed with salt-cured ham, fresh tomatoes, or fried chicken, or a sandwich made with leftover venison.
    The men visited among themselves, talking quietly about weather or hunting, or about the wood they were milling, or about the machines to which they were hostage—the machines the men served and serviced; machines that, if they stopped running, took away the workers' pay and dictated, with their sputtering valve-worn unpredictability, whether the men's families would have money for the most basic of items: flour, salt, sugar, shoes.
    Few of the workers owned any machines themselves, but rode horses or walked. Too many of them spent their money on whiskey, purchasing it from neighbors or buying the supplies and making it themselves. They were as dependent on it as they were on one another, and the machines, and they sat there at the edge of shade, in the clearing where they were gnawing deeper and deeper into the forest, and stopped and caught their breath, even as the rest of the country floundered in the Great Depression, threatening to sink back down into the gruesome poverty of a hand-to-mouth existence in which starvation was still an ever-present reality, as it had been ten thousand years before.
    And resting there—stalled there—the men had no real idea that for the first time they had much in common with other lives beyond their small hollow: that people on the other side of the great forest, whom they would never see—urban people whose lives were surely more complicated than their own, and who also surely possessed and moved through the world with some sort of laminar grace unbeknownst to the hill people—were now in the kind of dire economic straits that the hill people had known all their lives.
    As the meniscus of the forest separating the two grew thinner, and the desperations on either side of the forest more similar, it would have seemed that both sides might somehow have sensed they were becoming more similar, shaped and molded toward a sameness of circumstance if not spirit.
    But that was not yet the case. The men sipped their cooling coffee from battered steel thermoses and waited for their sweat to cool. They talked either reverently or scornfully about their machines, and when they were ready for the second part of their day, they disassembled the sawblades from their axles, and while the engines cooled further, some of the men would set about sharpening the circular blades of their saws, rasping with a motion so practiced that it was possible to tell who the saw sharpeners were by their musculature alone: a certain slope of shoulder, a particular thickness of forearms gotten from days and then years of grinding steel against steel.
    The saw sharpeners would place the blade flat on a spindle and file outward, honing the steel to address every point on the blade. They could tell roughly from their long experience when the