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There were the men in the pickle rooms, for instance, where old Antanas
had gotten his death; scarce a one of these that had not some spot of
horror on his person. Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing
a truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put
him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by
the acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners
and trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a
person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it
had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man
pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be criss-crossed
with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or to
trace them. They would have no nails,--they had worn them off pulling
hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like
a fan. There were men who worked in the cooking rooms, in the midst of
steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms the germs
of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed
every hour. There were the beef-luggers, who carried two-hundred-pound
quarters into the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind of work, that began
at four o'clock in the morning, and that wore out the most powerful men
in a few years. There were those who worked in the chilling rooms, and
whose special disease was rheumatism; the time limit that a man could
work in the chilling rooms was said to be five years. There were the
wool-pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of
the pickle men; for the pelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid
to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with
their bare hands, till the acid had eaten their fingers off. There were
those who made the tins for the canned meat; and their hands, too, were
a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance for blood poisoning.
Some worked at the stamping machines, and it was very seldom that one
could work long there at the pace that was set, and not give out and
forget himself and have a part of his hand chopped off. There were the
"hoisters," as they were called, whose task it was to press the lever
which lifted the dead cattle off the floor. They ran along upon a rafter,
peering down through the damp and the steam; and as old Durham's architects
had not built the killing room for the convenience of the hoisters, at every
few feet they would have to stoop under a beam, say four feet above the one
they ran on; which got them into the habit of stooping, so that in a few
years they would be walking like chimpanzees. Worst of any, however, were
the fertilizer men, and those who served in the cooking rooms. These people
could not be shown to the visitor,--for the odor of a fertilizer man would
scare any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men,
who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were
open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that
they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never
enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,--sometimes they would be
overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the
world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!
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