Sulfur

Everybody, except me, smoked. All my friends, that worked in the produce department of the grocery story, did. They had to do it in the back room where we stored produce that didn't need to be in coolers. There were palettes of onions in 50 pound bags, potatoes in 100 pound bags, bushels of okra and so on. There were metal barrels for compost, a workstation with running water and a sink, a shrink-wrap machine and a huge machine for packing the potatoes into 5 pound bags. It was a staging, processing and preparation area.

Jim was one of the three full-time produce department managers and he looked a lot like Popeye. He was thin and boney, and quietly drunk most of the time. He always smelled like alcohol. The senior manager didn't like him very much, it seemed, and regularly searched for a stash of liquor that he was sure was hidden somewhere in the back room. I think he wanted evidence sufficient to fire him but Jim showed up on time and was good at his job. All the guys liked him.

One day Jim had been in the cooler a long time loading a flat-top cart with boxes of produce to put out on the racks and tables where customers shopped. I was working at the sink with another guy when James pushed the cart out of the cooler. He walked over to the workstation where we were trimming and wrapping lettuce. He had a cigarette hanging from his lips and asked for a light.

My coworker offered him a strike-anywhere wooden match, a sulfur match as we called it. James made a slightly anguished face at the match and said he couldn't use sulfur matches. We asked why.

He had been an army train engineer during the war. One of his assignments was to pull a liberating troop train into the Dachau concentration camp. He said the smell of sulfur in the camp was so strong that it made him very ill.

Jim had never talked about his part in the war before, nor did he again.

The senior manager never found Jim's stash.