INDICTMENT

By Russ Farrell

(Editor’s note: In the 1950s, The International Woodworkers Union [IWA} was trying to organize logger’s on the Olympic Peninsula and improve worker’s safety in the woods where many loggers lost their lives, and the company’s would try to blame the workers for their own deaths instead of the conditions they had to work under).

For long weeks straight, I faced my plate
	And saw Walt Paulus there.
His neck so crushed, bright red that gushed,
Snow and blood mixed with his hair.

For long weeks straight, I cleaned my plate 
	And never knew the taste.
Just knew debris…and that Ray and me
	Couldn’t wrest him from the place.

Couldn’t move the massive log from him 
	Nor free him from beneath,
Couldn’t tell if life were crushed within
	Or if he’d ever breathe.

For weeks beheld his broken form
	On that logging right-of-way
And heard his young wife moaning
	When she saw us come that day.

We’d started out to logging
	In a good four foot of snow
All summer, we’d not turned a wheel
	‘Cause’ the market was so slow.

Then Truman warred Korea,
	All the wheels began to spin;
For war’s a magic market 
	And it sucks us workers in.

The woods Boss told us later,
	“When your time comes, you will die.
Your days on earth are numbered,
	It’s been written and that’s why.”

And I read in the local paper
	Paulas downhill from the log,
How he sawed that timber from below
	Like his mind had flipped a cog.

For long weeks straight, I faced my plate
	And knew that both had lied.
I knew how Paulus bucked that tree
	And I was how Paulus died.

For long weeks straight, I faced my plate
	Knowing War had laid him low,
Though he died of slippery, frozen logs
	In four frozen feet of snow.