"Dyin' to get your product, are they? Heh, heh!" "Yep," deadpans the driver in the white International 9400 with the distinctive maroon design, pulling a Trailstar aluminum flatbed.

The exchange is familiar to the drivers who run throughout New England, west to South Dakota and occasionally California, and south to the Carolinas for A. Bellavance & Sons Inc. Trucking of Barre, Vt. For these drivers, just-in-time delivery is not a possibility. They carry the final product for those whose time has run out.

Taking things for granite

We think of cemetery monuments as staid, solid, permanent, immovable. But in Barre, Vt., they and the granite of which they are made seem to be in perpetual motion. Quarrying and stone finishing set the tempo for the self-proclaimed "Granite Capital of the World." When Barre granite finally leaves town, chances are it is on a Bellavance truck.

From late February until Christmas, when the winter snows halt operations, slabs of Barre gray granite are cut from the 400-foot-deep Rock of Ages Quarry. Jet torches operating at 4,200 degrees F cut chambers in the rock, freeing slabs that weigh from 22 to 25 tons. Booms fitted with 1-inch steel cables lift the slabs from the quarry.

Quarry-owned trucks move slabs from the quarry rim to a storage yard. From there, selected slabs are trucked less than a half-mile to the Rock of Ages manufacturing plant, where they are cut, polished and prepared for finishing. As much as 40% of the polished stone will be turned into monuments at the plant. Other pieces will be selected for finishing by some 40 craftsmen around Barre, or shipped to Europe and Asia.

Slabs on the slab

After the polished granite slabs have been carved, lettered and crated, they are consolidated in the two-story, 45-by-365-foot Bellavance warehouse. From Tuesday through Friday, a fleet of Bellavance straight trucks fans out through the streets and alleys of Barre picking up crated monuments of various shapes and sizes at the craftsmen's shops. The ancient, heavily timbered, three-bay warehouse is eternally being emptied and refilled. At times, the only way through the monuments around the floor is over them.

Overhead cranes pick up monuments by the ears of their wooden crates or by sliding a fork under them, and lift them from the warehouse floor onto flatbed or stakebed trailers. Each trailer carries about 100 pieces. In 30 loads, 2,000 to 3,000 monuments a week leave Barre on Bellavance trucks.

Bellavance uses 45-by-102 Transcraft trailers with sliding tandems or 48-by-102 aluminum Trailstar flatbeds with 10-foot-2-inch wide-spread axles. Some have sidekits to ease loading, keep salt and mud off the monuments, and allow tarping of some backhauls. Aluminum trailers are generally used for trips out west where a lighter combination of load (48,000 pounds of lumber, for instance) and trailer is desirable. Most of the tractors are International 9400s with Pro Sleeper cabs, 435-hp Cummins engines and 9-speed transmissions. All are Qualcomm equipped.

Thursdays and Fridays are the biggest shipping days, but loading and shipping continue through Saturday. Drivers of trucks loaded on Saturday may choose to leave then or spend the weekend in Barre before heading out, says Roland Bellavance, 43, one of the founder's sons and the company's president.

A fleet of multi-talented drivers

Bellavance drivers are an integral part of the loading operation. They are familiar with their routes and with the equipment available to unload their product at each of their 10 to 12 regular stops. Some monument dealers have cranes, others forklifts or hand carts, and a few offer only the grass at the side of the road. Thus drivers are in the best position to direct crane operators in placing each monument on their trailers for easy unloading.

In addition to the physical work of consolidating, unloading, reloading and warehousing, Bellavance drivers must be willing to make multiple drops and be able to work well with the monument dealers on their routes. The typical Bellavance driver progresses from warehouse work to local pickup to longer runs. Most stay with the company over the long term; one recently retired after 40 years.

Roland grins as he recalls his own 33-year history in trucking. Beginning at age 10, he spent hours washing and polishing his father's trucks for the privilege of driving one a few feet in the company yard.

Bellavance trucks rarely deadhead. Drivers backhaul hay and Bobcats from South Dakota; steel from Pittsburgh and Ohio; block granite from a Pennsylvania quarry; flue tiles from Williamsport, Pa.; and construction supplies from Alliance, Ohio.

Carving out a niche

Vermont's granite industry has grown considerably since 1835, when the state paid $400 for stone to build the state capitol at Montpelier. Horse and mule brought stone over nine hilly miles from the quarry. In the 1800s, the railroads arrived, along with European and Canadian stonecutters who helped build the industry. Truck transport began in the 1950s, as did Bellavance & Sons.

Bellavance has grown with the granite industry. However, unlike some of the products it carries, no grass grows under its feet. Granite - for cemetery monuments, mausoleums, signs and precision products such as surface plates, machine bases and press rolls for the paper industry - makes up only 20% of the trucking business. Another 70 trucks and vans haul paper, furniture and plastic trash bags out of northern Vermont.

The people whose names are carved into their granite loads aren't going anywhere anytime soon, but A. Bellavance & Sons Trucking Inc. certainly is.