Lyddie

by Katherine Paterson

She tried to control the shaking in her voice, but in the end was unable to. “I—I come to purchase the book,” she said.

  The gentleman slid off his stool and waited for her to continue. But Lyddie had already made her rehearsed speech. She didn’t have any more words prepared. Finally, he leaned toward her and said in the kindliest sort of voice, “What book did you have in mind, my dear?”

  How stupid she must seem to him! The shop was nothing but shelves and shelves of books, hundreds, perhaps thousands of books. “Uh-uh Oliver Twist, if you please, sir,” she managed to stammer out.

  “Ah,” he said. “Mr. Dickens. An admirable choice.”

  He showed her several editions, some rudely printed on cheap paper with only paper backing, but there was only one she wanted. It was beautifully bound in leather with gold letters stamped on its spine. It would take all her money, she knew. Maybe it would be more than she had. She looked fearfully at the kind clerk.

  “That will be two dollars,” he said. “Shall I wrap it for you?”

  She handed him two silver dollars from her purse. “Yes,” she said, sighing with relief, “Yes, thank you, sir.” And clutching her treasure, she ran from the shop and would have run all the way back to the boardinghouse except that she realized that people on the street were turning to stare.

  * * *

  * * *

  The Sundays of July were too precious to think of going to church. She didn’t even go to the big Sunday School Union picnic on the Fourth, though the sound of the fireworks sent her running from her room to the kitchen. There was no one at home to explain the fearsome racket, but she satisfied herself that the iron cook stove had not blown up, and returned to her sweltering bedroom to continue reading and copying. Mrs. Bedlow gave a general reminder at breakfast on the third Sabbath that many of her boarders were neglecting divine worship, and that the corporation would be most vexed if attendance did not soon improve among the inhabitants of Number Five.

  Lyddie slipped a copied page of her book into her pocket and managed to read through the long Methodist sermon. In this way, she only lost a little study time during the two-hour service. She was startled once into attention during the Scripture reading. “Why do you, a Jew, ask water of me a Samaritan?” the woman asked Jesus in the Gospel story. Jesus a Jew? Just like the wicked Fagin? No one had ever told her that Jesus was a Jew before. Just like Fagin, and yet not like Fagin at all.

  Lyddie studied on it as she walked home after the service. “Will you watch where you’re going, please.” She had walked straight into a stout woman in her Sunday best. Lyddie murmured an apology, but the woman humphed angrily and readjusted her bonnet, mumbling something under her breath that ended in “factory girls.”

  The sidewalk was too crowded for daydreaming. Lyddie packed her wonderings away in her head to think about some other time and began to watch where she was going.

  It was then that she saw Diana, or thought she did. At any rate she saw a couple, a handsome, bearded gentleman with a well-dressed lady on his arm, walking toward her on the opposite side of Merrimack Street. The woman was Diana, Lyddie was sure of it. Without thinking, Lyddie called out to her.

  But the woman turned her head away. Perhaps she was embarrassed to have a girl yelling rudely at her across a public thoroughfare. Then several carriages and a cart rolled past them, and before Lyddie could see them again, the man and woman had disappeared into the crowd of Sunday strollers. She must have been mistaken. Diana would have recognized her and come across to speak.

  12

  I Will Not Be a Slave

  She was good at her work—fast, nimble-fingered, diligent, and even in the nearly unbearable heat of the weaving room, apparently indefatigable. The overseer noticed from his high corner stool. Lyddie saw him watching, and she could tell by the smile on his little round lips that he was pleased with her. One afternoon a pair of foreign dignitaries toured the mill, and Mr. Marsden brought them over to watch Lyddie work. She tried to smile politely, but she felt like a prize sow at a village auction.

  They didn’t pause long. One of them spent the whole time mopping his face and neck and muttering foreign phrases which Lyddie was sure had to do with the temperature rather than the marvels of the Concord Corporation. The other stood by blinking the perspiration from his eyes, looking as though he might faint at any moment. “One of our best girls,” Mr. Marsden said, beaming. “One of our very best.”

  The pay reflected her proficiency. She was making almost $2.50 a week above her $1.75 board. While the other girls grumbled that their piece rates had dropped so that it had hardly been worth slaving through the summer heat, she kept her silence. With Diana gone, she had no friends in the weaving room. She worked too hard to waste precious time getting a drink at the water bucket or running out to the staircase to snatch a breath of air. Besides, her Oliver was pasted up, and any free moment her eyes went to the text. She read and reread the page for the day until she nearly had the words by heart.

  In this way, she found that even the words that had seemed impossible to decipher on first reading began to make sense as she discovered their place in the story. The names, though peculiar, were the easiest because she remembered them well from Betsy’s reading. She liked the names—Mr. Bumble, a villain, but, like her bear, a clumsy one. You had to laugh at his attempts to be somebody in a world that obviously despised him.

  Bill Sikes—a name like a rapier—a real villain with nothing to dilute the evil of him, not even Nancy’s love. She did not ask herself how a woman could stay with a man like Sikes. Even in her short life she had known of women who clung to fearsome husbands.

  Fagin she understood a bit. If the world despised you so much, you were apt to seek revenge on it. The boy thieves—what choice did they have with no homes or families—only workhouses that pretended Christian charity and dealt out despair?

  She knew with a shudder how close the family had come to being on the mercy of the town that winter her mother had fled with the babies. Was it to save them from the poor farm that she had gone? Lyddie had not thought of it that way before. Her mother might have realized that she and Charlie on their own were stout enough to manage, but with the extra burden of their mother and the babies … Had their mother really thought the bear was the devil on earth? Had she really thought the end was near? Lyddie wondered if she’d ever know the truth of that, anymore than she would ever know what had become of their father.

  A letter came to Number Five in her mother’s handwriting. Lyddie felt a pang as she ran to fetch the coins to reimburse Mrs. Bedlow for the postage. She hadn’t yet sent any money to her mother. She’d been meaning to. She even had a few dollars set aside for the purpose, but her head had been tied up in other things—her work, the boardinghouse, the dream world of a book—and she had neglected the poor who were her own flesh.

  She wanted not to have to open the letter. She wanted the letter never to have arrived, but there it was, and it had to be faced.

  Dear Datter,

  I was exceding surpriz to get your letter consern yr mov to Lowell. I do not no to say. if you can send muny it will be help to Judah and Clarissa. They fel a grate burdun. Babby Agnes is gone to God. Rachel is porely. Miny hav died, but Gods will be dun.

  Yr. loving mother,

  Mattie M. Worthen

  She tried to remember Agnes’s little face. She strained, squenching her eyes tight to get a picture of her sister, now gone forever. She was a baby. She couldn’t have been more than four the winter of the bear, but that was now nearly two years past. She would have changed. Maybe she didn’t even remember me, Lyddie thought. Could she have forgotten me and Charlie? Me, Lyddie, who washed and fed her and dear Charlie who made her laugh? She wanted to cry but no tears came, only a hard, dry knot in the place where her heart should have been.

  She must work harder. She must earn all the money to pay what they owed, so she could gather her family together b
ack on the farm while she still had family left to gather. The idea of living alone and orphaned and without brother or sister—a life barren of land and family like Diana’s …

  So it was that when the Concord Corporation once again speeded up the machinery, she, almost alone, did not complain. She only had two looms to tend instead of the four she’d tended during the summer. She needed the money. She had to have the money. Some of the girls had no sooner come back from their summer holidays than they went home again. They could not keep up the pace. Lyddie was given another loom and then another, and even at the increased speed of each loom, she could tend all four and felt a satisfying disdain for those who could not do the work.

  Prudence was the first of the roommates to go home for good. The suitor in Rutland was urging her to give up factory life, but there was a more compelling reason for her to return. She had begun coughing, a dry, painful cough through the night that kept both Betsy and Amelia awake, though not Lyddie. She slept like a caterpillar in winter. Indeed, she was cocooned from all the rest. Betsy had not offered to read another novel to Lyddie since the summer. She and several other operatives had formed study groups, one in Latin and another in botany. On Tuesday and Thursday evenings they commandeered half the parlor of Number Five and hired their own teacher. When Betsy wasn’t downstairs with her group, she was in the room preparing for her next session. “Would you like me to read the text to you?” she asked Lyddie once, taking her nose out from between the pages of her botany book.

  Lyddie smiled and shook her head. She knew about plants and flowers, at least as much as she craved to know. She didn’t know enough about Oliver Twist.

  With Prudence gone and the parlor congested, Amelia was often in the room. She insisted on talking, though Betsy, when there, ignored her and Lyddie tried hard to.

  “The two of you should be exercising your bodies instead of holing up in this stuffy room reading,” Amelia said.

  No answer.

  “Or at the least, stretching your souls.”

  No reply, though both Lyddie and Betsy knew that Amelia was reminding them that it was the Sabbath and neither of them had gone to services earlier.

  “What are you reading, Lyddie?”

  Maybe if I pretend not to hear, she’ll leave me be.

  “Lyddie!” This time she spoke so sharply that Lyddie looked up, startled. “Get your nose out of that book and come take a walk with me. We won’t have many more lovely Sunday afternoons like this. It will be getting cold soon.”

  “I’m busy,” Lyddie mumbled.

  Amelia came closer. “You’ve been reading that same book for months.” She reached over and took Oliver Twist out of Lyddie’s hands.

  “That’s my book, ey!”

  “Come on, Lyddie. Just a short walk by the river before supper. It will do you good.”

  “Will you get her out of here before I gag her with my bonnet ribbons and lash her to the bedpost?” Betsy said tightly, never taking her eyes off her own book.

  “She can walk by herself. I got to read my book.” Lyddie stretched her hand to take the book back, but Amelia held it up just out of reach.

  “Oh, come,” she said. “You’ve already read this book. I’ve seen you, and besides, it’s only a silly novel—not fit for reading, and a sin on the Sabbath—”

  Lyddie could feel the gorge rising in her throat. Silly novel? It was life and death. “You ain’t read it,” she said, forgetting her grammar in her anger. “How can you know?”

  Amelia flushed and her eyes blinked rapidly. She was no longer teasing. “I know about novels,” she said, her voice high and a little shaky. “They are the devil’s instrument to draw impressionable young minds to perdition.”

  Lyddie stared at Amelia with her mouth wide open.

  It was Betsy who spoke. “For pity’s sake, Amelia. Where did you ever hear such pompous nonsense?”

  Amelia’s face grew redder. “You are unbelievers and scoffers, and I don’t see how I can continue to live in the same room with you.”

  “Oh, hush.” Betsy’s tones were gentler than her words. “We do you no harm. Can’t we just live and let live?”

  Amelia began to cry. Her chiseled marble features crumbled into the angry, helpless rage of a child. As Lyddie watched, she could feel the hardness inside herself breaking, like jagged cracks across granite.

  She got a clean handkerchief from her own box and handed it to the older girl. “Here,” she said.

  Amelia glanced quickly at the hanky—making sure it was a clean one, Lyddie thought wryly—but she murmured a thank you and blew her nose. “I don’t know what possessed me,” she said, more in her old tone.

  “We’re all working like black slaves, is what,” said Betsy. “I’ve half a mind to sign the blooming petition.”

  “Oh Betsy, you wouldn’t!” Amelia lifted her nose out of the handkerchief, her eyes wide.

  “Wouldn’t I just? When I started in the spinning room, I could do a thirteen-hour day and to spare. But in those days I had a hundred thirty spindles to tend. Now I’ve twice that many at a speed that would make the devil curse. I’m worn out, Amelia. We’re all worn out.”

  “But we’d be paid less.” Couldn’t Betsy understand that? “If we just work ten hours, we’d be paid much less.”

  “Time is more precious than money, Lyddie girl. If only I had two more free hours of an evening—what I couldn’t do.”

  “Should you sign the petition, Betsy, they’ll dismiss you. I know they will.” Amelia folded the handkerchief and handed it back to Lyddie with a nod.

  “And would you miss me, Amelia? I thought you’d consider it good riddance. I thought I was the blister on your heel these last four years.”

  “I’m thinking of you. What will you do with no job? You’d be blacklisted. No other corporation would hire you.”

  “Oh,” said Betsy, “maybe I’d just take off West. I’ve nearly the money.” She smiled slyly at Lyddie. “I’m thinking of going out to Ohio.”

  “Ohio?”

  “Hurrah!” Betsy cried out. “That’s it! I wait till I’ve got all the money I need, sign the petition, and exit this city of spindles in a veritable fireworks of defiance.”

  “No!” Lyddie was startled herself that she had spoken so sharply. Both girls looked at her. “I mean, please, don’t sign. I can’t. I got to have the money. I got to pay the debts before—”

  “Oh Lyddie, hasn’t your friend Diana explained it all to you? We’re working longer hours, tending more machines, all of which have been speeded to demon pace, so the corporation can make a packet of money. Our real wages have gone down more often than they’ve gone up. Merciful heaven! Why waste our time on a paper petition? Why not a good old-fashioned turnout?” Betsy put her botany book on the counterpane face down to save the place, hugged her knees, and began to sing in a high childlike soprano:

  “Oh! Isn’t it a pity such a pretty girl as I

  Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?

  Oh! I cannot be a slave,

  I will not be a slave,

  For I’m so fond of liberty

  That I cannot be a slave.”

  “I ain’t a slave!” said Lyddie fiercely. “I ain’t a slave.”

  “Of course you aren’t.” Amelia’s confidence had returned and with it her schoolmarm manner.

  “At the inn I worked sometimes fifteen, sixteen hours a day and they paid my mother fifty cents a week, if they remembered. Here—”

  “Oh shush, girl. Nobody’s calling you a slave. I was just singing the old song.”

  “How do you know that radical song?” Amelia asked.

  “I was a doffer back in ’36. At ten you learn all the songs.”

  “And did you join the turnout?” Now Amelia looked like a schoolmarm who had caught a child in mischief.

  Betsy’s eyes blazed. “At ten? I led out my w
hole floor—running all the way. It was the most exciting day of my life!”

  “It does no good to rebel against authority.”

  “Well, it does me good. I’m sick of being a sniveling wage slave.” Betsy picked up her botany book again as though closing the discussion.

  “I mean it’s … it’s unladylike and … and against the Scriptures.” Amelia’s voice was shaking as she spoke.

  “Against the Bible to fight injustice? Oh, come now, Amelia. I think you’ve got the wrong book at that church of yours.”

  Lyddie looked from one angry face to the other. She cared nothing for being a lady or being religious. She was making far more money than she ever had at home in Vermont or was ever likely to. Why couldn’t people just live and let live?

  The clang of the curfew bell quieted the argument but not Lyddie’s anxiety.

  13

  Speed Up

  Lyddie could not keep the silly song out of her head. It clacked and whistled along with the machinery.

  Oh! I cannot be a slave,

  I will not be a slave …

  She wasn’t a slave. She was a free woman of the state of Vermont, earning her own way in the world. Whatever Diana, or even Betsy, might think, she, Lyddie, was far less a slave than most any girl she knew of. They mustn’t spoil it for her with their petitions and turnouts. They mustn’t meddle with the system and bring it all clanging down to ruin.

  She liked Diana, really she did, yet she found herself avoiding her friend as though radicalism were something catching, like diptheria. She knew Mr. Marsden was beginning to keep track of the girls who stopped by Diana’s looms. She could see him watching and taking mental note.

  When Diana came her way, Lyddie could feel herself stiffening up. And when Diana invited her to one of the Tuesday night meetings, Lyddie said “No!” so fiercely that she scared herself. Diana didn’t ask again. It ain’t about you, Lyddie wanted to say. It’s me. I just want to go home. Please understand, Diana, it ain’t about you.