The ten-hour people were putting out a weekly newspaper, The Voice of Industry. Lyddie tried to keep her eyes from straying toward the copies of the weekly, which were thrown with seeming carelessness on the parlor table. Then one night after supper she and Amelia came upstairs to find Betsy chortling over the paper in their bedroom.
“Here!” she said, holding it out to Lyddie. “Read this! Those plucky women are going after the legislature now!”
Lyddie recoiled as though someone had offered her the hot end of a poker.
“Oh Lyddie,” Betsy said. “Don’t be afraid to read something you might not agree with.”
“Leave Lyddie alone, Betsy. You’ll only get her into trouble.”
“Never fret, Amelia. Our Lyddie loves money too much to risk trouble.”
Lyddie flushed furiously. She was worried about the money, but she wished Betsy wouldn’t put it like that. She wanted to explain to them—to justify herself. Maybe if she told them about the bear—about how close her family’d come to moving to the poor farm. Maybe if she told them about Charlie—how bright he was and how she knew he could do as good at college as Betsy’s stuckup brother. Only Charlie wasn’t at Harvard. He was sweeping chaff off a mill floor. And little Agnes had gone to God. She shuddered and held her peace. It might sound like cowardly excuses when the words were formed. But it didn’t matter if they understood or not. As much as she admired Diana, she wouldn’t be tricked by her, or even by Betsy, to joining any protest. Just another year or two and she could go home—home free. I got to write Mama, she thought. I got to tell her how hard I’m working to pay off the debt.
Dear Mother,
I was made quite sad by your letter telling of my sister Agnes’s death. I am consern that you are not taking proper care of your health. I have enclose one dollar. Please get yourself and little Rachel good food and if possible a warm shawl for the winter. I will send more next payday. I try to save for the debt, but you must tell me how much it is exakly. And do I send it direct to Mr. Wescott or to some bank? I am well. I work hard.
Your loving daughter,
Lydia Worthen
She checked her spelling in Oliver. The grammar as well. She felt a little thrill of pride. She knew she was improving in her writing. Not that her mother would be able to tell, but Charlie would. She took a second sheet to begin a letter to him, then hesitated, suddenly shy. It had been so long. She hardly knew what to say. I must go to see him soon as my year is up, she thought. I’ll lose touch. Or—he’ll forget me. She jerked her head to loosen the thought. Charlie would no more forget her than the snow would forget to fall on Camel’s Hump Mountain. But she should write. He might think she had forgotten him.
Dear Charlie,
No, “Dear Charles.” (He was nearly a man now and might not like a pet name.)
Dear Charles,
She held the pen so tight her fingers cramped.
I have heard from Mother that little Agnes has died. Did she write you as well this sad news? We must get Mother and Rachel home soon. I am saving most of my wages for the debt. I am working hard and making good pay. We can go home soon I stil hop. (ha ha). I trust you are well.
I am as ever your loving sister,
Lydia Worthen
A great blob of ink fell from the pen right at her name. She blotted it, but the black spread up into the body of the letter. She tried to tell herself that it didn’t matter—that Charlie would not be bothered, but she was too bothered by it herself. She’d meant the letter to show him how well she was doing—how she was learning and studying as well as working, but the black stain ruined it. She destroyed the page and could not seem to start another.
* * *
* * *
No matter how fast the machines speeded up, Lyddie was somehow able to keep pace. She never wasted energy worrying or complaining. It was almost as if they had exchanged natures, as though she had become the machine, perfectly tuned to the roaring, clattering beasts in her care. Think of them as bears she’d tell herself. Great, clumsy bears. You can face down bears.
From his high stool at the back corner of the great room, she could almost feel the eyes of the overseer upon her. Indeed, when Mr. Marsden got up to stroll the room he always stopped at her looms. She was often startled by the touch of his puffy white hand upon her sleeve, and when she turned, his little mouth would be forming something she took to be complimentary, for his eyes were crinkled as though the skin about them had cracked in the attempt to smile.
She would nod acknowledgment and turn back to her machines, which at least did not reach out and pat you when you weren’t watching.
He was a strange little man. Lyddie tried once to imagine him dressing in the morning. His impeccable wife tying that impeccable tie, brushing down that black coat, which by six A.M. would be white with the lint blowing about the gigantic room. Did she polish his head as well? And with what? You couldn’t use shoeblack of course. Was there a head grease that could be applied and then rubbed to a high shine? She saw the overseer’s impeccable wife with the end of a towel in either hand briskly polishing her husband’s head, just above the ears, then carefully combing back the few strands of grayish hair from one ear to the other. It was hard to put a face on the overseer’s wife. Was she a meek, obedient little woman, or someone like Mrs. Cutler, who would rule him as he ruled the girls under his watchful eye? Not a happy woman, though, for Mr. Marsden did not seem to be the stuff from which contentment could be woven.
Soon there was little time to wonder and daydream. She had done so well on her two, then three, machines that Mr. Marsden gave her a fourth loom to tend. Now she hardly noticed people anymore. At mealtimes the noise and complaints and banter of the other girls were like the commotion of a distant parade. She paid no attention that the food was not as bountiful as it had once been. There was still more than she could eat. Nor did she notice that the taste of the meat was a bit off or the potatoes moldy. She ate the food set before her steadily, with no attempt to bolt as much as possible in the short time allotted. When the bell rang, it didn’t matter what was left untasted, she simply pushed back from the table and went back to her bears.
She was too tired now at night to copy out a page of Oliver to paste to her loom. It hardly mattered. When would she have had time to study it? After supper she stumbled upstairs, hardly taking time to wash, changed to her shift, and fell into bed.
Though Amelia cajoled and Mrs. Bedlow made announcements at mealtime, Lyddie did not attempt to go to church. Her body wouldn’t have cooperated even if she’d had the desire to go. She slept out Sunday mornings and forced herself up for dinner, which she ate, as she ate all her meals now, automatically and without conversation. She was as likely to nap again in the afternoon as not.
“It’s like being a racehorse,” Betsy was saying. “The harder we work, the bigger prize they get.”
Amelia murmured something in reply, which Lyddie was too near sleep to make out.
“I’ve made up my mind to sign the next petition.”
“You wouldn’t!”
“Wouldn’t I just?” Betsy laughed. “The golden lad finishes Harvard this spring. His fees are paid up, and I’ve got nearly the money I need now. My Latin is done. So as soon as I complete my botany course, I’ll be ready to leave this insane asylum.”
Even Lyddie’s sleep-drugged mind could feel a twinge. She did not want Betsy to go.
“It would be grand—going out with the bang of a dishonorable dismissal.”
“But where would you go? You’ve always said you could never settle in Maine.”
“Not to Maine, Amelia. To Ohio. I’m aiming to go to college.”
“To college?”
“Do I surprise you, Amelia? Betsy, in public the devourer of novels, in secret a woman of great ambition?”
“College. I wouldn’t have imagined—”
“If they dismiss m
e, I’d have to stop stalling and blathering and get myself to Oberlin College and a new life.” By now, Lyddie was propped up on her elbow listening, torn between pride for Betsy and horror at what she was proposing. “So, you’re awake after all, our sleeping beauty.”
“Lyddie, tell her not to be foolish.”
“I’d hate you to leave,” Lyddie said quietly.
Betsy snorted. “I’d be gone a month and a half before you’d ever notice,” she said.
* * *
* * *
The overseers were being offered premiums—prizes to the men whose girls produced the most goods in a pay period—which was why the machines were speeded and why the girls hardly dared take time off even when they were feverish.
“If you can’t do the work,” Lyddie heard Mr. Marsden say to a girl at the breakfast break, “there’s many a girl who can and will. We’ve no place for sickly girls in this room.”
Many girls—those with families who could support them or sweethearts ready to marry them—went home, and new girls came in to replace them. Their speech was strange and their clothing even stranger. They didn’t live in the corporation boardinghouses but in that part of the city known as “the Acre.”
The Acre wasn’t part of the tour for foreign dignitaries who came to view the splendor of Lowell—the model factory city of the New World. Near the Northern Canal, sprouting up like toadstools, rose the squat shacks of rough boards and turf with only a tiny window and a few holes to let in light. And each jammed with Irish Catholics who, it was said, bred like wharf rats. Rumor also had it that these papists were willing to work for lower wages, and, since the corporations did not subsidize their board and keep, the Irish girls were cheaper still to hire.
Diana was helping the new girls settle in, teaching them just as she had taught Lyddie in the spring. Lyddie herself was far too busy to help anyone else. She could not fall behind in her production, else her pay would drop and before she knew it one of these cussed papists would have her job.
Often, now, the tune came unbidden to her head:
Oh! I cannot be a slave,
I will not be a slave …
It was a dreary December without the abundance of snow that Lyddie yearned for. What snow fell soon turned to a filthy sludge under the feet of too many people and the soot and ashes from too many chimneys. Her body itched even more than it usually did in winter. The tub of hot water, that first night in Mrs. Bedlow’s bedroom, proved to be her only full bath in the city, for, like most of the companies, the Concord Corporation had not seen fit to provide bathhouses for their workers. The girls were obliged to wash themselves using only the wash basins in their rooms, to which Tim hauled a pitcher of cold water once a day.
Despite the winter temperatures, the factory stayed hot with the heat of the machinery, the hundreds of whale oil lamps lit against the winter’s short, dark days, and the steam piped into the rooms to keep the air humid lest warp threads break needlessly and precious time and materials be wasted.
Lyddie went to work in the icy darkness and returned again at night. She never saw the sun. The brief noon break did not help. The sky was always oppressive and gray, and the smoke of thousands of chimneys hung low and menacing.
At the Lawrence Corporation, just down the riverbank from the Concord, a girl had slipped on the icy staircase in the rush to dinner. She had broken her neck in the fall. And the very same day, a man loading finished bolts of cloth onto the railroad cars in the Lawrence mill yard had been run over and crushed. There were no deaths at the Concord Corporation, but one of the little Irish girls in the spinning room had caught her hair in the machinery and was badly hurt.
Diana took up a collection for the hospital fees, but Lyddie had no money on her person. Besides, how could she give a contribution to some foreigner when she had her own poor baby sister to think of? She vowed to send her mother something next payday. She had opened a bank account and it was growing. She watched it the way one watched a heifer, hardly patient for the time to come when you could milk it. She tried not to resent withdrawing money to send to her mother, but she could see the balance grow each payday. She hadn’t seen her mother for two years. She had no way of knowing what her true needs were. And surely, as mean as Judah was and as crazy as Clarissa might be, they would not let their own sister or her child go hungry.
Christmas was not a holiday. It came and went hardly noticed. Amelia had a New Year’s gift from her mother—a pair of woolen gloves, which she wrapped again in the paper they had come in and hid in her trunk. Only someone fresh from the farm or one of the Irish would wear a pair of homemade gloves in Lowell. Betsy’s brother sent her a volume of essays “to improve my mind.” She laughed about his gift, knowing that it had been bought out of the money she sent him each month for his school allowance. “Oh, well,” she said. “Only a few more months and our golden lad will be on his own. Ah, if only our sexes had been reversed! Imagine him putting me through college.”
Lyddie received no gifts, indeed expected none, but she did get a note from Triphena, who thanked her for returning the loan. There was little news to report from Cutler’s. She asked after Lyddie’s health and complained that the mistress was as harsh as ever. Willie had run off at last, and the new boy and girl weren’t worth two blasts on a penny whistle. Lyddie had to smile. Poor Triphena.
Was she thinking of Triphena when it happened? Or was she overtired? It was late on Friday—the hardest time of the week. Was she careless when she replaced the shuttle in the right-hand box or had there been a knot in the weft thread? She would never know. She remembered rethreading the shuttle and putting it back in the race, yanking the lever into its slot … Before she could think she was on the floor, blood pouring through the hair near her right temple … the shuttle, the blasted shuttle. She tried to rise, she needed to stop the loom, but Diana got there almost at once, racing along the row, tripping with both hands the levers of her own machines and Lyddie’s four as she ran. She knelt down beside Lyddie.
“Dear God,” she said, cradling Lyddie’s head in her lap. She pulled her handkerchief from her pocket and held it tight against Lyddie’s temple. It filled immediately with blood. She eased her apron out from under Lyddie’s head, snatched it off her shoulders, and pressed it against the soaked handkerchief.
Girls had begun to gather. “Get me some cold water, Delia—clean!” she cried after the girl. “And handkerchiefs, please. All of you!” she cried to the girls crowding about them.
Mr. Marsden’s head appeared in the circle of heads above them. The girls shifted to make room for the overseer. “What’s this here?” His voice was stern, but his face went ashen as he looked down at the two girls.
“She was hit by the shuttle,” Diana said.
“What?” he yelled above the noise.
“Shuttle—shuttle—shuttle.” The word whished back and forth across the circle like a shuttle in a race.
“Well … well … get her out of here.” He clamped a large blue pocket handkerchief over his nose and mouth and hurried back to his high stool.
“Not partial to the sight of blood, are we?” The speaker was kneeling on the floor beside Diana, offering her the dainty white handkerchiefs she had collected from the operatives.
The cool water came at last. Diana lifted her apron from Lyddie’s temple. The first gush of blood had eased now to a trickle. She dipped a handkerchief into the water and, gently as a cow licking its newborn, cleaned the wound. “Can you see all right?” she asked.
“I think so.” Lyddie’s head pounded, but when she opened her eyes she could see nearly as well as she ever could in the dusty, lamp-lit room. She closed her eyes almost at once against the pain.
“How about your stomach? Do you feel sick?” Lyddie shook her head, then stopped. Any movement seemed to make the pain worse.
There was a sound of ripping cloth at Lyddie’s ear. She opened her eyes. “Your apron,”
Lyddie said. “Don’t—” Aprons cost money.
Diana seemed not to hear, continuing to tear until her apron was in shreds. She bound the least bloodied pieces around Lyddie’s head and tied them in place with a narrower strip. “Do you think you could stand up?” she asked.
In answer, Lyddie started to get up. Diana and Delia helped her to her feet. “Just stand here for a minute,” Diana said. “Don’t try to move yet.”
The room spun. She reached out toward the beam of the loom to steady herself. Diana put her arm around Lyddie’s shoulders. “Lean on me,” she said. “I’ll take you home.”
“The bell ain’t rung,” Lyddie protested weakly.
“Oh Lyddie, Lyddie,” Diana said, “whatever shall we do with you?” She sighed and pulled Lyddie close. “Delia, help us down the stairs, please. I think I can get her the rest of the way by myself.”
Slowly, slowly they went, stopping every few feet to rest. “We don’t want to open that cut again,” Diana said. “Easy, easy.” Mrs. Bedlow helped Diana take Lyddie up the stairs to the second-floor infirmary, not her own room as she wished. But Lyddie’s head pounded too much for her to insist that they take her up still another flight of stairs.
“I’ll send Tim for Dr. Morris,” she heard Mrs. Bedlow saying. No, no, Lyddie wanted to say. Doctors cost money.
“No,” Diana was saying. “Not Dr. Morris. Dr. Craven. On Fletcher Street.”
She was asleep when the doctor arrived, but she opened her eyes when she heard the murmur of voices above her. “Lyddie,” Diana was saying softly, “Dr. Craven needs to look at the wound.”
They were there, the two of them standing above her, Diana’s familiar face flushed, smiling anxiously down at her, and the doctor’s … He was a handsome, bearded gentleman—young, his dark brown eyes studying her own, his long, thin hands already reaching to loosen Diana’s makeshift bandage. “Now let’s look at that cut of yours,” he said in a tone compounded of concern and assurance—the perfect doctor.
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