Lyddie

by Katherine Paterson

  She’s ill—like Betsy and Rachel and Prudence and a host of others, Lyddie thought. She’s worked here too long and too hard. How much longer could Diana last? How much longer could any of them last?

  I must do something for her, Lyddie decided, give her a present. There was only one present good enough.

  “Diana?” Lyddie worked her way through the jostling crowd of operatives crossing the yard. “I been thinking.” She glanced around to see if anyone was listening, but all the girls were too intent on rushing home for their suppers. “About the—the—” Even now that she had made up her mind, she couldn’t quite bring herself to speak the forbidden word in the very courtyard of the corporation. She took a deep breath. “I been thinking on signing.”

  The older girl turned to her and put her hand on Lyddie’s sleeve. “Well,” she said, and Lyddie couldn’t quite make out the rest in the clamor of the yard, but it sounded something like: “Well, we’ll see,” as Diana let herself be carried away in the rushing stream of operatives.

  But I mean it, thought Lyddie. I mean it.

  Earlier in the spring she had known that there were girls in her own house secretly circulating the petition, but now that she had made up her mind to it, she wanted to do it for Diana. How could it be a true present otherwise? After supper she put on her bonnet and went to Diana’s boardinghouse. She asked one of the girls in the front room of Number Three for Diana. “Diana Goss?” the girl asked with a sneer. “It’s Tuesday. She’ll be at her meeting.”

  “Oh.”

  The girl looked her up and down as though memorizing her features. Maybe the girl was a corporation spy. Stare her down, Lyddie told herself. The other was shorter than she, so when Lyddie stood tall and looked down into her eyes, the girl shifted her gaze. “It’s at their reading room on Central Street.” She glanced back at Lyddie. The sneer had returned. “Number Seventy-six. All are welcome. So I’m told.”

  In for a penny, in for a pound, thought Lyddie, and made her way into town.

  The meeting had already begun. Someone was reading minutes. The forty or so girls crowded into the small room looked almost like a sewing circle, so many of the girls were doing mending or needlework.

  “Hello.” The young woman who seemed to be in charge interrupted the secretary’s droning. “Come on in.”

  Lyddie stepped into the room, looking about uncertainly for a chair. To her relief she saw Diana, getting up and coming toward her. “You came,” she said, her tired features relaxing into a smile. It reminded her of that first night when she had gone to see Diana, except then Diana had looked lovely and full of life. She took Lyddie to a place where there were two vacant chairs and sat beside her while the meeting carried on.

  It was hard for Lyddie to follow the discussion. They were planning something for some sort of rally at the end of the month. She kept waiting for someone to mention the petition, so she could declare herself ready to sign, but no one did. At the first curfew bell, the woman in charge pronounced the meeting adjourned until the following Tuesday, and the girls broke into a buzz, gathering their sewing things together and putting on bonnets to leave.

  The woman who had been in charge came over to where Lyddie was standing with Diana. She stretched out her hand. “I’m Mary Emerson,” she said. “Welcome. I think this is your first time with us.”

  Lyddie shook the woman’s hand and nodded.

  “This is my friend, Lydia Worthen,” Diana said. “She’s thinking about joining us.”

  Miss Emerson turned expectantly to Lyddie. “I come to sign the—the petition,” Lyddie said.

  The woman cocked her head, seemingly puzzled. What was the matter with her? “The one to ask for ten-hour workdays.” Why was she explaining the petition to a leader of the movement? It was crazy.

  “Maybe next year,” Diana was saying quietly.

  “No. I made up my mind to it. I want to do it now. Tonight.”

  “But we’ve already submitted it,” Miss Emerson said. “We had to. Before the legislature recessed for the year.”

  She had at long last made up her mind to do it, and now it was too late? “But—”

  “Next year,” Diana repeated, “you can put your name in the very first column, if you like.”

  “Yes,” said Miss Emerson brightly. “That’s our motto—‘We’ll try again.’ Since four thousand names didn’t convince them, next year we’ll have to get eight.” She gave Lyddie the kind of encouraging smile a teacher gives to a slow pupil. “We’ll need all the help we can get.”

  Lyddie stood there, openmouthed, looking from Diana’s thin face to the other woman’s robust one. Too late. She’d come too late. She was always too late. Too late to save the farm. Too late to keep her family together. Too late to do for Diana the only thing she knew to do.

  “We’d better get you back to Number Five,” Diana was saying. Like she was some helpless child who needed tending. “You wouldn’t want to be late.”

  They hurried down the dimly lit streets toward the Concord boardinghouses without speaking. Lyddie wanted to explain—to say she was sorry, to somehow make it up to Diana—but she didn’t know how to do it.

  As they neared Number Five, Diana broke the silence. “Thank you for coming tonight.”

  “Oh Diana, I come too late.”

  “You came as soon as you could.”

  “I’m always too late to do any good.”

  “Lyddie …” Diana was hesitating. “I’ll miss you.”

  What was she saying? “I ain’t going nowhere. I’ll be right here. Next year and the next.”

  “No. I’m the one who’ll be leaving.”

  “But where would you be going?” Diana had always said that the mill was her family.

  “Boston, I think.”

  “I don’t understand. Are you ailing?”

  “Lyddie, if I don’t leave soon—right away, in fact—I’ll be dismissed.”

  “It’s because of the cussed petition. They’re trying to get you—”

  “No. Not that. I wish it were.” They had stopped walking and stood several yards away from the steps of Number Five. They both watched the heavy door swing open and glimpsed the light inside as two girls hurried in to beat the final bell. “It’s because … Oh Lyddie, don’t despise me …”

  “I could never do that!” How could Diana say such a thing?

  “Lyddie, I’ve been, oh, I don’t know—foolish? wicked?”

  “What are you talking about? You could never be—”

  “Oh, yes.” She was silent for a moment as though sifting the words she needed from the chaff of her thoughts. “I’m going to have a child, Lyddie.”

  “A what?” Her voice had dropped to a stunned whisper. She tried to search Diana’s features, but it was too dark to read her expression. “Who done this to you?” she asked finally.

  “Oh Lyddie, no one ‘done’ it to me.”

  “Then he’ll marry you, ey?”

  “He—he’s not free to marry. There’s a wife … in Concord. She wouldn’t come to live here in a factory town. Though her father is one of the owners.” Diana’s laugh was short and harsh.

  It was that doctor. Lyddie was sure of it. He looked so kind and gentle and all the time … “But what will you do?” She could hear now the shrillness in her voice. She tried to tone it down. “Where can you go?”

  “I’ve got some savings, and he’s—he’s determined to help as he can. I’ll find work. I’ll—we’ll manage—the baby and I.”

  “It ain’t right.”

  “I’ll need to go soon. I can’t bring dishonor on the Association. Any whisper of this, and our enemies will dance like dervishes with delight.” She could hear the grim amusement in Diana’s voice. “I won’t hand them a weapon to destroy us. Not if I can possibly help it.”

  “How can I help you? Oh Diana, I been so blind—”

  She touched
Lyddie’s cheek lightly. “Let’s just pray everyone has been as blind. I’ll write you, if I may. Tell you how things go—”

  “You been so good to me—”

  “I’ll miss you, little Lyddie.” The final bell began to clang. “Quick. Slip in before they lock you out.”

  “Diana—” But the older girl pushed her toward the door and hurried away down the street toward Number Three.

  * * *

  * * *

  The word passed around the floor next morning was that Diana Goss had left, snatching an honorable dismissal while she could still get it. Much more of her radical doings and she would have been blacklisted, or so the rumors went.

  20

  B Is for Brigid

  Brigid had two looms now and would soon be ready for a third. She stood between them proudly, the sweat pouring from her forehead in concentration. If she would wear less clothing—but no, the girls from the Acre wore the same layers of dress, summer and winter. Still, despite her craziness, Brigid was turning into a proper operative.

  Mr. Marsden hardly came past Lyddie’s looms these days. When their eyes met by chance, it was as though they had never been introduced. Earlier, his coldness had worried her. She feared then that he might find some reason to dismiss her, so she had been scrupulous to observe every regulation to the letter. As the days went on, she became less anxious about Mr. Marsden’s state of mind, much preferring his coolness to the rosebud smiles and little pats she had endured before her illness.

  She treated herself to some more books. In honor of Ezekial Freeman—what a handsome name her friend had chosen for himself—she bought Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave Written by Himself and a Bible. Both volumes became a quiet comfort to her Sunday loneliness, because as she read them she could hear Ezekial’s rich, warm voice filling the darkness of the cabin.

  She had liked Mr. Dickens’s account of his travels in America—all but the Lowell part. It was, as Diana had warned her, romantical. There was no mention in its rosy descriptions of sick lungs or blacklisting or men with wives at Concord.

  July wore on its weary way into August. It seemed a century since the summer just a year ago when she had read and reread Oliver Twist and dreamed of home. She had been such a child then—such a foolish, unknowing child. As always, many of the New England operatives had gone home. Brigid took on her third loom. More Irish girls came on as spare hands, some of the machines simply stood idle. The room was quieter. Lyddie took to copying out passages from Mr. Douglass and the Bible to paste on her looms.

  She liked the Psalms best. “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills …” and “By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion …” The Psalms were poetry, no, songs that rode the powerful rhythm of the looms.

  Sometimes she composed her own. “By the rivers of Merrimack and Concord there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered …” I must forget, she thought. I must forget them all. I cannot bear the remembering.

  * * *

  * * *

  Lyddie was strong again. Her body no longer betrayed her into exhaustion by the end of the day, and she was past shedding tears for what might have been. It was a relief, she told herself, not to carry the burden of debt or, what was worse, the welfare of other persons. A great yoke had been lifted from her shoulders, had it not? And someday the stone would be taken from her breast as well.

  Between them, she and Brigid coached several of the new spare hands, all of them wearing far too much clothing in the suffocating heat. “But me mither says me capes will cape me cool,” one of the girls insisted. Lyddie let it be. She hadn’t managed to persuade Brigid to take off her silly capes, how could she expect to persuade the new girls? Still, she was more patient with them than she had ever been with poor Brigid at the beginning. She had to be. Brigid herself was a paragon of gentleness, teaching the new girls all that Lyddie and Diana had taught her, never raising her voice in irritation or complaint.

  Lyddie watched her snip off a length of thread from a bobbin and lead one of the clumsier girls over to the window and show her in the best light how to tie a weaver’s knot. It was exactly what Lyddie remembered doing, but she knew, to her shame, that her own face had betrayed exasperation, while Brigid’s was as gentle as that of a ewe nuzzling her lamb.

  She smiled ruefully at Brigid as the girl returned to her own looms. Brigid smiled back broadly. “She’s a bit slow, that one.”

  “We’re all allowed to be fools the first week or two,” she said, hearing Diana’s voice in her head. There had been a short note from Diana telling her not to worry—that she had found a place in a seamstress’s shop. But how could she not be anxious for her?

  “Aye,” Brigid was continuing sadly, “but I’m a fool yet.” She nodded at the Psalm pasted on Lyddie’s loom. “And you such a scholar.”

  Lyddie slid her fingers under the paper to loosen the paste and handed it to Brigid. “Here,” she said, “for practice. I’ll make another for myself.”

  Brigid shook her head. “It will do me no good. I might as well be blind, you know.”

  “But I sent you a note once—”

  “I took it straight away to Diana to read to me.”

  “You’ve learned your letters at least?”

  Shamefaced, the girl shook her head.

  Lyddie sighed. She couldn’t take Brigid on to teach, but how could she begrudge her a chance to start? She made papers for the girl to post.

  “A is for agent.” Beside it was a crude picture of a man in a beaver hat—the stern high priest of those invisible Boston gods who had created the corporations and to whom all in Lowell daily sacrificed their lives.

  “B is for bobbin and Brigid, too.” B was instantly mastered.

  “C is for carding.”

  “D is for drawing in.” She went on, using as far as possible words Brigid knew from factory life. Each day Lyddie gave her three new papers to post and learn, and, at the end of the day, to take home and practice.

  So it was that day by day, without intending to be, Lyddie found herself bound letter by letter, word by word, sentence by sentence, page by page, until it was, “Come by when you’ve had your supper, and we’ll work on the reader together.” Or on a Sunday afternoon: “Meet me by the river, and I’ll bring paper and pens for practice.”

  She did not go to Brigid’s house. She was not afraid to go into the Acre. She was not frightened by rumors of robberies and assaults, but, somehow, she was reluctant to go for Brigid’s sake. She did not want Brigid to have to be ashamed of the only home she had.

  At last a letter came from Charlie. She had not allowed herself to look for one, but when it came she realized how she had longed to hear—just to be reminded that she had not been altogether forgotten.

  Dear Sister Lyddie,

  (Charlie did make his letters well!)

  We are fine. We hope you are well, too. Rachel began school last month. Her cough is nearly gone, and she is growing quite fat with Mrs. Phinney’s cooking.

  Luke Stevens says he has had no reply. Do think kindly on him, Lyddie. You need someone to watch out for you as well.

  Your loving brother,

  Charles Worthen

  She almost tore this letter up, but stopped at the first tear. She had nearly ripped the page across Charlie’s name.

  * * *

  * * *

  September came. Some of the New England girls had returned to the weaving room, though the room now was mostly Irish. No Diana, of course, though there was something in Lyddie that kept waiting for her, that kept expecting to see the tall, quiet form moving toward her through the lint-filled room. She had taken something from the weaving floor with her going. There was no quiet center left in the tumult.

  A letter arrived in September, on thick, expensive paper, the address decked out in curlicues. “We regret to inform you of
the death of Maggie M. Worthen …” They hadn’t even got her name right. Poor Mama. Nothing ever right for her in life or death. Lyddie squeezed her eyes closed and tried to picture her mother’s face. She could see the thin, restless form rocking back and forth before the fire, the hair already streaked with gray. But the face was blurred. She had been gone so long from them. Gone long before she died.

  Fall came. Not the raucous patchwork of the Green Mountains, but the sedate brocade of a Massachusetts city. The days began to shorten. Lyddie went to work in darkness and came back to supper in darkness. The whale oil lamps stayed on nearly the whole day in the factory, so water buckets were kept filled on every floor. Fire was a constant dread while the lamps burned.

  As the days grew short, breakfast came before the working day began. There was, as always, barely time to swallow the meals, though the food was not as ample as it had been a year ago. At the end of the day now, she waited for Brigid, and they would go out together. Often all the other girls passed them on the stairs or in the yard, for they would be talking about what Brigid had read since the day before, and Lyddie would solve the mystery of an impossible word or the conundrum of a sentence.

  Then one evening, she realized that Brigid was not beside her on the crowded stairs. She tried to wait, but the crowd of chattering operatives pushed her forward. She went down to the bottom of the stairs and stepped out of the stream. A hundred or more girls went past.

  She was puzzled. Surely Brigid had been right beside her. They had been talking. Brigid had asked her what “thralldom” was. She was trying laboriously to read Mr. Douglass’s book, but was yet to get through the first page of the preface.

  At last the stairs were empty of clattering feet and the shrill laughter of young women at the end of a long workday. But still there was no Brigid. Lyddie hesitated. Perhaps the girl had gone ahead? Or perhaps she had forgotten something and gone back. Lyddie started across the nearly deserted yard. Her supper would be waiting and Mrs. Bedlow was insulted by tardiness. She had got nearly to the gate when something made her stop, nose up, like a doe with young in the thicket.