The Clock

by James Lincoln Collier

  Robert hurt his foot six years ago. He and his father were in a field, haying. It was bright and hot—you always had to hay in the hot weather, when the hay had a chance to dry. Mr. Bronson was going along with the scythe, the blade going slick, slick in the green hay. Robert was coming along behind with a rake to make sure the hay was spread out so as to dry the best. The dust was flying in the air, and naturally Robert was sweating to beat anything. The sweat and dust got into his eyes. He closed his eyes and pulled up his shirttails to wipe off his face. Without thinking about it he took a couple of steps forward. Mr. Bronson caught him in the back of his ankle with that sharp scythe. It went right through to the bone. After that Robert was laid up for a while. But it never healed right. The tendons had got cut, and he couldn’t raise his foot anymore. Robert couldn’t do farm work—at least he couldn’t do a lot of kinds of farm work, like haying. The only way he could make a living was to work in a store, or the mill, and so he went into the mill.

  Because of his bad foot Robert slept at the mill in the lodging with the New York boys, but on Sunday after church he came home to stay with his family. We always walked home together, the Bronsons and us, after church. I could ask him about the mill when we were walking home.

  That night I lay in bed, thinking. I slept up in the loft, up as close to the chimney as I could get my bed, for the warmth. There was a little window at one end of the loft, where you could see a patch of sky, and part of a big branch of the maple tree. I’d been looking out that window all my life, watching the maple leaves grow in the spring, then go red and brown in the fall, and disappear; watching the stars move across the sky with the seasons, never moving so much that you’d notice one night to the next, but one day you’d realize that the little constellation you’d been watching was disappearing out of the right-hand side of the window and another one was coming in from the left. My days at the mill would move slow as those stars, as I got to be sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty—before I was old enough to marry. All that time in the mill; all those days. I didn’t see how I could stand it.

  On Sunday Robert and I walked home together. We came along slow, behind the others, because of Robert’s lame foot. Pa and George and Mr. Bronson went first down the lane, talking. about money, mostly—Pa liked to talk about money. Then came Ma and Mrs. Bronson.

  It was a pretty Indian summer day—the trees all red and yellow and brown, and a light purple haze in the distance over the fields.

  Robert was my age, but he was full grown, and even though I was tall for a girl, he was taller by six inches. He had blond hair that lay all over to one side like raked rows of hay. It glinted in the sunshine, too, like the hay did. He had pale blue eyes that made him look sad sometimes, but not when he smiled—which he did a lot.

  We walked along slow, with the others way ahead of us, and I told him all about it. “I can’t stand the idea of it,” I said.

  “The mill isn’t so bad, Annie. Especially now that they’re bringing girls in. You’ll have lots of company.”

  “Why didn’t they ever have girls before?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “They had all the orphan boys from New York and didn’t need any others. But those boys are mighty hard to control. They don’t think twice about sneaking off for a snooze or stealing food from the kitchen when they get a chance. I think Colonel Humphreys and Mr. Hoggart would rather have girls, who might behave better and tend to their work. But the main reason is that Colonel Humphreys just brought in some new spinning machinery. They’re called slubbing billies. When you work at them, it’s really a lot the same as working at a spinning wheel. He figures that girls can do that real good, and boys don’t know anything about spinning at all.”

  Colonel Humphreys was the richest man around that part of Connecticut. During the Revolutionary War he’d been an aide to George Washington. Even though that was more than thirty years ago, he was still mighty important, and had a fine carriage, and was always going off to New York or Boston on business. I’d heard all kinds of stories about those big cities—how there were thousands of people rushing to and fro and hundreds of shops with just the grandest things in them. I wished some time I could visit a big city like that, just once, to see what it was like, but I didn’t know if I’d ever have a chance. Pa had been to Boston twice and New York once, and still talked about it a good deal, but the biggest place the rest of us had ever been to was New Haven, when we went over at Christmas time to visit Pa’s relations. But Colonel Humphreys went to Boston or New York whenever he wanted.

  Of course, Colonel Humphreys didn’t have anything to do with the mill hands. They were just hired hands to him. That’s what he had Mr. Hoggart there for, to be overseer, and see that the mill ran proper and the hands worked the way they were supposed to. “Robert, what’s he like, Mr. Hoggart?”

  Robert shook his head. “Oh, he’s a hard nut, I can tell you that. He’s mighty quick to whip the boys when they get out of line. All a boy has to do is look at him cross-eyed and he’ll get a whipping for it. Why, I saw him once take a shovel handle and smack a fellow so hard across his shin, it broke his leg.”

  “Did he ever whip you?”

  “No,” Robert said. “I’m not the same as the other boys, being as I’m tally boy. I’m higher up from them. It wouldn’t do to whip the tally boy. Not unless he did something mighty bad, like stealing.”

  I knew about being tally boy, for Robert had told me before. He stood by the mill door weighing up the wool that the farmers brought to sell to the mill. And he weighed up the finished yarn that was shipped out of the mill to the customers, so they’d know how much each lot was worth. “Does Mr. Hoggart ever whip the girls?”

  “Well, we haven’t had any girls up till now. I don’t know if he will. He might. He likes whipping people, that’s a plain fact.”

  That worried me. Pa had whipped me when I was little, and so had Ma, when I spilled something or broke something. But I hadn’t been whipped for years, not since I was maybe ten or so. “I don’t think I could stand being whipped,” I said. “What does he whip people for?”

  “Mostly for ruining the work. If a boy gets grease on some wool, or damages a machine, he can count on a whipping. That and stealing. These orphan boys were raised up to steal, and they’ll steal something as soon as look at it.”

  “What do they steal?”

  “Anything they can get ahold of. Rum out of the stores. Apples, bread, cheese from the kitchen. If they wear out a pair of socks they’ll steal a pair from another boy sooner than get another pair from the stores.”

  “I wouldn’t steal anything,” I said.

  “It wouldn’t be missed. There’s enough stealing going on there as it is. When you get down to it, the biggest thief is Mr. Hoggart himself. Only nobody knows it.”

  “What?” I said. “Mr. Hoggart’s a thief?”

  He put his finger to his lips. “Shush, Annie. I’m the only one who knows, and if Mr. Hoggart learned I knew, he’d make things mighty hard for me. Oh, yes, he would.”

  I lowered my voice. “What does he steal?”

  “Wool. Bags of it. Hundreds of pounds of it over a year.”

  That was a big surprise, all right. I never would have thought that somebody as important as Mr. Hoggart would steal. I could understand boys stealing, and girls, too, even, for I’d stolen pieces of cheese and lumps of butter out of the keeping room myself, when I was little. But it certainly surprised me that an important man like the overseer would steal. “Are you sure, Robert?”

  “Well, I can’t prove it. But I weigh up the wool when it comes back all clean from fulling, and I weigh up the yarn when it’s shipped out, and the figures don’t tally. Oh, sure, you expect to lose some weight. But even allowing for the loss, there’s too much difference between what comes in and what goes out.”

  I stared at him. “But shouldn’t you tell somebody, Robert?”

  “I’d be bound to get in a heap of trouble if I did.”

  “
How’d you get in trouble? I should have thought you’d be a hero.”

  “Suppose I told somebody, and then they couldn’t find any proof. Mr. Hoggart would be out to get me in the worst way. He’d do whatever he could to get even.”

  “But wouldn’t they put him in jail?”

  “Not if they couldn’t prove it.” He stopped walking and looked at me. “Now, Annie, you’ve got to promise me you won’t say anything to anybody. Ever.”

  He looked into my eyes and I knew he was very serious about it. Robert was my best friend, and I’d never do anything to hurt him. “I promise,” I said. “I won’t say anything.”

  Then, to change the subject, he said, “Did you know that Hetty Brown is in the mill?”

  “Yes. She says she likes it, because of the different people to talk to.”

  “You watch, a lot more girls will be coming in, at least for part of the year. What do the girls do all winter long except spin yarn anyway? With the money they make at the mills, they can buy all the yarn they need, and have money left over.”

  “Well, it’ll be nice to have some other girls to talk to,” I said. Then I sighed. “But still, it’s mighty hard to stop going to school.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  MA’S OWN PA was a sailor out of New Haven, who drowned at sea in 1793, when she was still a little girl. Not long after, her ma died of yellow fever. Ma was put out to live with her aunt and uncle, but they had eight young of their own, and didn’t need another one. She was last at the trough for everything, she always said—never had a stitch of new clothing, but always wore hand-me-downs that two or three of her cousins had already grown out of, and were patched so much that there wasn’t anything of the original cloth left to them. She hated going anywhere looking like a patchwork quilt, for the other kids would giggle at her and make fun, and even the grown-ups would make jokes about how warm she must be in a nice quilt like that, and such. She was last at the food, too, for she sat at the bottom of the table, and by the time she was served, the others would have got all the meat out of the stew, and left her with nothing but potatoes and gravy. She lived on potatoes most of the time she was growing up, she always said.

  When she was fourteen her uncle said he couldn’t afford to keep her anymore, she was old enough to take care of herself. He found her a job with Mrs. Agnes Reed, who kept a dame school, where some of the families sent their kids. It was the best thing that ever happened to her, Ma always said. She didn’t get any pay, except a copper cent at Thanksgiving, but Mrs. Reed liked her, and got her off the potato diet and saw to it that she had some clothes that had only been handed down once, instead of two or three times.

  On top of it, Mrs. Reed saw to it that Ma got some schooling. Not as much as the other kids, for she had her work to do, sweeping and scrubbing and helping the cook. But Mrs. Reed put her in the reading and writing classes, and taught her some ciphering, too. Being allowed to go to that school was the first time anybody ever did anything for Ma, she always said. She loved going to school, and studied hard whenever she had a spare moment. “Oh, I’d have studied all day long if I could have,” Ma said. “I wanted to study Latin, mathematics, geography, everything they taught. But, of course, I had my work to do, and knew I was lucky to be taught anything at all. I’d have given anything to have gotten to be a schoolteacher myself. It seemed to me just like the greatest thing. But there wasn’t any chance of that.”

  So, with Ma talking about what a wonderful thing it was to be a schoolteacher, it was natural that I would get fired up about the idea, and I was happy to go to school. It was a whole lot more interesting than sitting in front of the spinning wheel all day long, which was what we did on the farm most of the time during the winter. There were four of us to keep in clothes. That meant spinning an awful lot of yarn, weaving it into cloth on the big loom, and then cutting and sewing to make dresses and shirts and trousers and coats.

  The spinning wheel was in the parlor next to Ma and Pa’s bed. It stood on three legs with a board across them like a small table. On one end was the great big walking wheel—about three feet across—held by an upright post on one side; on the other end was a horizontal rod held by two little rods on a kind of swivel. The horizontal rod led the spindle, which was turned by a belt that came off the wheel. Ma and I would take turns carding and spinning.

  Carding is the really dreary part. When you get the wool off the sheep it’s all tangled and has twigs and straw and all kinds of things—even old dried-up dead bugs—stuck in it. The cards are flat hard leather brushes with wire sticking up. You put some wool on one of the cards and brushed the other one over it till all the twigs and things were cleared out. This also separated the fibers so they came off the card in rolls like real curly hair. These rolls were called rolags.

  I hated the carding because my arms got so tired, and my fingers would get pricked with burrs and nettles and briars in the wool. The spinning wasn’t so bad. Sometimes it was even fun to see how even I could get the yarn and how fast I could do it.

  What I did was stand next to the walking wheel, and reach down into a basket and pick up a roll of wool. Then I’d sort of mush one end of the roll onto the end of the yarn on the spindle with my left hand, and push the wheel back with my right hand. The spindle would start turning and twisting the wool I was holding. My job was to walk backward four or five small steps, stretching out the wool roll so it got twisted into yarn. The idea was to pull at it very evenly so the yarn didn’t get too thin, or bunch up. Ma said all those steps added up to as much as twenty miles a day sometimes.

  When I’d walked backward to where I couldn’t reach the wheel, I’d take my three or four steps forward, pick up another roll, and start all over again. A good spinner could spin as much as three thousand yards of yarn in a day. That would be enough to knit five pairs of mittens, almost. Ma could spin that much, and I was getting pretty close.

  But even with the two of us spinning our lives away, it seemed like we never had enough yarn for all the clothes we needed. Pa used to do the weaving, but now he took the yarn over to Mr. Grumble, who wove it into homespun in exchange for Pa plowing his fields.

  That night, after supper, George and I went out to the barn to water the ox and the chickens. “Why did Pa have to do it, George?” I said.

  “It’s the debts,” George said.

  “Then why did he buy that blame clock?”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he said, “We shouldn’t talk against Pa. He’s our father.”

  That was right, but I couldn’t help myself. “If he’s the father, he should have more sense. I hate not going to school. I’m going to hate going to the mill.”

  “Maybe it won’t be so bad, Annie. Days when it’s bitter cold and snowing, and I’m up in the wood-lot bucking logs, you’ll be mighty glad to be under cover.”

  It was mighty tedious though. Reading about Julius Caesar’s wars or learning about foreign places, like Switzerland and the West Indies, was a whole lot more interesting than spinning wool. I learned the most amazing things—there were mountains in Switzerland where there was snow all year round; but in the West Indies a lot of the people had never seen snow and didn’t know what it was.

  A week later Pa took me down to the mill and signed me up. It was a cold, rainy October day, gloomy as could be, which suited me, because I was mighty gloomy inside, and the weather matched up. We sloshed down the farm lane, and then at the end of it turned left onto the road into Humphreysville. The village was in a valley where two streams came flashing down out of the hills and joined a river. The river went over a falls, and ran on down the valley through a forest.

  Below the falls, just outside the village, a bridge crossed the river, and on either side of the falls were the factories—great buildings four stories high, and two hundred feet long. Each had a huge wheel that was turned by water shunted out of the river through a deep ditch, which carried the water under the wheel to move it, and then bent back into the river again. W
e turned off the village road onto the road to the woolen mill, which ran alongside the river. The noise was something fierce—the roar of the water going over the falls; the squeaking and groaning of the big wheels as they turned; and coming from inside the mills, the thumping and rattling of the machinery.

  Inside, the noise was even louder, for the machines banged and shook and clanged. There were rows of them stretching down the full length of the floor, and at each machine were two boys, most of them dirty and wearing worn clothing. As Pa and I came in all the boys looked up; and when they saw I was a girl, they set to buzzing among themselves and winking at me. I’d never had so many boys look at me at once, and it made me feel mighty queer. I wondered how it would be to work amongst those boys all day long—would they go on winking and buzzing, or would they get used to me?

  We walked down the wooden floor to the end of the mill, with all those boys still staring at me and making me nervous. In the back there was a little office with a couple of chairs, a table, and a chest. Mr. Hoggart was sitting there. He was a short man, but broad, and had sparse red hair, and a pink face and a big round red nose. Pa went in, and I stood outside looking around. I was mighty curious about the boys. I was pretty interested in seeing boys who stole and lied and cheated and cursed as if it was the most natural thing. It was because they didn’t have a proper upbringing, Robert said, and couldn’t help themselves. So I looked at this one and that one, trying to see if boys like that looked any different from ordinary boys; but it seemed like every time I started to look at one of them he’d know it, and swivel his head around from the machine and give me a wink. I’d snap my head away, and blush—for who knew what they were thinking?

  Then Pa and Mr. Hoggart came out of the office. “All right, Annie,” Pa said. “It’s arranged. Mighty lucky for you, too, to be able to work inside all winter where it’s warm and dry, rather than out in the snow and cold like some.”