Copyright © 2020 by Jotham Burrello
E-book published in 2020 by Blackstone Publishing
Cover design by Kathryn Galloway English
Lyrics to “The Curse of the Aching Heart” supplied by
the Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music,
Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced
or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of
the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental
and not intended by the author.
Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-982629-39-7
Library e-book ISBN 978-1-982629-38-0
Fiction / Historical / General
CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Blackstone Publishing
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For the past
Mary, Tom, Hiya, and Doc
For the future
Atticus, Miles, and Jotham
We price the cotton.
We spin the yarn.
We weave the fabric.
We dress the world.
Same as it ever was, and as it will always be.
Welcome to Spindle City.
—Colonel Jefferson Cleveland,
president of Cleveland Mill, speaking
to visiting French Trade Council, 1886
part i
1911
Invitation Ode
One hundred years ago,
to crude machines we owe
a tribute grand.
Unfailing progress came,
weaving both cloth and fame,
wafting Fall River’s name
through every land.
Fall River bids you come,
four million spindles hum
your welcome here.
Join us in rosy June,
come morning, night or noon,
come with your hearts atune
with festal cheer.
Regatta and parade,
mill goods in pride displayed
await your call.
A week of merriment,
each day some big event,
a program excellent;
come one, come all.
—J. Edmund Estes
presidential city
fall river, massachusetts, june 23
The kind of day Minister Johns said Jesus had promised. Crisp and sunny, though cool for June. The type of weather, Johns preached last Sunday, that respects a man’s daily toil. The paper predicted fifty thousand.
Despite it being Friday, Joseph Bartlett was nowhere near the Cleveland Mill; no, today he was trying to belong, so he stood with the other Cotton Centennial Committee members in the assigned section of the temporary grandstand directly opposite city hall at the assigned time, wearing his assigned straw Milan boater with the blue silk ribbon and his assigned smile—or half smile; he had another bad tooth—waiting for the president of the United States. He glanced at his pocket watch; the Mayflower, the president’s yacht, was said to have made anchor an hour ago. He wanted to go home to his sick wife, Lizzy. She’d slept through his goodbye kiss. Joseph snapped the gold clasp and sank down on the wooden grandstand that held aloft the portly fathers of Fall River.
The Decoration Committee had gone overboard. The Granite Block, the commercial heart of the city, resembled an exploding firework. Wreaths of red carnations hung from all the office windows. Old Glory fluttered from every building on the block. Red, white, and blue bunting dangled from city hall windows and the bell tower like bats’ wings. Suspended from a cross weave of wire down Main Street hung garlands of roses and thousands of incandescent globes. Young female clerks tossed confetti from McWhirr’s department store windows; the store’s marquee flashed red, white, and blue. Out-of-town revelers, probably stock-owning Bostonians, serenaded the crowd from the street-facing rooms of the Hotel Mohican. To celebrate the city’s product, the Cotton Manufacturers’ Association had organizers stack five-hundred-pound cotton bales on street corners.
A homespun racket accompanied the patriotic decorations. Screechers, scrapers, rattlers, and croakers filled the spaces between hoarse shouts and whooping calls. Those who couldn’t afford the peddlers’ noisemakers shook tin cans filled with dried beans or beat coal shovels on frying pans. The policemen’s union band marched below playing “Hail to the Chief.” Taft’s motorcade was close. The Massachusetts militia lined Main Street. boom! boom! boom! The president’s naval escort, the battleship Connecticut’s eight-inch guns rocked the grandstand with another salute from Mount Hope Bay, and the crowd flinched with each blast. A spooked dray horse galloped wildly past the review stand; police gave chase. Children clutched their mothers’ skirts. The roar of the mill’s spinning room was peaceful compared to this din, Joseph thought. Main Street was no place for a nervous person.
Young men carried paper signs tucked into the bands of their straw hats. i am out for a good time. my home is yours. And oh, you kid. The ladies got in on the act with slogans like my heart is yours and i am in love. And Joseph’s favorite, my heart’s on fire, worn by a red-haired Irish girl with wide hips who reminded him of Mary Sheehan. In the sea of bodies, the suffragettes’ yellow votes for women pennants popped against the gentlemen’s black suit jackets.
A ragtag crew of Portuguese boys wearing their lint-covered work overalls marched back and forth under the Centennial Arch singing the first verse of the “Invitation Ode.” No doubt their overseer forced them to memorize it:
“One hundred years ago,
to crude machines we owe
a tribute grand.
Unfailing progress came,
weaving both cloth and fame,
wafting Fall River’s name
through every land.”
On the horizon, Joseph saw a rare sight: clear sky between the hulking redbrick smokestacks. He smiled. Taft had done it. One hundred and eleven mills were silent. Only a president could close the mills. Anarchists, socialists, suffragists—all stripes of “ists” and “isms” had tried and failed. In Joseph Bartlett’s lifetime, textile alley had never ceased to produce cloth. He had half expected Taft would try and fail too.
The president’s speech would conclude the Cotton Centennial, a carnival of sorts to celebrate one hundred years of great American innovation in the great American city of Fall River, Massachusetts. Everyone loves a carnival, with the beauty queens, floats, circus animals, parades, contests and games, and rickety, stomach-turning rides whipping through the sweaty aroma of blood sausage and kidneys, cotton candy and hot nuts.
Joseph spotted the checkered hatband of his son in the crush pushing toward the review stand. The boy spun and grabbed the arm of a shopgirl. No, on second glance, it was neither Will nor Hollister; their tickets to the grandstand were tucked away in his breast pocket, had been all week. He touched them now, squeezing the thick cardstock between his thumb and finger. A fellow on the Horse Show Committee slapped Joseph’s back, and he bit down hard on his bad tooth. The man shouted something and laughed, but Joseph couldn’t make out the joke over the searing pain in his jaw.
* * *
Up in the Highlands, on June Street, the faint strains of the military band in Taft’s motorcade reached Evelyn as she worried over the temperature of Elizabeth B
artlett’s tomato soup. The poor woman could guess temperature to the degree. Tomato soup must be served between 137 and 139 degrees Fahrenheit. And the soda crackers must be fresh, straight from the tin, and served on a saucer, six per serving. Before Elizabeth’s illness, Evelyn had intentionally hardened poached eggs and oversalted beef stews, but now she painstakingly measured, mixed, and stoked in the surefire manner her mother taught her as a girl in Ireland.
She and Elizabeth had dispensed with the usual employee-employer fussiness. They were friends, sort of, given that Highlands society had ceased to visit Elizabeth’s parlor after Dr. Boyle imposed twenty-four-hour bed rest. At this stage of the fight, Elizabeth’s hollowed bones couldn’t support her own weight. Cored like a bird’s bones, was how Dr. Boyle described the cancer’s invasion in a recent note to Joseph. It was Evelyn’s idea to move into the small room at the end of the hall; handling Elizabeth’s “dirties” had earned her the household’s respect. Evelyn believed cleanliness curried favor with the Lord.
Evelyn backed noiselessly into the darkened room. Elizabeth had instructed her to double up the lace curtains during daylight hours to keep her mother’s furniture from fading, giving the room the hue of a bruised peach. The trapped air reeked of bedpans and phlegm; it circled the bed like a noose. But before setting to fixing lunch, Evelyn cracked the window, and a salty breeze rolled up the hill from the Taunton River.
Elizabeth’s cut-glass animal collection vibrated when the Connecticut’s big guns fired. The animals were pastured on the oak drop desk cabinet that housed the Minnesota Model A sewing machine Joseph had bought her for their first anniversary. Will had sprinkled straw for the glass animals and arranged them in clusters by species, chickens with other chickens, pigs with pigs, sheep with sheep, and so on up the barnyard hierarchy. Her older boy, the wanton Hollister, attempted to crossbreed the species at every opportunity. Will had balanced the mateless white unicorn on top of the miniature wooden barn. Elizabeth had told him of its magic. Rub its horn and make a wish. The boy hadn’t the heart to tell his mother that he’d already made hundreds of wishes.
At the foot of the bed, the family’s two cats, Bobbin and Thread, snoozed in a pie wedge of sunlight. Evelyn set the lunch tray on the nightstand next to The Practical Family Doctor, which leaned against a jar of Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound and other half-baked potions and tonics that Elizabeth had put her faith in during her steep decline—all against Dr. Boyle’s wishes. Like the rest of her, Elizabeth’s face had sunk in on itself as her body gradually shut down. Evelyn believed it an early stage of rigor mortis, though she wasn’t sure what rigor mortis was exactly. The term had been tossed about when her little sister wouldn’t fit into the coffin her mother had traded her wedding band for.
Evelyn peeled back the sheet and slipped her hand under the embroidered fringe of Elizabeth’s nightgown and pressed down lightly. Elizabeth’s eyelids fluttered. Her heartbeat was soft, her breaths well spaced. A deep sleep. I know her body better than that silly frog Boyle does, Evelyn thought. She imagined herself Elizabeth’s personal physician: Dr. Evelyn Mary Daly. Her surgeon’s coat would be the whitest, the finest Egyptian cloth, and her bag made from the softest Italian leather. She rubbed Elizabeth’s chest another moment and then did her daily test of how far she could wrap her hand around Elizabeth’s bony wrist. She pressed her lips to her patient’s hot cheek. Let Saint Peter eat crow, she thought. Then suddenly she choked up. What happens to me if she dies?
Evelyn knelt beside the bed. She made the sign of the cross and mumbled the Lord’s Prayer.
* * *
Not far from the grandstand, under a tent erected inside Big Berry Stadium, the local parishes sponsored boys’ boxing. Amateur classes only. Hundred-and-fifty-pound limit. The bank of lights hung low over the ring surrounded on four sides by wooden folding chairs. Tunnels of sunlight from the four entries were the only other illumination, each glowing bright like a gateway from a celestial world. When the fights started, the natural light dimmed because of the rubberneckers who blocked it: men who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, pay the nickel gate. Those who could pay sat thirty rows deep. Each had a relative or bet in every bout.
“Hey, Father,” some drunkard, a Protestant most likely, shouted from the cheap seats. “That the blood of God?” The male crowd, all overseers and civil servants, broke into a roar, as Father Maxi, the stout referee with a flattened nose from one too many jabs in his boxing days, bent down on hands and knees to press a towel to the loser’s split lip. The victor, Damian Newton, wiped the Yankee boy’s blood down his threadbare trousers. His red boxing gloves, like two rotten tomatoes, swayed over his head. Maxi glanced up. Not even the Romans made such a spectacle of victory.
Ringside, Damian’s little brother, Patrick, kept a firm grip on his father’s belt, hoping the old man didn’t blast off. Indeed, as his brother landed the knockout punch, Patrick coiled the belt around his fist like a cowboy might a leather rein.
Pete Newton had used his fists successfully in the general strike of 1904, then again on a granite wall behind Saint Anne’s the afternoon of his wife’s burial. In the years since, he’d raised the boys on church handouts and his fists, training them in late-night kitchen sparring sessions. Damian pummeled the calcified knots on his old man’s back and neck. After each blow, Pete stumbled to his feet, mumbling technique: “More on the jawline,” or “Gonna haveta stroke harder to beat a Yankee boy.” Patrick always hid under the sink, waiting for the roundhouse that would send his father off to sleep.
As Damian continued his victory dance, Old Pete sat queerly silent, his arms folded over his reed-thin frame, piss drunk, no question, but oddly cool, as if he’d known the fight’s outcome before the first bell. Finally, a crooked smile stretched over his scarred face when Maxi announced that Damian’s final opponent would be Will Bartlett. Local legend held that Will’s grandfather Otis had tossed Pete’s father out a second-story window at the Cleveland Mill for barging drunk into the lady weavers’ latrine. Old man Cleveland, the patriarch of the company, had investigated the incident, but the weavers said the foulmouthed toper had slipped, breaking both his legs.
A young priest escorted Damian from the ring to change out of his bloody trousers before the title bout. Outside the tent, the Fort Adams marching band played “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”
* * *
“How is our dear Elizabeth? Such a dear, dear creature,” cooed Mrs. Gower in a syrupy voice. Joseph stared at the enormous ostrich plumes protruding from her head. Mrs. G. was a 78 percent stockholder in the Gower Linen Company and an old family friend of Elizabeth’s people, the mill-owning families who lived on the hill. Since taking over the Cleveland Mill six years ago, Joseph equated everyone with his or her share value. If Lizzy died, his would spike, but he’d be free of the Highlands. Her plumes reminded him of bunny ears. He was willing to bet half his meager Cleveland holdings that they were a foot tall, if not longer. Thankfully, Lizzy had never been a fan of such trims on her hats.
Mrs. G. stood above him on the grandstand, fanning a tiny bouquet of white sweet peas and violets tied with white satin ribbon under her nose. All of the committee members’ wives waved them, making the entire section of the grandstand smell like a summer garden compared to the stench of manure at street level. The armada of shit wagons the city employed was no match for a week’s worth of mounted police, coronation coaches, trade parades, and the Ringling Brothers’ caravan of horses, elephants, and zebras.
Mrs. G. had yet to meet his eyes. Perhaps she was really broken up about Lizzy. Dr. Boyle had taken to leaving notes on the state of her condition rather than endure Joseph’s long silences. He thought about the inappropriateness of the word “creature.” Lizzy isn’t a creature. Joseph’s throat constricted. The word conjured up an image of Will’s pet turtle, Shelly. For a moment, he considered the social consequences of telling Mrs. G. to go to hell, but before he could summon the courage, her
white-gloved hand tugged at his black coat sleeve. She repeated, “Such a dear, dear creature. We all miss her so.”
“She’s holding her own, given the circumstances,” he managed. Joseph pinched his tight collar. “No change, really. No improvements since your last visit. Easter, was it?”
“I’ve been meaning to . . .” Her voice trailed off.
After a long day at the mill, Joseph might not muster much more than a quick peck to Lizzy’s forehead. The girl he loved was slowly evaporating, like a bucket of water set out in the sun; each visit to her bedside proved costly to his memory. The porcelain-white feet he’d first laid eyes on that magical summer at Loon Lake were curled and yellowed. The baby-blond hairs on the back of her neck that stood on end when he’d pressed her against her father’s boathouse had lost their will. The blue eyes that had matched the lake water had grayed. Who had taken these pleasures from him? The Almighty, Joseph had long ago concluded, was partly to blame.
Mrs. G. latched onto his forearm. The old biddy had quite a grip. He was unsure if she was overcome with emotion for Elizabeth’s dire straits or guilt-ridden for not calling in three months.
Slowly she turned to face him, looking much younger than her sixty-five years. Winters spent south are said to preserve youthfulness. “Give her my love, from John and me.” She released his arm and patted her gloved wrist against the corner of her eyes.
“Of course.”
She glanced to either side of Joseph. “How are the boys getting along?”
“Evelyn can’t keep them out of her room.” He raised his fists. “They’re both entered in the boxing competition. I might sneak off to catch Will’s bout.”
“Righto.” She turned back to her husband, tugging at his sleeve so he’d acknowledge Joseph.
John Gower tipped his boater sternly and then stroked his beard. Gower carried grudges like a camel carries a hump—square in the middle of his back. The old man had not forgiven Joseph for breaking with the Manufacturers’ Association during the 1904 strike. The owners told labor they needed a second wage concession in nine months to compete against the Southern menace. Joseph disagreed and raised pay. Dividends and fair wages can coexist! During the strike, he transitioned Cleveland toward producing fine goods and odd specialty products like tablecloths that the South couldn’t yet manufacture. Cleveland prints were made from high-quality thread, and their colors became known for not running at the first sight of a washboard.
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