Lyddie

by Katherine Paterson

  “Then what were you doing all that time?”

  Betsy slammed her book shut. “What affair is it of yours, Amelia?”

  “It’s all right,” Lyddie said. She had no desire to get her roommates stirred up over nothing. “She just give me paper to write to my family to tell them where I was.”

  “Oh Lyddie,” Prudence said. “How thoughtless of us. We never offered.”

  “No matter,” Lyddie said. “I done it now.”

  “She’s devious,” Amelia muttered. “You have to watch her. Believe me, Lyddie. I’m only thinking of your own good.”

  Betsy snorted, reached over, and blew out the candle as the final curfew bell began to clang.

  10

  Oliver

  The four-thirty bell clanged the house awake. From every direction, Lyddie could hear the shrill voices of girls calling to one another, even singing. Someone on another floor was imitating a rooster. From the other side of the bed Betsy groaned and turned over, but Lyddie was up, dressing quickly in the dark as she had always done in the windowless attic of the inn.

  Her stomach rumbled, but she ignored it. There would be no breakfast until seven, and that was two and a half hours away. By five the girls had crowded through the main gate, jostled their way up the outside staircase on the far end of the mill, cleaned their machines, and stood waiting for the workday to begin.

  “Not too tired this morning?” Diana asked by way of greeting.

  Lyddie shook her head. Her feet were sore, but she’d felt tireder after a day behind the plow.

  “Good. Today will be something more strenuous, I fear. We’ll work all three looms together, all right? Until you feel quite sure of everything.”

  Lyddie felt a bit as though the older girl were whispering in church. It seemed almost that quiet in the great loom room. The only real noise was the creaking from the ceiling of the leather belts that connected the wheels in the weaving room to the gigantic waterwheel in the basement.

  The overseer came in, nodded good morning, and pushed a low wooden stool under a cord dangling from the assembly of wheels and belts above his head. His little red mouth pursed, he stepped up on the stool and pulled out his pocket watch. At the same moment, the bell in the tower above the roof began to ring. He yanked the cord, the wide leather belt above him shifted from a loose to a tight pulley, and suddenly all the hundred or so silent looms, in raucous concert, shuddered and groaned into fearsome life. Lyddie’s first full day as a factory girl had begun.

  Within five minutes, her head felt like a log being split to splinters. She kept shaking it, as though she could rid it of the noise, or at least the pain, but both only seemed to grow more intense. If that weren’t trial enough, a few hours of standing in her proud new boots and her feet had swollen so that the laces cut into her flesh. She bent down quickly to loosen them, and when she found the right lace was knotted, she nearly burst into tears. Or perhaps the tears were caused by the swirling dust and lint.

  Now that she thought of it, she could hardly breathe, the air was so laden with moisture and debris. She snatched a moment to run to the window. She had to get air, but the window was nailed shut against the April morning. She leaned her forehead against it; even the glass seemed hot. Her apron brushed the pots of red geraniums crowding the wide sill. They were flourishing in this hot house. She coughed, trying to free her throat and lungs for breath.

  Then she felt, rather than saw, Diana. “Mr. Marsden has his eye on you,” the older girl said gently, and put her arm on Lyddie’s shoulder to turn her back toward the looms. She pointed to the stalled loom and the broken warp thread that must be tied. Even though Diana had stopped the loom, Lyddie stood rubbing the powder into her fingertips, hesitating to plunge her hands into the bowels of the machine. Diana urged her with a light touch.

  I stared down a black bear, Lyddie reminded herself. She took a deep breath, fished out the broken ends, and began to tie the weaver’s knot that Diana had shown her over and over again the afternoon before. Finally, Lyddie managed to make a clumsy knot, and Diana pulled the lever, and the loom shuddered to life once more.

  How could she ever get accustomed to this inferno? Even when the girls were set free at 7:00, it was to push and shove their way across the bridge and down the street to their boardinghouses, bolt down their hearty breakfast, and rush back, stomachs still churning, for “ring in” at 7:35. Nearly half the mealtime was spent simply going up and down the staircase, across the mill yard and bridge, down the row of houses—just getting to and from the meal. And the din in the dining room was nearly as loud as the racket in the mill—thirty young women chewing and calling at the same time, reaching for the platters of flapjacks and pitchers of syrup, ignoring cries from the other end of the table to pass anything.

  Her quiet meals in the corner of the kitchen with Triphena, even her meager bowls of bark soup in the cabin with the seldom talkative Charlie, seemed like feasts compared to the huge, rushed, noisy affairs in Mrs. Bedlow’s house. The half hour at noonday dinner with more food than she had ever had set before her at one time was worse than breakfast.

  At last the evening bell rang, and Mr. Marsden pulled the cord to end the day. Diana walked with her to the place by the door where the girls hung their bonnets and shawls, and handed Lyddie hers. “Let’s forget about studying those regulations tonight,” she said. “It’s been too long a day already.”

  Lyddie nodded. Yesterday seemed years in the past. She couldn’t even remember why she’d thought the regulations important enough to bother with.

  She had lost all appetite. The very smell of supper made her nauseous—beans heavy with pork fat and brown injun bread with orange cheese, fried potatoes, of course, and flapjacks with apple sauce, baked Indian pudding with cream and plum cake for dessert. Lyddie nibbled at the brown bread and washed it down with a little scalding tea. How could the others eat so heartily and with such a clatter of dishes and shrieks of conversation? She longed only to get to the room, take off her boots, massage her abused feet, and lay down her aching head. While the other girls pulled their chairs from the table and scraped them about to form little circles in the parlor area, Lyddie dragged herself from the table and up the stairs.

  Betsy was already there before her, her current novel in her hand. She laughed at the sight of Lyddie. “The first full day! And up to now you thought yourself a strapping country farm girl who could do anything, didn’t you?”

  Lyddie did not try to answer back. She simply sank to her side of the double bed and took off the offending shoes and began to rub her swollen feet.

  “If you’ve got an older pair”—Betsy’s voice was almost gentle—“more stretched and softer …”

  Lyddie nodded. Tomorrow she’d wear Triphena’s without the stuffing. They were still stiff from the trip and she’d be awkward rushing back and forth to meals, but at least there’d be room for her feet to swell.

  She undressed, slipped on her shabby night shift, and slid under the quilt. Betsy glanced over at her. “To bed so soon?” Lyddie could only nod again. It was as though she could not possibly squeeze a word through her lips. Betsy smiled again. She ain’t laughing at me, Lyddie realized. She’s remembering how it was.

  “Shall I read to you?” Betsy asked.

  Lyddie nodded gratefully and closed her eyes and turned her back against the candlelight.

  Betsy did not give any explanation of the novel she was reading, simply commenced to read aloud where she had broken off reading to herself. Even though Lyddie’s head was still choked with lint and battered with noise, she struggled to get the sense of the story.

  The child was in some kind of poorhouse, it seemed, and he was hungry. Lyddie knew about hungry children. Rachel, Agnes, Charlie—they had all been hungry that winter of the bear. The hungry little boy in the story had held up his bowl to the poorhouse overseer and said:

  “Please sir, I want some more.” />
  And for this the overseer—she could see his little rosebud mouth rounded in horror—for this the overseer had screamed out at the child. In her mind’s eye little Oliver Twist looked exactly like a younger Charlie. The cruel overseer had screamed and hauled the boy before a sort of agent. And for what crime? For the monstrous crime of wanting more to eat.

  “That boy will be hung,” the agent had prophesied. “I know that boy will be hung.”

  She fought sleep, ravenous for every word. She had not had any appetite for the bountiful meal downstairs, but now she was feeling a hunger she knew nothing about. She had to know what would happen to little Oliver. Would he indeed be hanged just because he wanted more gruel?

  She opened her eyes and turned to watch Betsy, who was absorbed in her reading. Then Betsy sensed her watching, and looked up from the book. “It’s a marvelous story, isn’t it? I saw the author once—Mr. Charles Dickens. He visited our factory. Let me see—I was already in the spinning room—it must have been in—”

  But Lyddie cared nothing for authors or dates. “Don’t stop reading the story, please,” she croaked out.

  “Never fear, little Lyddie. No more interruptions,” Betsy promised, and read on, though her voice grew raspy with fatigue, until the bell rang for curfew. She stuck a hair ribbon in the place. “Till tomorrow night,” she whispered as the feet of an army of girls could be heard thundering up the staircase.

  11

  The Admirable Choice

  The next day in the mill, the noise was just as jarring and her feet in Triphena’s old boots swelled just as large, but now and again she caught herself humming. Why am I suddenly happy? What wonderful thing is about to happen to me? And then she remembered. Tonight after supper, Betsy would read to her again. She was, of course, afraid for Oliver, who was all mixed up in her mind with Charlie. But there was a delicious anticipation, like molded sugar on her tongue. She had to know what would happen to him, how his story would unfold.

  Diana noticed the change. “You’re settling in faster than I thought,” she said. But Lyddie didn’t tell her. She didn’t quite know how to explain to anyone, that it wasn’t so much that she had gotten used to the mill, but she had found a way to escape its grasp. The pasted sheets of poetry or Scripture in the window frames, the geraniums on the sill, those must be some other girl’s way, she decided. But hers was a story.

  As the days melted into weeks, she tried not to think how very kind it was of Betsy to keep reading to her. There were nights, of course, when she could not, when there was shopping or washing that had to be done. On Saturday evenings they were let out two hours early and Amelia corralled Lyddie and Prudence for long walks along the river before it grew too dark. Betsy, of course, did whatever she liked regardless of Amelia. Sundays Amelia dragged the reluctant Lyddie to church. At first Lyddie had been afraid Betsy would go on reading without her, but Betsy waited until Sunday afternoon, when Amelia and Prudence were down in the dining room writing their weekly letters home, and she picked up the story just where she had stopped on the previous Friday evening.

  It was several weeks before Lyddie caught on that the novel was from the lending library and thus cost Betsy five cents a week to borrow. On her own, Betsy could have read it much faster, Lyddie was sure of that. As much as she hated to spend the money, on her first payday, Lyddie insisted on giving Betsy a full ten cents to help with Oliver’s rent. Betsy laughed, but she took it. She, too, was saving her money, she confessed quietly to Lyddie and asked her not to tell, to go for an education. There was a college out West in Ohio that took female students—a real college, not a young ladies’ seminary. “But don’t tell Amelia,” she said, her voice returning to its usual ironic tone, “she’d think it unladylike to want to go to Oberlin.”

  It seemed strange to Lyddie that Betsy should care at all what Amelia thought. But Lyddie, who had never had any ambition to be thought a lady, did find herself asking, What would Amelia think?—and censoring her own behavior from time to time accordingly.

  Then, all too soon, the book was done. It seemed to have flown by, and there was so much, especially at the beginning—when Lyddie was too tired and, try as she might, could not listen properly—so much at the beginning that she needed to hear again. Actually, she needed to hear the whole book again, even the terrible parts, dear Nancy’s killing and the death of Sikes.

  She wished she dared to ask Betsy to read more, but she could not. Betsy had given her hours and hours of time and voice. And besides, with July nearly upon them, the three roommates were making plans for going home. The very word was like a blow to her chest. Home. If only she could go. But she had signed with the corporation for a full year of work. If she left, even just to see the cabin and visit for an hour or so with Charlie, she would lose her position. “And if you leave without an honorable discharge,” the clerk had said, “not only will you never work at the Concord Corporation again, but no other mill in Lowell will ever engage you.” Blacklisted! The word sent chills down her backbone.

  So she watched her roommates pack their trunks and listened as they chattered about whom they would see and what they would do, and tried not to mind. Amelia would go to New Hampshire where her clergyman father had a country church. Her mother would welcome her help around the manse and with the tutoring of the farm children in the parish Sunday School. Prudence was bound for the family farm near Rutland, where, Amelia hinted, a suitor on a neighboring farm was primed to snatch her away from factory life forever. Betsy’s parents were dead, but there was an uncle in Maine who was always glad for her to come and help with the cooking. Haying season would soon be here, and there would be many mouths to feed. There was a chance, as well, Betsy said, of seeing her brother. But again, he might be too pressed with invitations from his university mates to find time for a visit with a sister who was only an old spinster and a factory girl to boot.

  After they are gone, I will be earning and saving, Lyddie said to comfort herself. I may earn even more. If the weaving room is short of workers, Mr. Marsden may assign me another loom. Then I could turn out many more pieces each week. For she was proficient now. Weeks before she had begun tending her own loom without Diana’s help.

  She hadn’t imagined that Diana would go on holiday as well, but when Diana told her she was going, she felt a little thrill. Mr. Marsden was sure to give her charge of at least two looms, perhaps a third. She didn’t want Diana to think she was rejoicing in her absence, but she was not skilled at feigning feelings she did not own. “I’ll miss you,” she said.

  Diana laughed at her. “Oh, you’ll be glad enough to see me gone,” she said. “There’ll be three looms for you to tend, a nice fat raise to your wages for these several weeks.” Lyddie blushed. “You needn’t feel bad. Enjoy the money. I think you’ll find you’ve earned every penny. It’s hot as Hades up here in July.”

  “But where will you be going?” Lyddie asked, trying to shift attention from herself. She quickly repented, remembering too late that Diana had no family waiting to see her.

  “It’s all right,” Diana said in reply to Lyddie’s pained look. “I was orphaned young. I’m used to it. I suppose this mill is as much home as I can claim. I started here as a doffer when I was ten. So I’ve fifteen years here. But only a scant handful of Julys.”

  Lyddie wanted to ask, then, if she had no home to go to, where she was headed, but it wasn’t rightly her business, and Diana didn’t offer the information except to say when the noise of the machines insured that no one could overhear, “There’ll be a mass meeting at Woburn on Independence Day.” When Lyddie looked puzzled, she went on, “Of the movement. The ten-hour movement. Miss Bagley will speak, as well as some of the men.” When Lyddie still said nothing, she continued, “There’ll be a picnic lunch, a real Fourth of July celebration. How about it? I promise no one will make you sign your name to anything.”

  Lyddie pressed her lips together and shook her head. “No,” she s
aid. “I expect I’ll be busy.”

  July was hot, as Diana had so inelegantly predicted. Reluctantly, Lyddie spent a dollar on a light summer work dress as her spring calico proved unbearable. Her other expenditure was at the lending library, where she borrowed Oliver Twist. This time she would read it on her own. It didn’t occur to her that she was teaching herself as she laboriously chopped apart the words that had rolled like rainwater off Betsy’s tongue. She was so hungry to hear the story again that, exhausted as she was after her thirteen hours in the weaving room, she lay sweating across her bed mouthing in whispers the sounds of Mr. Dickens’s narrative.

  She was grateful to be alone in the room. There was no one there to make fun of her efforts, or even to try to help. She didn’t want help. She didn’t want to share this reading with anyone. She was determined to learn the book so well that she would be able to read it aloud to Charlie someday. And wouldn’t he be surprised? His Lyddie a real scholar? He’d be monstrous proud.

  During the day at the looms, she went over in her head the bits of the story that she had puzzled out the night before. Then it occurred to her that she could copy out pages and paste them up and practice reading them whenever she had a pause. There were not a lot of pauses when she had three machines to tend, so she pasted the copied page on the frame of one of the looms where she could snatch a glance at it as she worked.

  July was halfway gone when she made her momentous decision. One fair evening as soon as supper was done, she dressed in her calico, which was nicer than her light summer cotton, put on her bonnet and good boots, and went out on the street. She was trembling when she got to the door of the shop, but she pushed it open. A little bell rang as she did so, and a gentleman who was seated on a high stool behind a slanting desktop looked up at her over his spectacles. “How may I help you, miss?” he asked politely.