Lyddie gasped.
He drew his hands back. “Are you in pain?” he asked.
Lyddie shook her head. It was not pain that had startled her. It was the doctor himself. She had seen him before—with Diana—last summer on Merrimack Street.
14
Ills and Petitions
By Saturday afternoon she was back in her own room, and by Sunday the pain had dulled. Dr. Craven had cut her hair away from the wound and bound her head in a proper bandage, but she took it off. She was going back to work the next day, bald spot and all. She’d never been vain—never had anything to be vain about, to tell the truth. No need to start in fussing over her looks now.
At first Amelia and Mrs. Bedlow objected to her returning to work so soon, but they quickly gave up. Lyddie would go to work no matter what. “If you can’t do the work …,” Mr. Marsden had said. Besides, Diana came by Sunday evening and said she was looking quite fit again. Diana should know, shouldn’t she?
She went to bed early, but she couldn’t sleep. Her head seemed to throb more when she was lying down. She thought about her family—suppose that cussed shuttle had killed her, or put out her eye? What would they do? And Diana. What was Lyddie to think? She hadn’t dared ask about Dr. Craven. Diana hadn’t explained why she sent for him instead of Dr. Morris, who usually cared for the girls at Number Five. Dr. Craven seemed as good a doctor as any—better. He didn’t leave a bill.
The curfew bell rang. Amelia came to bed. Betsy did too, though she kept her candle burning, studying into the night as she often did. At last she blew out the light, and slid down under the quilts. Then it began, that awful tearing sound that Lyddie would come to dread with every knotted inch of nerves through her whole silently screeching body. Finally it stopped.
“Betsy, I do wish you’d see Dr. Morris about that cough.” Amelia’s voice came from the next bed.
“I’m a big girl, Amelia. Don’t nag.”
“I’m not nagging. If you weren’t so stubborn …”
“What would he tell me, Amelia? To rest? How can I do that? I’ve only got a few more months to go. If I stop now—”
“I’m going to stop.”
“What?”
There was a sigh in the darkness. “I’m leaving—going home.”
“Home?”
“I—I’ve come to hate factory life. Oh Betsy, I hate what it’s doing to me. I don’t even know myself anymore. This corporation is turning me into a sour old spinster.”
“It’s just the winter.” Betsy’s voice was kinder than usual. “It’s hard to stay cheerful in the dark. Come spring you’ll be our resident saint once more.”
Amelia ignored the tease. “I’ve been through winter before,” she said. “It’s not the season.” She sighed again, more deeply than before. “I’m tired, Betsy. I can’t keep up the pace.”
“Who can? Except our Amazonian Lyddie?” Betsy’s laugh turned abruptly into a cough that shook the whole bed.
Lyddie scrunched up tightly into herself and tried to block out the sound and the rusty saw hacking through her own chest. Had Betsy been coughing like this for long? Why hadn’t she heard it before? Surely there must be some syrup or tonic, even opium …
“You must see the doctor about that cough,” Amelia said. “Promise me you will.”
“I’ll make a pact with you, Amelia. I’ll see the doctor if you’ll promise to stay until summer. I can’t think of Number Five without you.” She stopped to cough, then cleared her throat and said in a still husky voice, “How could I manage? You’re the plague of my life—my—my guardian angel.”
There was a funny kind of closeness between her roommates after that night, but even so, Amelia went home the last week of January to visit and didn’t come back. She wrote that her father had found her a teaching post in the next village. “Forgive me, Betsy,” she wrote. “And do, please, I beg you, go to see the doctor.”
* * *
* * *
With a bed to herself, Lyddie was less distressed by Betsy’s coughing. And though Betsy never quite got around to seeing Dr. Morris, she was better, Lyddie told herself. Surely the cough was less wracking than it had been. Lyddie missed Amelia. She would have imagined that she’d feel relief to have her gone, but Betsy was right. They both needed her in an odd sort of way—their nettlesome guardian angel.
Her cut was quite healed. Her hair grew out and covered the scar. She was working as well and as hard as ever. Her January pay came to eleven dollars and twenty cents, exclusive of board. Everything was going well for her when Mr. Marsden stopped her one evening as she was about to leave. The machines were quiet, so she could not pretend deafness.
“You’re feeling fine again? No problems with the—the head?” She nodded and made as if to go. “You have to take care of yourself. You’re my best girl, you know.” He put his hand on her sleeve. She looked down at it, and he slipped it off. His face reddened slightly, and his little round mouth worked a bit on the next sentence.
“We’re getting new operators in tomorrow—not nearly so clever as you, but promising. If I could put one in your care—let her work as a spare hand on one of your machines.”
Oh, hang it all. How could she say no? How could she explain that she must not be slowed down? She couldn’t have some dummy monkeying with her looms. “I got to make my pieces,” she muttered.
“Yes,” he said, “of course you do. It would only be for a day or so. I wouldn’t let anyone hinder you.” He smiled with his mouth and not his eyes. “You’re my prize girl here.”
I’m not your girl. I’m not anybody’s girl but my own.
“So—it’s settled,” he said, reaching out as though to pat her again, but Lyddie quickly shifted her arm to escape the touch.
* * *
* * *
The new girl, Brigid, was from the Acre—an Irish papist through and through, wearing layers of strange capes and smelling even worse than Lyddie herself. Lyddie scented more than poverty and winter sweat. She whiffed disaster. The girl’s only asset was a better command of proper New England speech than most of her lot. Not that she spoke often. She seemed deafened by the machinery and too cowed to ask questions even when she needed to.
As for tying knots, a basic weaver’s knot, the girl simply couldn’t do them. Lyddie demonstrated—her powdered fingers pinching, looping, slipping, pulling—all in one fluid motion that magically produced a healed warp thread with no hint of a lump to betray the break.
“You don’t even watch!” the girl cried out in alarm. And, of course, Lyddie didn’t. She had no need to. Her fingers could have tied that knot in a privy at midnight, and it would have held. It would have been invisible as well.
“Here,” she said, barely clinging to patience. “I’ll do it more slowly.” She slapped off all four machines. With her scissors, she cut two threads from a bobbin and, taking the girl to the window where the light was best, she wasted at least five precious minutes tying and retying the useless knot until, finally, the girl was able, however clumsily, to tie a lumpy knot herself.
Lyddie jerked a nod. “It will get better with practice,” she said gruffly, anxious to get the stilled looms roaring once more.
Threading the shuttle was, if anything, worse. Lyddie popped the full bobbin into the shuttle and then, as always, put her mouth to the hole and sucked the thread through, pulled it to length, wrapped it quickly on a hook of the temple, dropped the shuttle into the race, and restarted the loom. The next time the quill had to be replaced, she had Brigid thread it, and, as she watched the girl put her mouth over the hole and suck out the thread, the words kiss of death came to mind. She had always thought the words a joke among the weavers, but here was this strange-smelling foreigner sucking Lyddie’s shuttles, leaving her spittle all over the thread hole. Lyddie wiped the point quickly on her apron before she banged the shuttle against the far end of the race. “We don’t want any flying s
huttles,” she yelled, her face nearly as crimson as the Irish girl’s.
By the end of the first day, the girl was far from ready to operate her own machine, but Lyddie had run out of patience. She told Mr. Marsden to assign the girl a loom next to her own. “I’ll watch out for her and tend my own machines as well.”
Before the noon break of the next day, a flying shuttle had grazed the girl’s shoulder, and she had let the shuttle run out of weft, ruining several inches of cloth. When a warp thread snapped, instead of instantly hitting the lever to stall the loom, she threw her apron over her head and burst into tears.
“Shut off your loom,” Lyddie yelled over to her. “You can tie the knot this time. You should know how by now, ey?” The girl burst into tears again, and before Lyddie could decide what to do with her, Diana was there, slapping off the loom. Burning with shame, Lyddie glanced over as Diana, without a quiver of impatience, helped the girl retrieve the broken ends and tie a weaver’s knot. When, finally, Diana stood back and told the girl to pull the lever into place, Lyddie touched Diana’s shoulder. “Sorry,” she mouthed.
Diana nodded and went back to work. At the last bell Lyddie found herself going down the stairs beside Diana.
“She’s going to do fine, your Brigid,” Diana said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Lyddie said, wondering how Diana knew the girl’s name and then annoyed that the foreigner should be “hers.” Surely Lyddie had never wanted her. “She seems all thumbs and tears. They be such fools, those Irish.”
Diana gave a wry smile. “We’re all allowed to be fools the first week or two, aren’t we?”
Lyddie blushed furiously. “I never thanked you proper for taking care of me before,” she said. “And your doctor—he never sent a bill. Mind you, I’m not complaining, but—”
Diana didn’t comment on the doctor. “Your head seems to have quite recovered. How do you feel? No pain, I hope.”
“Oh, I’m all right,” Lyddie said. “Just ornery as a old sow.”
“Ornery enough to add your name to the petition?” Diana whispered.
She was teasing her, Lyddie was sure of it. “I don’t reckon I aim to ever get that ornery,” Lyddie said.
* * *
* * *
Betsy signed the petition. One of the Female Labor Reform girls caught her in an apothecary shop one evening and got her to write in her name.
Lyddie was furious. “They got you when you was feeling low,” she said. “They go creeping around the city taking advantage when girls are feeling sick or worn out. Now you’ll be blacklisted, and what will I do without you?”
“Better to go out with a flourish than a whine, don’t you think?” But Betsy was never allowed her imagined exit. She was to be neither blacklisted nor dismissed.
Her cough got no better. She asked for a transfer to the drawing room. The work of drawing the warp threads from the beam through the harness and reeds had to be done painstakingly by hand. The air was cleaner in the drawing room, and there was much less noise. Though the threading took skill, it did not take the physical strength demanded in the machine rooms, and the girls sat on high stools as they worked. The drawing room was a welcome change for Betsy, but the move came too late to help. The coughing persisted. She began to spend days in their bedroom, then the house infirmary, until, finally, when blood showed up in her phlegm, Mrs. Bedlow demanded that she be removed to the hospital.
On Sunday Lyddie went to see her, taking her botany text and a couple of novels that cost Lyddie twenty cents at the lending library.
“You’ve got to get me out of here,” Betsy said between fits of coughing. “They’ll bleed me of every penny I’ve saved.” But where could Betsy go? Mrs. Bedlow would not have her in the house, unwilling to bear the responsibility, and Dr. Morris had declared her too weak to travel to Maine to her uncle’s.
Lyddie wrote the brother. He was only in Cambridge—less than a day away by coach or train—but there was a three-week delay before he wrote to say that he was studying for his final examinations and would, perhaps, be able to come for a visit at the end of the term.
Betsy only laughed. “Well,” she said, “he’s our darling baby boy.” Then she fell to coughing. There was a red stain on her handkerchief.
“But you sent him all the way through that college of his.”
“Wouldn’t you do as much for your Charlie?”
“But Charlie is—” Lyddie was going to say “nice” and stopped herself just in time.
“Our parents are dead, and he’s the son and heir,” Betsy said as though that explained everything.
Betsy grew a little stronger as the weather warmed, and in April her uncle came to take her to Maine. By then her savings were gone, along with her good looks. “Keep my bed for me, Lyddie. I’ll be back next year to start all over again. Someday I’ll have enough money to go to college no matter how much the piece rate drops. I may be the oldest girl in the corporation before I have the money again, but if they let women into Oberlin at all, surely they won’t fuss about gray hair and a few wrinkles.”
She’ll never come back, Lyddie thought sadly as she watched the buggy disappear around the corner, headed for the depot and the train north. She’ll never be strong enough again to work in a mill thirteen, fourteen hours a day. When I’m ready to go myself, she thought, maybe I could sign that cussed petition. Not for me. I don’t need it, but for Betsy and the others. It ain’t right for this place to suck the strength of their youth, then cast them off like dry husks to the wind.
* * *
* * *
He was standing by the front door of Number Five when she came with the rush of girls for the noon meal. “Lyddie Worthen …” He said her name so quietly that she almost went past him without hearing. “Miss Lyddie …”
She turned toward the voice, which didn’t seem familiar, to see a tall man she didn’t know. Later she realized that he had not been wearing his broad black Quaker hat. She would have known him at once in his hat. His hair in the sunlight was the rusty red of a robin’s breast. Several girls nudged her and giggled as they pushed past her up the steps to the boardinghouse.
“I was hoping thee would come,” he said. He was so tall he had to stoop over to speak to her. “I’m Luke Stevens.” His grave brown eyes searched her face. “Has thee forgotten?”
“No,” she said. “I’d not forgot. I just never expected—”
“I wondered if thee would know me in this strange garb.” He was wearing shirt and trousers of coarse cotton jean—the kind of cloth the Lowell mills spit out by the mile. She would have known him at once in his Quaker hat and his mother’s brown homespun. “I’m fetching some freight from down Boston way,” he said almost in a whisper, glancing over his shoulder as he spoke. “They tend to look out for Friends on the road.”
“Oh,” she said, not really understanding.
“My pa sent thee this,” he said, handing her a thick brown parcel about the size of a small book. “He didn’t want to risk the post with it, and since I was coming down Boston way—”
She took the parcel from his big, rough farmer fist. “I thank you for your trouble,” she said.
“It was no trouble.” Was he blushing behind that sun- and wind-weathered face? How odd he seemed.
She felt a need to be polite. “Maybe Mrs. Bedlow could find you some dinner,” she said. “We was just coming to eat.”
“I can’t stay longer. I’m due in Boston. But—but, I’m obliged,” he said.
“Well …”
“I’d best be on my way …”
“Well …” She could hear the calls and clatter of the dinner hour even through the closed front door. She’d hardly have a minute to eat her meal if he didn’t go.
“It’s mighty good to see thee, Lyddie Worthen,” he said. “We miss having thee up the hill.”
She tried to smile at him. “Thank you for the …”—wha
tever the strange parcel was. “It was good of you to bring it all this way.” When on earth would he leave?
“Thy Charlie is well,” he said. “I was by the mill just last week.”
Charlie. “He’s doing well? Fit and—and content?”
“Cheerful as ever. He’s a fine boy, Lyddie.”
“Yes. I know. Give him my—my best when you see him again, ey?”
He nodded. “Thy house came through the winter in good shape.” He saw her glimpse the door. “I mustn’t hold thee longer from thy dinner,” he said. “God keep you.”
“And you,” she said.
He grinned good-bye and was gone.
She didn’t have time to open the parcel until after supper. Enclosed in several layers of brown paper was a strange, official-looking document, which at first she could make no sense of, and a letter in a strange hand.
My dear Miss Lydia,
By now you have despaired of me and decided that I am a man who does not honor his word. Please forgive my tardiness. Thanks to the good offices of our friends the Stevenses (true Friends, indeed) as well as your gracious loan, I was able to make my way safely to Montreal. I have now the great joy of my family’s presence. Enclosed, therefore, herein is a draft which can never repay my great debt to you.
With everlasting gratitude, your friend,
Ezekial Freeman
She could not believe it. Fifty dollars. The next day she used her dinner break to race to the bank. Yes, it was a genuine draft from a solvent Montreal bank. Fifty dollars. With one piece of paper her account had bulged like a cow about to freshen. She must find out at once what the debt was. She might already have enough to cover it. Why hadn’t her mother replied to her inquiry? Did her mother even know what the debt was? Did she care? Oh mercy, had the woman always hated the farm? Was she glad to have it off her hands?
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