Saints (4 page)

The door behind her opened. The man looked from her to the door as Anna half-turned to try to get the children to go back, to stay out of the way. She had no time to say anything, however. Robert rushed by her and swung the heavy iron stewpot, striking the man in the shoulder. The drunk roared, reached at Robert, who was staggering back, recovering his balance after the exertion. He didn’t touch the boy, however, for at that moment Dinah shoved forward and kicked the man squarely in the crotch. He bellowed, lost his balance, tumbled backward down the stairs.

“No!” cried Anna, terrified that they had killed him. But the man immediately scrambled to his feet and fled out the door. As soon as he was gone, Anna ushered the children back into their room. “I’m relieved to see that Charlie’s still asleep.” Anna said. “I half expected to see him turn up next with a musket.”

“Won’t have nobody talk to you like that,” Robert said, his voice trembling.

“Won’t have
anybody
,” Anna corrected him. “You should have let me handle it.”

“I’ll kill him if he comes back,” Dinah said.

“No talk of killing,” Anna said, violently scrubbing her hand and sleeve with a rag, trying to get rid of the slime.

“Don’t be angry, Mother,” Robert said. “We only meant to help.”

Suddenly Anna found herself crying, not stern at all, not rebuking, but reaching out to Robert and Dinah, hugging them and saying, “Thank you, thank you.”

At last they were calmed down enough to sleep. Only a few quiet words. “How did Dinah know to kick a man like that?” Robert asked.

“I don’t know,” Anna answered. “But I’m glad she knew.”

Charlie woke a little as she covered Robert in the same bed. “I dreamed bad,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Anna said. “Did you say your prayers?”

“I prayed three times and the dream went away.”

“It’s all better then, isn’t it?”

Charlie nodded gravely, believing it. So easily, thought Anna, so easily such a little one can be given peace.

The children slept, and now Anna trembled, now she quietly crept out the door and stepped a short way down the stairs and leaned over the wobbly banister and vomited into the foul room. And when she was empty, she still retched and retched until, exhausted, she returned weakly to her bed. She was ashamed of her weakness, and tried to excuse it. It was the smell, the fear, the helplessness, the loss of her husband, most of all the shame of having fallen to such a depth as this.

“Mother.”

“Hush, Dinah. Go to sleep.”

“How will Father know to find us here, when he comes back?”

How could she tell the girl that her father would never come back, that he was also proud, that his shame would always keep him away? Still less could she explain that if he came, she’d shut the door in his face, treat him like the man they had driven from their stairs. I hate him, Dinah, I’ll never forgive him; even if he
is
your father, he’s the cause of all this, and I pray every night that there’s a miserable room in hell for men who abandon their families. She couldn’t say any of that. So she told the comforting lie: “I left word with the neighbors. He’ll know the way.”

Dinah nodded inscrutably; for a moment Anna had the queer feeling that her daughter knew the true answer, and had only asked the question to test her mother, to see whether Anna would trust her with the truth. But of course not, Dinah was only ten, only a child, and she missed her father after these weeks. Of course she did. God help her—she’s had to strike a man to save us, and if he had died, she would have been the one who tumbled him down the stairs. Ten years old, and she had reached willingly to cause a death, if Providence had turned it that way. What will happen to you, Dinah, you and my sons, what will happen to you when the need gets greater, and our strength grows less?

Can’t be helped. All in the hands of God, can’t be helped. We will pray as we have always prayed, and God will care for us, as he sees best.

Next day before breakfast she went downstairs and began sweeping the filth off the floor, including her own vomit, which was no less foul than any other. One by one the children came down to help, and it was done before their first meal at noon. “Tastes better,” Robert said, holding up his cold potato, “without the smell of downstairs sauce.”

Despite the brave front he tried to put on it, Robert did not face new things easily. He never had. Dinah’s birth had been catastrophic to him, and he had reacted almost as badly to Charlie’s, even though he was six when his younger brother was born. The other three children had not lived more than a few days—their deaths had been a relief to him. Was it sinful of him? As he grew older, he wondered about himself, but he was really no more monstrous than most children are.

Robert knew beyond doubt how things ought to be. The family ought to live in rooms above a store. There ought to be customers. His mother ought to say, “My strong boy. What would I do without you?” Just as the sunlight ought to slant so in summer, hot and shimmery, and then at a steeper, colder angle in the winter afternoons. In his earliest years he had studied the customers and knew who would buy, who would haggle, and who would cheat; he had also studied the dust trembling in the sunlight streaming through the window, yet for all his study never knew which drifting wisp of it would pass too near the edge, would slip outside the walls of the sunbeam and be lost.

I am lost, he said to himself. He feared the strange silence of this place; the walls were all wrong; and worst of all, the wrongest thing of all was that his father’s step never came here, that he could no longer conjure a memory of his father’s face, even in the darkest night. Am lost.

And yet there were things even here that he could count on. He would awake in the morning when he heard the door close from his mother going off to fetch water. He would rise, set out the plates, stoke the fire, and then, if she was not back yet, lean against the bare wall and look at the arrangement of the plates. God bless me, thought he, but I do a neat job of it.

A morning like any other. Cold potato again, and less of it than ever. Mother looking afraid but smiling cheerfully despite the way that Charlie, damn him, whined for more. And when at last Charlie was buried in his book, Robert said, “Will you take me to find work, or must I go alone?”

As if by habit Anna shook her head. Robert rolled up his sleeves and stretched out his arms. “If you won’t let me use them, you might as well cut them off.” Ah, it was a melodramatic moment. But it was no actor’s ploy; Anna saw that the boy would not be denied. In truth, she had no further will to deny him. Starvation was only weeks away, and
she
had had no luck in finding work.

So Robert and Anna stood at the door of Ambrose and Brewster, an impressive hulk of smudged brick that loomed over Chapel Street. Anna held Robert’s hand, and she spoke for him, but he had no illusions. Her hand would go, and he would stay, and it would all be new and terrible. Only this made it bearable: that he had chosen it.

“Mum?” asked the thick and confident man who opened the door.

“I wondered,” Anna said, “if you have need of a fine young man.”

“A child?”

“You see that Robert is tall for his age, and strong.”

“Eleven?”

“Thirteen.”

“Looks like eleven, and soft. We pay him for what he does, not what his mother thinks of him.” The man wrote
doffer
in his book, and the name
Robert
. “He gets dinner at noon, tea at four if you live close. Work stops at ten, and then wash up. Master’s particular about washing up.”

“So am I,” Anna said. She was relieved that they cared about cleanliness. Robert was not. He did not hear cleanliness. He heard that Master was particular.

“Will you treat him well?” Anna asked.

“They don’t do much work if we beat them too much, mum. But they also don’t do much if we don’t maintain normal and necessary discipline.”

A few beatings were to be expected; no adults thought twice about it, unless it was excessive. Robert had been beaten at school as a matter of course. Anna suspected that the stories she had heard of cruelty in the factories were much overdone. “You’ll find Robert’s a good boy.”

“Three a week.”

“I had rather hoped for more, him being so large for his age.”

“Well, then,” said the overseer, drawing a line through Robert’s name in the book. “We don’t want him, if he’s already being trained to be greedy.” He closed the book and made as if to turn away.

Anna was flustered, but Robert knew that this was just another form of haggling: he knew it well from his earliest memories of his father’s store. “Sir,” Robert said, “start me at three, and I’ll work so hard that in six weeks you’ll not be able to say your prayers for paying me so little.”

The man turned around and squinted at Robert. “Cocky little devil, aren’t you? Begging your pardon, mum. Well, I can’t give you more than two and six, at first, seeing how you’re so smart-spoken and have greedy blood. But if you do as well as you brag, boy, you’ll have your rise, we don’t pay but what’s fairly owed.”

He could tell his mother wanted to refuse, wanted to take him away and find another place, or better still send him back to school somehow. But the money was low and the food near gone, and so he pulled his hand from hers and reluctantly she agreed to it. So it was done, and Anna went off and left him there. Oddly, when she let go his hand the noise of the factory suddenly became louder, reached out to him and touched him and enveloped him; he could feel the throbbing of the machinery for the first time, as if the quiet pulse of her hand had been enough to drown it out before.

The overseer’s fingers came around behind his neck, large and strong, stronger than his father’s hand; by it he was propelled into the factory, where the smell of coal and the whine and screech and hum and clatter of machinery took hold of him and drew him in despite his terror. It came to him like the thunder and lightning from Mount Sinai, like hearing the voice of a God whose face could not be seen. Lord, the world is burning, but it is not consumed! The rites of the factory had more strength than the stately Anglican service, for the silence of the Church could be no match for this. Trembling into his bones, hammering at his ears, this was omnipotence, Almighty Coalfire and His Son the Steam Engine, and everywhere the power brought by endless whistling belts to each spinning jenny, like the Holy Ghost touching the heart of every man: Praise God, from whom all blessings flow; fear God and live, yes, fear him and live, become careless of him and you will die.

“You hear me, boy? Never touch one of those belts for an instant or you’re dead on the spot, the belts’ll snatch you and crush you into the machinery in a second, and nothing for you but the grave, boy, if we can find enough pieces of you to fill a box.”

It was a religion Robert could understand. “Aye, sir,” he said reverently. He saw the hundreds of women, each bent over her work, the bins of unspun wool being sucked dry by the power of the machines, the digested thread spewing from them, hurtling around huge bobbins, all by the force of the belts that seemed alive, they sang so. “I’ll be careful.”

The hand at his back tightened, held his neck and his hair in a crushing, tearing grip.

“Did I ask you to speak?”

“No, sir!”

The hand tightened more. “I say, did I ask you to speak?”

This time Robert only shook his head.

“Then keep still. In this place, that rule is law. Not a word except what’s required for the work, and that’s damned little except what’s said by me. In other factories they talk and get careless, but here you keep still and think about your work and there’s no accidents that way, or fewer, anyway. Do you understand?”

Robert caught himself in time and nodded his answer instead of saying yes.

The overseer left him and stepped farther into the cavernous room. Boys Robert’s age and younger were rushing back and forth carrying bobbins. The overseer collared one and pulled him to where Robert waited. “New doffer. Teach him in fifteen minutes or I’ll have your hide.”

The boy glared at Robert, but led him to the spinning jenny he had been heading for with his empty bobbin. The woman there did not stop her work, not even to look up at them. Instead she said softly, so that it was almost impossible to hear her, “A new one?”

The boy nodded. The woman’s face went ugly for a moment, but she just nodded and went on working. The boy whispered something to Robert. “What?” Robert asked.

The boy slapped his face. Robert was stunned, and might have made reply except for the woman hissing softly and shaking her head. The boy grabbed Robert’s shirt front, pulled him close, and whispered in his ear. “Not a sound out loud, not that the bastard overseer can hear, or we’ll all three be strapped!” The whisper was vehement. Robert nodded quickly. “All right then, strip off those shoes and stockings and take off that jacket so you can get to work.” Robert looked where the boy was pointing—a room full of coats and shoes and stockings. Robert quickly went to it, took off his shoes and socks. As he hung up his coat on a peg, he noticed that many of the coats were women’s, as were many of the shoes, mingled right among the men’s. He was startled—surely the factory would not do anything so indecent as to require the women to remove their stockings in the same room as the men. He puzzled on this for a moment.

“Dawdling?”

He turned to see the overseer gazing at him with deep, bright eyes, and he was so afraid that he spoke to defend himself. “No sir, I was just—”

He was silenced by the sting of the overseer’s strap against his arm. It was a piece of an old belt that once had carried power; now it carried only authority, and yet the force of it, like all other force within the factory, came ultimately from the unseen coalfire, which sent the black dust everywhere, coming from nowhere, to burn in the nose and lungs and spread to fill all Manchester with its soot. This was what the overseer carried in his hand, and Robert’s awe only deepened.

“Not a word,” said the overseer. “Now were you dawdling?”

Robert shook his head. The strap fell again, stinging twice as badly as before.

“Not a word, and still less a lie. Dawdling? I asked you.”

Robert nodded.

“I thought so.” The overseer grabbed him by the arm, spun him around, and landed three vicious blows across the high part of his back, between his shoulders. They were agonizing, caught as Robert was with just his shirt. Robert cried out, and the overseer heaved him into the coats hanging on the wall. It was all the boy could do to keep from crying from the pain.

“Learn your trade quickly,” said the overseer, “and make no mistakes, and you won’t feel this strap again.” And again Robert was alone in the cloak room.

When he got back to the spinning jenny, the boy assigned to him said nothing, just began showing Robert how to dismantle the frame of thread, remove the full bobbin, rush it to the rollers, and return with an empty bobbin and replace it in the frame. One doffer served six jennies, and it was only a few moments before Robert was required to change a frame entirely on his own.

It was not just fear of the strap that kept Robert from doing well at first; the very novelty of everything he was doing and the speed at which it had to be done had him so terrified that he was lucky to remember where the bobbin was on the machines. The operator of one of the first jennies he changed alone became impatient and whispered, “Quick, damn you, boy, or I fall behind!” It only made Robert more tense, less able to move quickly, and when he finally had the frame off and the bobbin out, he lost his balance and stumbled toward the belts and straps that whirred madly only a few inches away from him.

The operator cried out, grabbing him by the arm. His free hand brushed against a belt. The belt caught his hand and threw it brutally against the jenny. It could have been worse, could have caught his hand between strap and metal and shorn it off at the wrist. As it was, it tore a gouge out of his flesh, bruised his hand, twisted his wrist, and so frightened him that he felt nauseated and faint.

“What’s going on!” roared the overseer. “Why the shouting and screaming! Why isn’t the boy working!”

No one said anything. The operator just lifted Robert’s bleeding hand.

“Stanch that blood! Do you want to stain the thread?”

The operator made as if to help Robert to a place where his hand could be bound, but the overseer jabbed at her with the strap. “Not you! Where’s the turnboy!”

A nine-year-old appeared from farther up the line. The overseer tersely told him to take care of the problem. The nine-year-old had no sense of urgency—what was another boy’s blood to him?—and sauntered easily to the washroom, where he directed Robert to put his hand under a spigot, which poured out ice-cold water. It numbed the pain.

“Can I talk here?” Robert asked.

“Ye’re talkin’, an’t ye?”

“Will my hand be all right?”

The boy shrugged. “If it is, ye go back to work in a minute, and do double to make up for the time lost. If it isn’t, ye go home and no more come here to work.” In other words, the hand was all right whether it was injured or not, because it
had
to be.

“What’s a turnboy?”

“Me,” said the boy. Then he grinned. “Turnboy’s what tells everybody their turn.”

“Turn for what?”

“To pluck daisies. And they only have a few seconds, so when yer turn comes, fellow, ye’d best have the need.” The hand was bound now, and skillfully, so that Robert still had full use of it. “Ye’re na cripple on this one. Be more careful, there’s nothin’ I can do if yer head be crushed.”

Kind words and a note of concern: They were people here, not just pieces of the machine or fingers of the overseer. And hadn’t the operator grabbed him and probably saved his life? As ancient Israel had discovered, God could be lived with, and so could even his prophets, it was possible to survive even in the shadow of the power of God, even after God had touched his hand and struck his back and taught him that the first virtue of power was its pain.

By dinner Robert had the knack of it, and though he wasn’t near as quick as the other boys, he got it done and kept up. He noticed how the others had such a keen eye for the overseer that they could stop now and then and chat with each other, with the rollers, with even the operators. The women had learned to trust the doffers’ eyes—if the boy spoke, it was because, for the moment, it was safe to speak. Robert hadn’t their trust yet, and didn’t deserve it—he wasn’t sure enough of his work to take his eyes off it to see where the man with the strap was lurking. Yet there was hope, for the other boys could do it, and someday he’d manage it as well.