The Daredevils (30 page)

“‘Because they wish to!' ‘I do not wish you to speak of it again. You must pay attention to your work or risk a break in your concentration. You might fall behind, your work will pile up, something might snarl or jam or catch, and you will place not only the steady functioning of the line but yourself and your fellows in terrible jeopardy. If the line is destroyed, so are our jobs and consequently our lives and our souls. Yes, it is a sin. God will wonder
what is wrong with you. You don't want God wondering what's wrong with you, Rosemary, do you understand me? Do you understand me? I will not have you starve to death!'”

“You seem to know a lot about the Willimantic mill.”

Vera looked at Charles when she answered him. It was the first time the dreamy look drifted away from her eyes.

“I do.”

“You have never talked about the Muscatine mill this way.”

“My job in Muscatine was much simpler. There were no machines involved. I was younger and if I worked there longer, it doesn't seem that way now. Too much happened in Willimantic.”

“From buttons to thread.”

“American Button to American Thread.”

“Are you really from Muscatine? Is your name really Vera?”

Vera looked away and sighed. After a while, back in character, she continued her story.

“Because our drums were necessarily near the loading docks, we were privy to tantalizing portions of the conversations of the men who came and went there: the suggestive small talk and boasting and whispered rumors, the thick accents and humorous imitations, bits of news and gossip, jokes and the tag ends of strange lines of dialogue, oratory and performance of anecdotes to pass the time—and of course, observation, analysis, commentary, complaint, and passionately voiced frustration, which became, with what seemed like the passage of the years of our young womanhood, slow-boiling anger and isolated bursts of terrifying outrage. It was, in the absence of real family and friends, with these men that we learned to speak—first to ourselves, but after not too long, publicly and socially as well. Rosemary became a favorite of some of these men. She was pretty, I was not.”

“Don't be absurd! You are fantastically beautiful!”

“You
are
sweet, but it's not true.”

“Oh, Vera . . . .”

“They sought her out and kidded her while the drums turned and we pushed the dirty lumpy cotton along the feeding tray. She kidded them back, telling them of her merciful, nutrient-rich urine and the deep little people who prayed for it. The men found her inventions startlingly witty in one so young. It's not too much to say they found her fascinating, which attention in turn encouraged her to act more audaciously, to broaden the reach of her narratives, and to deepen their meaning. By the time we were fourteen, in the year 1910, she was the center of a devoted circle. The men (boys, really, not much older than she) would appear in the several proscenia of the open loading dock doors, lit and backdropped according to the weather, sometimes silhouettes against the bright sunlight, sometimes colorful heroes striding out of the ravages of a storm, conduct their business, tease her a little bit from a distance, making big obvious gestures and shouting, then drift nearer and nearer, refining remark and gesture as they came until at last they were speaking into each other's ears and there was fondling and wrestling and kissing and all our drum-mothers would scream abuse—early days, or, later, blow their whistle. It's not hard nowadays to imagine the extent to which the sexual play went, but we couldn't believe what was happening. Then, one day the next year, they stopped coming. We did not know why, but suspected that the drum-mothers had said something to someone, and someone perhaps had supplied them with the goddamned whistles, and now had taken even harsher steps to restrict the flow of communication into and out of the mill. Rosemary fell into a deep depression—I did not—and kept climbing up and tumbling down the sides of it. Her old nervous unease and disorder—the tics only she noticed, the fluttering feeling and the feeling that something other than blood was coursing flammably through her veins, and her heart, racing for no reason until she felt ready to faint, then hovering on the edge of unconsciousness until it passed—began to take hold of her again. Her head ached ceaselessly, her whole body ached and trembled, and she fell into nearly incoherent rages over nothing. It was either that or weep, almost undetectably but uncontrollably, while staying physically steady, pushing and spreading the cotton as the drums screeched
in their eternal revolutions. She became fixated on the idea that there were little girls inside her drum, dead little girls playing games and singing, girls who could be our dearest friends but for the fact that they were trapped in the drum and forever tumbling. Noises would suddenly sharpen and penetrate her head, then fade out again, there were dark curtains around the familiar shapes of her station. She could make out distinct and interesting conversations inside the drum and outside it simultaneously. She might hear bells ringing, horses nickering and snorting, greasy smoking engines thudding away, then suddenly clear human speech.”

“I think it was you who imagined these things.”

“It wasn't me, you dumb bunny.”

“Why do I think it was?”

“If she looked up and saw her mother's mouth moving, she would sigh and stop listening; if a man's mouth and bushy moustache across the room were moving, she would listen as long as she could. On the worst days the noises would join and become unbearable, but then, as if under the control of a just and surprisingly merciful god, cease utterly. She might look up and see her mother's mouth working some terrible curse—she knew the patterns of lips and tongue and jaw by now—see that she was sobbing, but hear nothing. In that silence, when she knew perfectly well that something inside her had broken—or perhaps only relaxed?—she could hear the little girls, our friends, inside the slowly turning drum singing whispery mournful songs, simple little dirges in time with the drum's reemergent banging and creaking. Dazed by this silence and the warmth of the sad songs, she would slip to her knees and, sometimes, urinate. One day she did fully and completely faint. She was having trouble hearing anything at all—the sounds of the mill were muffled and she could only see the drum-mother's lips moving as she hectored and judged almost good-naturedly, and she made a motion as if to squat and pee. The drum-mother reached out with her habitual gesture almost of comfort but of restraint too, but Rosemary went unsteadily down. She began to urinate, then blacked out and went over backward. The drum-mother panicked. Fallen workers were to be left to their own devices and
the assistance of floor managers, so she stepped over Rosemary, hurriedly pushed some cotton along the tray, then dashed to the back to the carder. Rosemary awoke a second or two later, having no idea what had happened or where she was. When it came to her—when she realized she was not in a strange white room but in the mill—she tried to get to her feet. Her mother reached out now without even looking at her and caught a hank of her long dark hair. She tipped over again but her mother wouldn't let go this time, bending awkwardly but keeping her fear-filled eyes and one hand on her work. Rosemary crawled toward her, grabbed her ankle, and bit hard into her calf. Her mother yelped inaudibly under the noise of the machines and let go of her hair. Rosemary stayed low, slapping and banging the filthy floor as she made her getaway. One man laughed at her, again inaudibly, a grotesque grimace of pain, it looked like, and another shook his leg at her like he would a dog. The kick caught her a glancing blow, altering her direction and ultimately bringing her to her feet. The sound of the mill and its workers was now deafening but she could hear every note of it. She looked over her shoulder at her drum-mother, who stared back at her in panic and horror, and at me, wide-eyed, frightened—then bolted. I swallowed hard and followed her. She ran as fast as she could up the aisle into the heart of the mill, shouting, ‘STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE!' I suppose I hollered the same or similar. Our fellow workers did pause in their movements, some for only a second or two, some for longer, and confusion began to mount. Leaping up the stairs to the second floor, we struggled—still dizzy as well as being ordinarily weak from the poor food we ate—with the weights and pulleys of the big iron door that led to the looms, pulled it open just enough to squeeze through, then lost our way in terrified inner darkness for a crucial moment. The door caught us as it swung heavily back into place. We screamed and fought the door and slipped through: the looms clattered and hummed. It was a noise on a higher register than the noise below, but more penetrating. Rosemary took a breath, started shouting ‘STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE!' again, and dashed into the center of the room. It was exactly at that point that one of the mill's famous lead-tipped shuttles shot from its loom. It was
‘a convergence of the twain' worthy of Hardy. The shuttle traveled straight as an arrow, then, just as it began to lose momentum and descend, struck Rosemary in the temple. It was like the hand of God. That she should faint, then revive and race to a distant point only to intercept a missile streaking toward the very spot where she would be—and not simply be but be in an act of outright rebellion—seemed incontrovertibly theological in its parabolic progression. Because the danger posed by these powerfully ejected and effectively rifled shuttles, the room was laid out so that no one who was standing where he or she was supposed to be standing would be hurt when one of them fired itself out of a loom; the obvious corollary revolved around the ancient belief that if you weren't where you were supposed to be, even for an instant!—you deserved what was coming to you. And it would always come to you. And because company policy was company policy no matter what floor you worked on, she was left in a heap on the floor. What had been coming for her for millennia had arrived. She was nervously glanced at over shoulders and under arms, and there was a great deal of surreptitious talk, but she remained where she was and as she was. Her long black skirt (in which was sown the flat little package of family documentation) was spread out around her and hid most of her body so that from a certain angle she looked like she'd fallen in a hole filled with black water, with only her head and arms above water, weakly hanging on to the edge.”

“After He smote her, God spoke to her. He spoke to her for a very long time, and when she awoke, she knew the Almighty to be a fraud and a coward. A handsome young man had her in his arms and was standing up. He was whispering to her that it would be all right, she was fine and everything would be all right, she should not worry. Rosemary was not to worry. The handsome young man repeated this injunction. No stranger to the protocols of the fairy tale, she immediately trusted the young man and found herself as incapable of worry as of suspicion. His princely, heroic beauty held no trace of treachery or even vulnerability to vice—and in fact his only fault
seemed to lie in an apparent double standard: he was visibly worried, stricken, it was not too much to say, with anxiety. If he was outwardly reassuring, he was also clearly gripped by a fear of what might happen if he failed to get Rosemary off the filthy floor and into a warm bed in a clean room. He carried her across, it seemed, the whole of Willimantic, me bouncing along next to them, moaning and whispering and petting Rosemary's head, then through the door of a small house, up its main staircase, and into a room that was clean and warm but nearly empty. There was a bed in it, and he put her gently under its covers. I crawled in too, and he seemed not to think I was being presumptuous. He brought more blankets and more pillows. He brought some food, which we ate together, conversing with polite awkwardness about conditions at the mill, the weather, opera, and romantic poetry. There was evidence outside of a growing commotion, but we were able to ignore it. Rosemary was warm and happy and thoroughly amazed at the depth of the young man's knowledge of beautiful, truthful things—as was I, even though I saw very clearly that I was not the object of his tender little attentions, but merely an object. We were as well unspeakably grateful to him—so grateful and so admiring we found it impossible to find out who he was or even where we were. After a while, in which we must have dozed, the commotion outside became so loud and strange that we could ignore it no longer. We stood at the window, the young man holding the curtain back just enough so that we could see. It was a strike. ‘They're saying you started it,' laughed the young man. ‘Me?' asked Rosemary. ‘Yes.' ‘Who is saying that?' ‘The men who saw you take the shuttle to your head.' ‘Oh,' said Rosemary falteringly. ‘Is that what happened . . .?' ‘Yes. They think you're dead. Some of them do, anyway. It was too much for them to bear. You're a legend in your own time.' ‘I ought to join them.' ‘Certainly, if you feel better. But do you in fact feel better?' Rosemary suddenly found herself sobbing. ‘No,' she said. ‘Then,' said the young man, ‘you must stay.' ‘Perhaps until the morning . . .?' Admitting her weakness made her feel even worse, and she sobbed wretchedly. ‘Certainly. But while you are resting, think about those men who know you are not dead.' ‘There are men who believe I'm alive?'
‘Of course there are, darling. But you're safe here. If you expose yourself, whether you feel better or not, you will be less safe. You may in fact find yourself in terrifying danger. You might get shot. You might go to prison for the rest of your life.' The young man stared out the window. ‘I'd lie low for a while,' he said, not turning around. ‘You too, of course,' he said to me, turning abruptly and putting his hand on my shoulder.”

“Rosemary sat on the edge of the bed. Her feet were cold. It was hard to believe, but she thought she could eat some more, if more was available. The young man said he would find more if it was the last thing he did. His pose of ardency seemed even more authentic than it had been earlier, but what he actually did was give me some money and send me out. Earlier, prepossessingly resourceful, he had found a Victrola and a complete recording, forty sides, by La Voce del Padrone of
La Gioconda.
We listened to this long masterpiece in its entirety, and then I went out for bread and cheese. Rosemary and the young man listened to it again, in its entirety, playing over and over ‘The Dance of the Hours,' because it took me, no surprise, quite a while to get the food. We listened to it yet again, mad for it, really, as who would not have been, given all that had happened, all that was happening? The next morning, the young man gone, we decided we were finished lying low. Rosemary was pregnant. Though of course we didn't know it at the time, she couldn't keep the news of the fuck to herself. The young man had disappeared. Had he fathered the presence she suddenly insisted she unmistakably felt within her? She did not know. She did not know. How was one to know? I did not know. She did not care. I cared but was helpless. Strangely, her skirt was missing too, the one—the only—in which she believed she'd sewn the family document. Since her undergarments, stockings, boots, blouse, and sweater were all still available to her, but strewn here and there about the room, the corridor, landing, and stairs, she concluded she was merely being hysterical and could not trust herself to look carefully and search thoroughly an environment in which so much had happened in
so little time. ‘I could be,' she said, ‘looking right at it.' Wrapping herself in the bedsheet with snug ingenuity, she dressed herself and we went out into the crowded street. It was a cold day but not so cold that we shivered, and if the gray sky threatened snow, it was still dry. Rosemary liked to speak of herself, and perhaps to think of herself, as a fairy-tale innocent, but she was not naïve. She knew she hadn't caused the strike, but she felt in an obscure way responsible, even guilty. There is no explaining such guilt: it had something to do with a frivolous lightheartedness that informed or was at least present in or witness to her darkest deeds. There was no romance in a strike, and she knew it; it could only seem so in retrospect, in, as it were, a ballad. It took place in darkness and the light it shed was explosive. But it was not a darkness of evil, and that was the difference. It was a darkness of despair and fear, and a light of pain and anger, and so it was unreasoning and unrelenting. Good was not an inherent consequence. In fact no good could come of such a force, unless reason could be brought to bear upon it, unless people around whom the water was rising and swirling could be encouraged to somehow not mind the ominous roaring in the distance, could be encouraged to think and act calmly even in the face of . . . this is where Rosemary Thorndike eventually made her single historically documentable mark . . . brutal repression. And so we clung to the steps of the house while our people raged past us. If we had heard singing from the window earlier—it was possible but we viewed the possibility with suspicion, given what had been happening—no one was singing now. The flow of the crowd was so fast and turbid that it was impossible to stay in one place for longer than a few seconds. Some people we recognized who in turn recognized us, but nothing was made of these recognitions as nothing could be made of them in such uncertain circumstances: the mill had been struck and shut down and the street was a river in flood just as surely as if a dam had been dynamited. Men, women, and children would certainly drown, it was only a question of how many; and when their bodies finally fetched up in some psychological backwater, slowly rotating in the faint current, recognition would matter even less. We heard fragments of talk, asked a
question here and there when we could, and, with what we already knew from the men on the docks and rumor, slowly fashioned a narrative, which went something like this: the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had begun to take measures that would raise the standard of living for millworkers and protect them generally from the zealotry of mill owners and other smaller-minded, meaner-spirited capitalists, but Connecticut was slow in following suit. There was a corresponding diminishment of patience for the scaling down of the sixty-hour workweek. Fifty-four was the goal, and fifty-eight would be acceptable as a first step, but both goal and step were rejected as mill owners testified to insurmountable disadvantages in the marketplace: it could simply not be done, no matter what Massachusetts may, in its folly, have set out to do. Fifty-eight was nevertheless mandated. In acceptance of the mandate, the owners reduced wages. This was seen as a more or less reasonable compromise, but the 3 percent cut was felt by the workers receiving it as salt in a wound. Rosemary felt wounded, so wounded, as I have said, that she was in a nearly perpetual state of hallucination and understood as well as was necessary, with a mind not at all at ease with numbers—with in fact a mind in which numbers elicited a kind of feverish loathing—that the weavers had been forced to work twelve looms at forty-nine cents a cut instead of seven looms at seventy-nine cents. This was probably why she ran upstairs when she regained consciousness on the floor before her drum. These men did in fact respond to her cry. They were ready to walk out, and when ‘the little girl' ran screaming into their presence, it was nearly impossible not to act. Most workers, however, in other parts of the mill, stayed at their stations. It wasn't until the next morning, when she was feeling the first uneasiness of pregnancy, that pay envelopes were opened and the wage cuts made incontrovertibly manifest, and violence broke out. After a period of nervousness and actual embarrassment—Rosemary's word for the general sentiment that universal principles of right conduct had somehow been subverted—shouts of anger could be heard here and there, and before anyone could think of doing it, some gear works were smashed and some drive belts cut. One man, who seemed lost and who had obviously been
crying—she could see the tracks in the grime on his face, and his eyes were puffy and red—told her that someone had been killed, a little girl had been shot down by soldiers. ‘Soldiers?' she cried. ‘Where did soldiers come from so quickly?' ‘They shot her. I saw it,' said the man with sudden disturbing calm. ‘No,' said Rosemary. ‘No they didn't. There aren't any soldiers in this town.' ‘A little girl was shot and killed,' insisted the man, now with a kind of indifference. ‘NO SHE WASN'T!' shouted Rosemary. ‘THAT WAS ME! I AM THE LITTLE GIRL AND I'M NOT DEAD!'”