The Daring Ladies of Lowell (2 page)

“You shouldn’t tantalize yourself, peeking toward town; that’s for Saturday afternoon,” Lovey said, glancing at her. “Hear the water?”

Alice nodded; the sound of the rushing water had built to a roar. “I’ve never heard a river flow so fast,” she shouted.

“It’s coming down a thirty-foot drop from Pawtucket Falls,” Lovey shouted back. They were on the bridge now, Alice nervously watching the water gurgling beneath her feet.

“See the wheel?” Lovey pointed ahead to a huge, rapidly turning wheel, larger and more breathtaking than any Alice had ever seen. “The water makes the wheel turn, and that makes the looms work, and the cloth from that turns into your three dollars a week, and that means you’re not stuck on a farm all your life,” she said cheerfully. “That’s all you need to know.”

Alice stopped suddenly, turning to the huge brick-and-mortar structure ahead of her that straddled the river. The cotton mill, all six stories of it. Already alive and humming. She saw men lifting and hauling dozens of canvas bags from three carts lined up by the ground-floor entrance, trudging into the mill, their backs bent.

“That’s the raw cotton; they scrub it first,” Lovey said, following her gaze. “Takes real strength, so women don’t work on that floor.”

Alice’s eyes traveled upward. She was awed by the sight as she listened to Lovey’s brisk introduction. Everything was done here. On each floor, there were machines that performed one step of a complicated process: the cleaning of the cotton, the carding to untangle the strands, the drawing to make the fibers strong, the spinning of thread, the weaving—all part of the magic of creating cloth. She thought of her homespun dress, so roughly made; she was almost dizzy in the presence of such progress.

She and Lovey hurried with the others into the factory, the girls scattering to their various posts. Alice covered her ears. If the roar of the water had been loud outside, the clattering of almost one thousand machines inside was deafening.

“Get over here, girl!” yelled a man beckoning to her, his voice bellowing hoarsely over the clattering machinery. She saw Tilda smiling encouragingly. This was Jonah Briggs, the mill foreman, a stocky man with heavy, dark eyebrows. He wore a blue work shirt already drenched in sweat. She moved quickly and stood straight, ready for instruction. The heavy, moist heat was tickling her throat.

“I run this place; you answer to me,” he said. “Tilda will show you what to do. Pay attention; you don’t get coddled around here.” He pointed upward to a huge moving leather belt cutting through to the floor above. “See that thing? It’s powered by the water from below up to the machines on each floor, then back down again. It’s always moving, and it weighs nine hundred pounds. You don’t want to get your hand caught in it, or you’ll be squashed against the ceiling, hear me?”

Alice nodded. She felt a bit light-headed.

Tilda was all business now, her fingers moving with deft speed. Alice watched closely and was rewarded with Tilda handing off a loom to her by ten in the morning. It was all she could handle so far; Tilda took care of six at once.

The other girls worked just as fast—and even with the roar of the machines, they carried on shouting conversations.

“You going to the next Lyceum lecture?” Tilda called out to the one named Mary-o, whose face was not as fretful as her voice had been last night.

“It costs too much, I don’t need more bills,” she answered cheerily. “And I want to get a pretty dress in town; I’m tired of homespun.”

Another girl, with a tangled mass of curly red hair and freckles scattered across her nose, piped up. “Well, I hear one of these days we’re getting a grand mystery lecturer. And I hear the handsome Samuel Fiske is coming to town for it; in fact, the whole Fiske family is planning to show up. Now those mill owners don’t come poking around up here unless they’ve got someone special to show off.”

Down the line, Lovey suddenly was alert. “Are you sure, Delia? He’s coming? The son of old Hiram? And his brother, Jonathan—the one who winks at me when he visits? I’m setting my cap for
that
one, and don’t anybody get in my way!”

Jane frowned, looking around nervously. “Don’t talk like that, Lovey,” she said. “You know Hiram Fiske wouldn’t allow that for one minute.”

“Oh, Jane, you’re so serious,” Lovey shot back.

They all laughed, never stopping their weaving, watching their machines, moving among them with expert timing.

“A Lyceum lecture?” Alice asked, trying not to get distracted.

“It’s a great event,” said Tilda. “Wonderful speakers come and talk about everything under the sun. You get to learn all sorts of things, as long as you can stay awake; you know, after a thirteen-hour day. We get speakers frequently. The one they’re talking about is still months away.”

A buzz of voices at the far end of the room. “You know why? Guess who the mystery speaker is,” came a shout. “President Jackson, what do you think of
that
? Just heard it from the foreman. No wonder it merits a visit from the Fiskes.”

A sudden scream pierced the cacophony, a high, curdling sound that froze all in place.

“Oh, God,” Tilda moaned. “It’s Delia. We warned her to pin her hair up.”

The revolving cylinder pulling the huge rubber belt that ran from the first floor to the top of the mill had caught a swaying tendril from the head of the girl with the red hair, snapping it up tight, hoisting her off her feet, and yanking her upward.

Alice saw Delia’s toes desperately searching for traction on the floor. She sprinted toward her as Lovey ran from the opposite direction. Alice grabbed a pair of scissors sitting on a nearby work table and tossed them to Lovey.

“Cut!” she screamed. She hoisted Delia’s body around her hips, lifting her to take pressure off, realizing to her horror the belt was still moving. She held the girl higher. Lovey had pulled herself up on a loom and lifted the scissors high over her head. A flash of the blades and a large swatch of thick red hair fell to the ground.

The tug upward was inexorable. “Hurry,” Alice panted. She was already on her tiptoes. How long could she hold the girl?

Another flash of the scissors, then another. Hair fell to the floor in two final hunks, and suddenly Alice felt Delia’s body slump down on her. She was free.

Only then did the belt, with a sickening screech, grind to a halt.

“What took you so long?” Lovey yelled at Jonah Briggs.

“Where the damn hell did you think I was?” Briggs roared back. “I was in the next room, I don’t fly!”

Delia was gasping, great ragged inhalations, trying to get her breath again. Her eyes were scared and bulging. She looked curiously older than the others without her hair, as if she had come out from beneath an artful wig.

Lovey put an arm around her and led her to a bench under one of the closed windows. “Well, at least you didn’t break your neck,” she said gently.

Alice noticed the bobbin girl standing in the doorway, her arms burdened with a bundle of freshly filled bobbins for the spinning floor, her mouth open.

“Delia!” the child wailed. She seemed unable to move.

Alice scooped her up and took her over to the bench where Delia rested. “Don’t worry,” Alice said, realizing the child could be no older than eight.

“She’s my
sister;
I’m Ellie.”

“I think she’ll be all right, Ellie.” It sounded like inadequate comfort, but the redheaded girl on the bench was alive and breathing better. Delia reached out to the child, and they shared a wordless hug.

“She’s gonna have a mighty sore neck for a while,” the foreman said. “Serves her right.”

“Will she lose her job?” Ellie asked, her voice tight and off pitch. “She can’t lose her job.”

“Actually, nothing much really happened, I would say.” Lovey was staring at the foreman as she spoke. “I can’t imagine our Mr. Briggs would want to spend any time fussing over this.”

The foreman hesitated. Carelessness was to be punished: mill rules. But he’d be up for punishment, too; it had happened on his watch.

“My dear Mr. Briggs, we are your friends, you know.”

Lovey’s voice had turned saucy, warm with a dash of vinegar.

The foreman’s gaze turned bold as his eyes surveyed her body. He still hadn’t said anything. Lovey gave him a slow wink, then a faint curve of a smile.

“Well, I guess she just got a bad haircut,” he said with a shrug, walking away. “One of you can walk her back to the boardinghouse. And get her a cap.”

The minute he disappeared, Lovey gave Delia a quick kiss on the forehead, then looked over at Alice. “You know, you’re supposed to throw scissors handles first,” she said. And then she grinned.

And in that moment, whatever the risk—and she knew there would be risks—Alice decided she wanted Lovey Cornell as a friend.

T
hat night Alice was almost too exhausted to lift a spoon. She had to force herself into her seat in the boardinghouse dining room before reaching gratefully for a slab of cheese and bread and eyeing a bubbling pot of beans in the middle of the table. She was suddenly ravenous.

The table was quieter than it had been at breakfast. Alice looked toward the other end and saw Delia slip into a chair, her head kept down. A rough knit cap was pulled tight around the girl’s ears, hiding the stubby remains of her ginger hair. A dull-red stain was visible behind her right ear.

“You’re bleeding,” Alice ventured.

Delia’s hand flew to her ear. “It’s nothing,” she said quickly.

“Oh, but it should have a dressing.” No one said anything, and Alice could sense the hovering presence of Mrs. Holloway behind her. Maybe she was violating some unspoken rule.

“All mill accidents are small ones,” Lovey said cheerfully, breaking the silence. “We’re too competent a crew to risk our jobs over little things. Right, girls?”

“You’re making fun, again,” Mary-o said.

“Well, isn’t an almost-scalping a good joke on us all?”

“Enough.” Mrs. Holloway looked unsettled. “Nothing bad happened. This was carelessness, pure carelessness, on Delia’s part. Isn’t that right, Delia?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Delia murmured.

“Pass your soup bowls to me. And get in the habit of proper laundering of your clothes; I’m tired of seeing chemises scattered about. You need to be dressed properly when the president graces us with a visit.”

“Have faith, Mrs. Holloway, that’s several fortnights away. We can scrub and iron everything by then, I’m sure. Is our Lyceum attendance mandatory, then?” Lovey asked innocently.

The clatter of bowls being passed to Mrs. Holloway gave her a few moments before answering. “It is indeed,” she finally said. “But you’ll all be given new green silk parasols to carry when the president greets you, which should please you.”

“I love green,” Mary-o said happily.

“Can we keep them?” Lovey asked.

“We will reserve them for special occasions.” Mrs. Holloway’s voice was tensing.

“And I assume we each have to pay the usual fifty cents to attend?”

The room fell silent again as Mrs. Holloway carefully put down a bowl and folded her hands, looking directly at Lovey. “What is your point, please?” she said.

“I think we’re being trotted out to make the mill owners look good in President Jackson’s eyes, that’s all. And when it’s for their benefit, we shouldn’t have to pay.”

“Well, perhaps you should raise that issue with the Fiske family. Several of them, including old Hiram Fiske, will be there.”

“Perhaps I shall.” Lovey’s eyes held, for an instant, a dangerous glitter.

A
lice wasn’t quite sure what to do after the tables were cleared. A few girls disappeared into their respective dormitories, then reemerged with baskets of rolled yarn and knitting needles and drifted into the great keeping room. Jane could be heard complaining about somebody’s britches tossed on the floor near her bed. Alice peeked in and saw her plumping up her pillow and scrubbing out the communal washbasin, grumbling away to herself.

“When Jane’s not praying, she’s nagging us about the mess. She can’t stand disorder of any kind,” Lovey said drily. “Not of the mind and certainly not on the floor.”

Alice followed the others into the keeping room. They called it the parlor, which seemed a fancy name, but it was of generous size. An old but lavishly patterned wool rug, worn thin in spots, reached almost to the corners. There was plenty of room for several chairs and even a settee covered in a rough-textured linen. The girls carrying their baskets of yarn were settling into the chairs, their chatter lively. Little Ellie sat cross-legged on the carpet, playing with jackstraws. Alice spied an unexpectedly ornate desk tucked into one corner of the room with a magazine lying open on it, the reader’s place held by a glass paperweight in the shape of a pineapple. She looked closer at the title on the cover and, yes, it read
The Lowell Offering.
Her fingers itched to pick it up. It meant the story spread from farm to farm along the coast was true: there
was
in the magic town of Lowell a literary magazine the mill girls wrote themselves. Girls like herself could write and publish poetry and stories without pretending to be male; no need to hide. She reached for it, then hesitated. It was a rude thing to do, to ignore the fact that some absent reader had staked her claim with the paperweight.

In the center of the room was an ancient grand piano, clearly the proudest item of all. The keys were yellowed, and one foot pedal looked broken, but two girls were already vying to sit in the straight-backed chair substituting for a piano bench.

Mrs. Holloway opened the front door at the sound of a discreet knock. An elderly man, lugging a sackful of books, stepped inside, tipping his hat and nodding to the mill girls. “Finally got Walter Scott’s
Fair Maid of Perth,
first one up here gets it,” he announced with a grin.

“He brings us the lending library,” Lovey said, seeing Alice’s confusion. “He’s a very popular man. A good number of the girls are readers here. Not me, I’m too twitchy to sit still long.”

One of the girls began to play, a simple tune that Alice recognized but couldn’t place. At home, she rarely heard the piano. She looked around to speak again to Lovey, but Lovey had slipped outside. Alice hesitated, then quietly opened the door and followed her. Lovey was sitting on the front steps, looking up at the sky.

“How did you know so fast what had to be done today?” Lovey asked, without turning around.

“I saw a woman’s hair get caught in a tractor’s rotating shaft. One of the farmhands cut it off with a knife and pulled her out,” Alice said.

“Was she hurt?”

“They got her out too late.” Alice closed her eyes at the memory; would that she could have then.

“How old were you?”

“Ten.”

Lovey was silent for a long moment. Then, still not turning around, she pointed to the sky. “Full moon,” she said. “It dims the stars, but it’s still nice. Now look carefully—what do you see?”

Alice stared at the milky planet, puzzled. “Nothing, really.”

“Oh dear, where is your sense of romance? Look harder. See? On the left is a man, and on the right is a woman. They’re kissing.”

Bemused, Alice looked again. And there they were, two lovers on the moon; she had never seen them before, and now she would see them forever.

“Do you mind if I sit with you?” she asked.

“I would have no objection.”

Shivering, Alice sat down on the step and looked around. The moonlight had bathed the rough-surfaced road leading to the mill in a silvery glow that was almost otherworldly. Like a painting, she thought. She felt a quick moment of longing for the brushes and small pots of paint she had been forced to leave behind at the family farm. Her father would probably throw them out, but at least she had saved the books.

“You’re wondering why I was provoking Mrs. Holloway, I suppose.”

“I’m just trying to figure out how things work here. I knew you were angry.”

“Perceptive. About what?”

“I would be much obliged if you told me.” Alice was freezing now, and her arms were aching from the day’s work. She needed to find her place here, to know when to keep her head down, when to seize opportunity. She would not dwell on it; it would rob her of the thrill of having pushed her way out of a narrow life. But it was the next step, and the one after that, that mattered now. She glanced at Lovey’s profile against the porch light. She didn’t look as if she could be defeated by anything.

“There’s plenty to be angry about,” Lovey said. “None of us wants to lose our jobs, so we can’t say much, but look how they treated Delia. The mill isn’t safe, but we don’t have any way of fixing things, and the Fiskes—those pompous people—know it. They’re hypocrites, too. All that cotton making them rich comes from the labor of slaves, but none of them wants to think about that.”

“But without the cotton—”

“We wouldn’t have the jobs that make
us
feel rich, right?”

“Are you afraid—”

“Of being fired? Yes, but I’ve been fired before.” Lovey’s tone was matter-of-fact. “They’ll try to do it again. It won’t be banishment by Mrs. Holloway; she just likes to threaten. She’s one of those sorrowful widows without a penny; not such a bad person, actually.”

“What would you do?”

“Go to another mill where they don’t know me. The important thing is not to care; that’s what keeps me free.”

Alice reflected on that for a moment. To not care was the spice of life for a permanent wanderer, but it wasn’t for her.

“Where is your home?” she asked.

Lovey turned her face full toward Alice’s, putting it into shadow. “I grew up in Fall River, but I’m not welcome there, according to my father. You might watch being around me, Alice—I’m a bad influence.” She laughed. The sound of it was like water bubbling in a pot on low, light and airy, with a tease at the end.

“Where do you
feel
at home?” Alice asked.

“I don’t know such a place.”

“Not here?”

Lovey sat silently, picking at a fingernail. “Sometimes. The girls are a good sort.”

“I don’t know such a place, either, at least not yet,” Alice said. “I’m seen as something of a troublemaker where I come from.”

“Really?” Lovey glanced at her with renewed interest. “Tell me. I love troublemaker stories. Where were you born?
”

“On a farm, same as you, I suppose. My father tried being a blacksmith for a while, but he couldn’t make a go of it. We ended up as tenant farmers.” Alice paused at the memory of watching her father, a grin on his face, pounding an iron bar over a fiercely hot fire. It would bend to his will; it always did. And so did I, she thought. Well, mostly.

“Did you go to school?”

“I finished secondary school. Won my certificate of completion last June.” She hoped Lovey wouldn’t see her pride as boasting.

“So why are you here? Helping out your father sounds a little too noble to be the whole story.”