Lyddie

Mrs. Bedlow talked very fast, her face flushed. Lyddie was sure the man would turn them both away—he looked barely patient as Mrs. Bedlow rattled on. But in the end, he said he would give Lyddie a contract for one year. There was a shortage in the weaving room at the moment. Mr. Thurston, the clerk, would give the girl the broadside with the regulations for the Concord and arrange for her to have her smallpox vaccination the following morning.

They were dismissed with a nod. Mrs. Bedlow punched Lyddie and prompted her to thank the agent for his kindness. Lyddie’s voice could hardly manage a whisper, but it didn’t matter. The gentleman wasn’t paying her any attention.

She signed the paper where the clerk pointed, tried to listen carefully to all his warnings about what the contract demanded, and stuffed the broadside that he handed her into her apron pocket. She would study it tonight, she decided, her heart sinking. She could tell at a glance that it would be almost impossible for her to make out the meaning of such a paper. Oh, if only Charlie were here to read it aloud to her and explain the long words. Factory girls were not supposed to be ignorant, it would seem.

It would be several months before she could read with ease the “Regulations for the Boarding Houses of the Concord Corporation.” But she found out the next day that it concealed unpleasant truths. The first of these was the vaccination. Mrs. Bedlow marched her over to the hospital after dinner where a doctor cruelly gouged her leg and poured a mysterious liquid directly into the wound.

Lyddie was even more distressed when the wound turned into a nasty sore in a few days’ time, but she was only laughed at for her distress and told it was all for her own good. She’d never get the pox now, so she should be grateful. Amelia, indeed, was always instructing her to be grateful about things that Lyddie, try as she might, could not summon the least whiff of gratitude over. But finally, when she had been alternately shocked and bored for the better part of two weeks, the announcement was made at supper that work was to begin again the next day, and Lyddie felt a surge of gratitude that her days of idleness were over. She would be a true factory girl in a few hours’ time.

Lyddie was mostly disappointed, but perhaps a tiny bit relieved, when Mrs. Bedlow announced that she would take her over to the weaving room after dinner. The large noonday meal must be out of the way and the dishes washed before the housekeeper could spare a moment, she said. Besides, it wouldn’t do to be totally worn out the first day. Four hours would be plenty to start with.

The gate was locked. “They don’t want tardy girls slipping past,” Mrs. Bedlow explained. “You must always take care to be here when the bell rings.” They entered the factory complex through the counting room as they had two weeks before, but this time it was teeming with men, all dressed like gentlemen. Every head seemed to rise, and every eye looked their way. Despite her new clothes, Lyddie could feel the shame burning through her rough brown cheeks. She ducked her bonneted head and hurried through as fast as she could, almost shoving Mrs. Bedlow in her haste.

Once in the yard, she was acutely aware of the thudding. The pulse of the factory boomed through the massive brick wall, and she could feel the vibrations of the machinery as they made their way up the shadowy wooden staircase, which clung for dear life to the side of the building.

Mrs. Bedlow huffed ahead, stopping more than once to catch her breath on the climb to the fourth floor. Once there, she jerked open the door, and the thudding beat exploded into a roar. She gave Lyddie a little push toward the racket. “Mr. Marsden is expecting you!” she yelled. “He’ll see you settled in.” And she was gone.

9

The Weaving Room

Creation! What a noise! Clatter and clack, great shuddering moans, groans, creaks, and rattles. The shrieks and whistles of huge leather belts on wheels. And wh

en her brain cleared enough, Lyddie saw through the murky air row upon row of machines, eerily like the old hand loom in Quaker Stevens’s house, but as unlike as a nightmare, for these creatures had come to life. They seemed moved by eyes alone—the eyes of neat, vigilant young women—needing only the occasional, swift intervention of a human hand to keep them clattering.

From the overarching metal frame crowning each machine, wooden harnesses, carrying hundreds of warp threads drawn from a massive beam at the back of each loom, clanked up and down. Shuttles holding the weft thread hurtled themselves like beasts of prey through the tall forests of warp threads, and beaters slammed the threads tightly into place. With alarming speed, inches of finished cloth rolled up on the beams at the front of the looms.

The girls didn’t seem afraid or even amazed. As she walked by with the overseer, girls glanced up. A few smiled, some stared. No one seemed to mind the deafening din. How could they stand it? She had thought a single stagecoach struggling to hold back the horses on a downhill run was unbearably noisy. A single stagecoach! A factory was a hundred stagecoaches all inside one’s skull, banging their wheels against the bone. Her impulse was to turn and run to the door, down the rickety stairs, through the yard and counting room, across the narrow bridge, past the row of boardinghouses, down the street—out of this hellish city and back, back, back to the green hills and quiet pastures.

But of course she didn’t move a step. She didn’t even cover her ears against the assault. She just stood quietly in front of the machine that the overseer had led her to and pretended she could hear what he was saying to her. His mouth was moving, a strange little red mouth peeping out from under his bushy black mustache. The luxuriant growth of the mustache was all the more peculiar because the overseer had hardly any hair on his head. His pate gleamed like polished wood.

Suddenly, to Lyddie’s astonishment, the man put his red mouth quite close to her ear. She jerked her head away before she realized he was shouting the words: “Is that quite clear?”

Lyddie stared at him in terror. Nothing was clear at all. What did the man mean? Did he seriously think she could possibly have heard any of his mysterious mouthings? But how could she say she had heard nothing but the beastly racket of the looms? How could she say she could see hardly anything in the morning gloom of the huge, barnlike room, the very air a soup of dust and lint?

She was simply standing there, her mouth open with no words coming out, when an arm went around her shoulders. She shrank again from the touch before she saw it was one of the young women who tended the looms. Her head was close enough to Lyddie’s left ear so that Lyddie could hear her say to the overseer, “Don’t worry, Mr. Marsden, I’ll see she settles in.”

The overseer nodded, obviously relieved not to have to deal with Lyddie or the loom he’d assigned her.

“We’ll work together,” the girl shouted in her ear. “My two machines are just next to you here. I’m Diana.” She motioned for Lyddie to stand close behind her right shoulder, so although Lyddie wasn’t in her way as she worked, the older girl could speak into Lyddie’s left ear by turning her head slightly to the right.

Suddenly, Diana banged a metal lever at the right of the machine and the loom shivered to a halt. At either end of the shed, made by the crisscrossing of warp threads, was a narrow wooden trough. From the trough on the left she retrieved the shuttle. The shuttle was wood, pointed and tipped at either end with copper. It was about the shape of a corncob, only a little larger and hollowed out so that it could carry a bobbin or quill of weft thread. With her hands moving so quickly that Lyddie could hardly follow them, Diana popped out a nearly empty quill of thread and thrust in a full one from a wooden box of bobbins near her feet. Then she put her mouth to a small hole near one end of the shuttle and sucked out the end of the weft thread.

“We call it the kiss of death,” she shouted, smiling wryly to soften the words. She pulled out a foot or more of the thread, wound it quickly around one of two iron hooks, and rehung the hooks into the last row of woven cloth. The hooks were attached by a yard or so of leather cord to a bell-shaped iron weight. “You have to keep moving your temple hooks,” Diana said. “Pulls the web down snug as you go.” She pointed to the new inches of woven fabric.

“Now,” said Diana, speaking into Lyddie’s ear, “make sure the shuttle is all the way at the end of the race—always on your right here.” She placed the shuttle snug against the right-hand end of the trough. “We don’t want any flying shuttles. All right, then, we’re ready to go again.” Diana grasped the metal lever, pulled it toward the loom, and jammed it into a slot. The loom shuddered once more to life.

For the first hour or so Lyddie watched, trying mostly to stay out of Diana’s way as she moved among the three machines, two opposite and one adjoining. The older girl refilled the shuttles when they ran low and rehung the temple hooks to keep the web tight. Then, without warning, for no reason that Lyddie could see, Diana slammed off one of the looms.

“See,” she said, pointing at the shed, “a warp thread’s snapped. If we don’t catch that, we’re in trouble.” An empty shuttle might damage a few inches of goods, she explained, but a broken warp could leave a flaw through yards of cloth. “We don’t get paid when we ruin a piece.” She pinched a tiny bag hung from the metal frame of the loom. It spit out a puff of talc, which she rubbed into her fingertips. Then fishing out the broken ends of warp, she showed Lyddie how to fasten them together with a weaver’s knot. When Diana tied the ends, they seemed to melt together, leaving the knot invisible. She stepped aside. “Now you start it,” she said.

Lyddie was a farm girl. She took pride in her strength, but it took all of her might to yank the metal lever into place. She broke into a sweat like some untried plow horse. The temples were not much larger than apples, but when Diana asked her to move one, she felt as though someone had tied a gigantic field stone to the end of the leather cord. Still, the physical strength the work required paled beside the dexterity needed to rethread a shuttle quickly, or, heaven help her, tie one of those infernal weaver’s knots.

Everything happened too fast—a bobbin of weft thread lasted hardly five minutes before it had to be replaced—and it was painfully deafening. But tall, quiet Diana moved from loom to loom like the silent angel in the lion’s den, keeping Daniel from harm.

There were moments when all three looms were running as they ought—all the shuttles bearing full quills, all three temples hung high on the cloth, no warp threads snapping. During one of these respites, Diana drew Lyddie to the nearest window. The sill was alive with flowers blooming in pots, and around the frame someone had pasted single pages of books and magazines. Diana pressed down a curling corner of a poem. Most of the sheets were yellowing. “Not so much time to read these days,” Diana said. “We used to have more time. Do you like to read, Lyddie?”

Lyddie thought of the regulations that she was still trying laboriously to decipher when no one was looking. “I’ve not much schooling.”