smells of the dyes used to color the leather after it was tanned. Or maybe, she sometimes thought, the worst smell was the smell of the people themselves, all of them sweating in the heat, their eyes fastened on their work for fear that if they looked toward the filthy windows the light and air outside would overpower them, and they’d drop their work and run away from the mill forever.
But they couldn’t do that—Amy least of all. This was 1886, and there weren’t many jobs, and at home her mother, who had no job at all, always told her how lucky she was to have a job in the middle of the depression. And even though Amy wasn’t quite sure what a depression was, she knew that she couldn’t give in to her impulse to run away from the mill, because if she did, there wouldn’t be any money at all, and her mother and sisters and brothers would have nothing to eat.
The door of the mill loomed a few steps ahead of her now, and she paused. According to the clock on the church steeple above the square, she still had four minutes before the morning whistle blew and everyone had to be at the tables, ready to work. Her eyes darted around, as if gathering images to put away for examination later, but then fixed on a group of three children—children her own age—who were walking along the other side of the street. She knew their names, but had never spoken to them, as they had never spoken to her.
Fleetingly, she wondered if they knew her name.
Probably not, since they didn’t work at the mill.
They didn’t work at all.
They were the lucky ones, whose fathers ran the mill, and who lived in nice houses, and went to school in the winter and played outside all summer. And they had pretty clothes, clothes that never looked as though someone else had worn them before; never looked as though they needed mending two or three times a week. Involuntarily, Amy’s hands dropped down and ran over her own dress, as if by some unseen force she could make the stains on it disappear, or smooth over the rough stitches that held its tattered pieces together.
For a moment, she wondered where they were going today, then decided it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered, really, was that now she had only one minute to get to her table, and if she was late, the shift supervisor would yell at her; might even fire her. And if that happened—
She put the thought out of her mind, and hurried through the door into the dimness of the mill, doing her best to put the rest of the world out of her mind.
A few people spoke to her as she started toward the stairs at the far end of the building, and she nodded a brief response. But most of the people were already hard at work, their fingers moving quickly in unchanging routines that had long since become automatic as they assembled shoes from the piles of leather around them. The people seemed to have a sameness about them: their eyes were vacant, and their skin seemed to have the look of worn leather. Their clothes, shabby and ill-fitting, all looked alike, and marked them for what they were—millworkers. For a fleeting instant, she wondered if they, like herself, dreamed of getting out of the mill, but then she decided they didn’t. For most of them, the mill was their life, and they would be here until they died.
As the whistle sounded, its piercing scream slashing through her like a knife, Amy hurried down the stairs and into the little room under the loading dock where she worked with the other children her age, cutting the freshly dyed hides into the many pieces that went into the shoes.
It was here she had started working three years ago, when she was eight, tending to the vats in which the hides were soaked, then moving on to the dyeing itself. Finally, she had begun training as a cutter, and now she worked her twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, cutting soles from the rough leather, training herself to work as the others worked, without thinking.
Even as she put on her apron and took up her position at the cutting table, she began the process of closing down her mind.