American Empire: Blood and Iron - By Harry Turtledove Page 0,39

peacetime? Only counting their profits, as far as she could see.

She hurried the children out of the apartment and down to the clamorous streets of Boston. With a sigh of regret, she walked past a newsboy hawking the Globe. She couldn’t justify laying out a couple of cents on it, not when she didn’t know if she’d have work next week.

“England signs treaty!” the newsboys shouted, trying to persuade others to part with pennies. “Limeys give up all claim to Sandwich Islands and Canada! England signs treaty! Recognizes Ireland and Quebec!”

It was, she supposed, good news. The best news, though, as far as she was concerned, would have been for the ocean to swallow England and all her works. And while the ocean was at it, it could swallow the CSA, too.

Mrs. Dooley was an aging widow with wavy hair defiantly hennaed, and with bright spots of rouge on her cheeks. To Sylvia, it looked more like clown makeup than anything alluring, but she would never have said so. The woman took good care of her children and did not charge too much.

After kissing George, Jr., and Mary Jane good-bye, Sylvia went back to the trolley stop, tossed another nickel in the fare box (and soon she would have to start paying Mary Jane’s fare, too: one more expense), and headed to the galoshes factory. To her relief, she got there on time.

The place stank of rubber from which the rubber overshoes were made. Sylvia’s post came just after the galoshes emerged from the mold. She painted a red ring around the top of each one. Had the firm been able to train a dog to do the job, it would have. That failing, it grudgingly paid her.

When she’d worked in a mackerel-canning plant, she’d been able to operate the machine that glued gaudy labels to cans almost without thinking about it; sometimes, when she was lucky, she would hardly notice the time going by between getting to the factory and dinner or between dinner and going home. She hadn’t had that luxury at the shoe factory where she’d been working when George was killed. If she didn’t pay attention to what she was doing there, the powerful needle on the electric sewing machine would tear up her hand. She’d seen it happen to operators who’d been at the place longer than she’d been alive. A moment’s lapse was all it took.

All that could happen with a moment’s lapse here was her ending up with red paint on her hand, not red blood. Still, she couldn’t let her mind wander, as she’d been able to do in the canning plant. What she did here wasn’t simple repetitive motion, the way that had been. She had to pay attention to painting the rings precisely. If she didn’t, the foreman started barking at her.

Frank Best wasn’t a hardened old Tartar like Gustav Krafft, the foreman at the shoe factory where she’d worked, who gave a walking demonstration of why the limeys and frogs thought of Germans as Huns. Best’s style was more the sly dig: “Thought you were going to slip that one by me, did you?” was a favorite remark.

The other difference between the two men was that Krafft had been too old to serve in the Army. Frank Best wore a Soldiers’ Circle pin with the year 1904 on it. That being his conscription class, he was only a handful of years older than Sylvia. He was also single, and convinced he was the greatest gift to women God had ever set on the planet.

A lot of women who worked in the galoshes factory were widows, some still wearing mourning, others not. Most of them, like Sylvia, heartily despised the foreman. “Like to put a certain part of him in the mold—the size-two mold,” Sarah Wyckoff, one of those widows, said at dinner on a day when Best was being particularly obnoxious. “Wouldn’t need nothin’ bigger.”

That produced a good set of giggles. Sylvia said, “No, for goodness’ sake, you don’t want him vulcanized there. He’d never keep quiet about it then.” More giggles rose.

“If so many of us hate him,” said May Cavendish, another widow, “why does he think he’s so bully?”

“He’s a man,” Sarah Wyckoff said, as if she expected that to cover everything. By the way the other women nodded, it probably did.

May Cavendish tossed her head; her blond curls bounced on her shoulders. “What frosts me is that some of the girls do like him.”

“I can’t imagine