The Clock (4 page)

They rang the mill bell at four-thirty in the morning to wake everybody up. But if the wind was wrong we couldn't hear it out on the farm, so George would wake me up. George slept in the back of the house and when the animals started moving around in the morning they'd wake him up. He'd climb up the loft ladder, put his head over the top, and call my name. I'd jump up and dress in two minutes, come down the loft ladder, and grab a piece of johnnycake to eat on the way to the mill. It didn't take me more than twenty minutes to get to the mill, if I hurried.

They rang the mill bell again at five o'clock. We were supposed to be ready to start work then. At seven o'clock the bell rang again for breakfast, and again at noon for dinner, and again at five o'clock to let us quit and go home. From where I stood at the slubbing billy in the wool mill, I could see the bell tower, which was on the cotton mill. There was a clock in the bell tower, and I could see that, too, and now I knew what it meant to work by clock time, instead of sun time.

With sun time, the way we always worked before, and our grandpas and grandmas before us, and their grandpas and grandmas before them, you could rest a little when you were tired, and take a drink of something when you were thirsty, or a bite of bread and cheese when you were hungry. But with clock time you weren't allowed to get tired or hungry or thirsty on your own; you had to wait until the clock told you it was time to be thirsty or tired. I wasn't used to it.

Back on the farm Ma and me would spin all the livelong day half the winter, it seemed like. And if it wasn't spinning it was cutting and sewing to make frocks for ourselves and trousers and shirts for Pa and George. But now and again, when we felt like it, we'd stop working and rest. Ma'd make tea and we'd eat a baked apple left over from supper with cream on it, and talk. Ma would tell about Mrs. Reed's school, or how handsome Pa was when he was courting her, and I'd tell about being a teacher when I was grown up, and the eagle I'd seen the day before in the top of the pine trees.

But you couldn't do that on clock time. You had to wait until the bell said you could rest and eat and talk about things. Oh, it didn't take me but two days to come to hate that bell and that clock in the tower. But there wasn't anything to change that. I just had to get used to being hungry when I was told to be hungry.

They brought us our breakfast at the mill—bread, cheese, and hot tea that they carried over from the lodging house where the boys ate. But we were supposed to get our own dinners at noon. A lot of girls lived right in the village, like Hetty, and could scoot home for dinner. But the ones like me, who lived out on farms, didn't have time to scoot home, and brought our dinners in dinner baskets—cold pork, cold pie, cheese, bread, apples. They sent over a boy from the lodging house kitchen with tea to go with our dinners.

The boy's name was Tom Thrush. He was about fourteen but small and looked half his age. Tom was chosen for the job because he had got half his hand clawed off by a carding machine the
year
before. Some wool had got stuck and he had reached into the machine to grab it, but the machine had grabbed him instead. It mangled all his fingers so bad, they had to cut them off, and part of his thumb too. All he had now was a stump of a hand and a stub of a thumb. He couldn't do regular work anymore, but he had enough of a hand to sweep, and carry the tea buckets. Tom wasn't the only one who'd lost part of himself in a machine in that mill. There were a dozen of them with a finger gone, a toe off, an eye out, where they'd had an accident.

We were all mighty glad to see Tom Thrush come around, for he was saucy and cheerful and would say anything. When he came around we usually asked him some kind of question, just to get him talking. I was mighty curious to know what it had been like to be an orphan boy in New York. One rainy day when he came with the tea for noontime dinner I asked, “Tom, did they make you go to school down in New York?”

“They would have, if they could have catched me.”

Because of the rain Hetty'd brought her dinner. “Don't you want to learn things?” Hetty said.

He began to ladle out our tea. “Oh, I wouldn't mind learnin' things if there wasn't no work to it. I wouldn't mind it if they could just ladle it into you the way I ladle out the tea. But there's too much blame work to it. I mean, scratchin' away at the slate to learn your letters, and memorizing whole stacks of tables. Who cares what twelve times anything is? I never had twelve of anything in my life, except strokes from Hoggart's birch. I wasn't about to multiply
them
if I could help it.”

“You'd better stop talking so much and get our tea poured,” Hetty said. “Mr. Hoggart will give it to you good if he catches you standing around and gossiping.”

He winked again. “I ain't scared of old Hoggart. I seen goblins that make old Hoggart look like nothin' at all.”

“There isn't any such thing as goblins,” I said.

“That's what you think,” he said. “I seen one in New York one night on Water Street that was as big as a horse, with fire comin' out of its eyes and teeth like a set of knives. You'd believe in goblins, all right, if you'd seen that one. Of course, you don't see one like that every day. They're mighty scarce, that kind, and a good thing too.”

I laughed. You couldn't help but being cheerful with Tom Thrush, once you got used to that stump of a hand. “Well, I don't know about goblins, but I heard you hollering like a dozen cats when Mr. Hoggart thrashed you for stealing that pie out of the kitchen.”

“I didn't deserve no thrashing neither, for it was the worst pie I ever stole. It warn't fit to eat—I give most of it to the pigs.”

“You better pray he doesn't catch you again. Next time he'll take some skin off your back.”

“Prayin' ain't much use with old Hoggart. He don't hold with church much.”

“I thought Colonel Humphreys made everybody at the mill go to church,” Hetty Brown
said.

“Oh, he herds us over there, all right. The boys, the cooks, the mill hands in general. Then Hoggart he goes off to the Episcopal Church himself. Congregational ain't good enough for him. Least that's his story. But he don't go. He heads on back to the mill.”

We opened our baskets and started eating our pork and johnnycake. “How do you know, Tom?” Hetty said.

He winked. “I don't mind going to church in bad weather. It's as good a place for a snooze as any, I reckon. But you take fine weather, when the sun's a-shinin', and the birds are singin', and things are in bloom—it don't suit me to be in church. I slink off to the tail end of the herd, and when old Hoggart's got his back turned I duck behind a tree, and then scoot off into somebody's cornfield and lie out in the sun for two or three hours until I figure the sermon's about wound down and it's time for dinner. Plenty of times I seen Hoggart come out of church after he's herded everybody in, and head back for the mill. He don't go to church at all.”

“What if Colonel Humphreys catches him?” Hetty Brown said. “Would he discharge him?”

“Well, I wish he would,” Tom said.

Then from the direction of the door there came a shout. “Thrush.”

Tom whipped around. Mr. Hoggart was standing there, about twenty feet away, his arms folded over his chest. He stared at Tom, and then he stared at me. Hetty and I jumped up, scared as could be. Mr. Hoggart came charging down the mill floor. Tom turned to run, but Mr. Hoggart was on him like a shot. He grabbed Tom by the ear, and gave him a smack across the head that nearly knocked him down. Tom twisted loose and jumped back, but Mr. Hoggart grabbed him, and this time he swatted Tom across the face. Tom sat down hard and wrapped his arms around his head. Mr. Hoggart kicked him in the side. Tom doubled over onto the floor, holding onto his stomach. Mr. Hoggart raised his boot again. Then he thought better of it. He put his foot down and walked away, back toward where Hetty and I were staring down at the floor, our hearts beating fast, feeling mighty scared. He walked slowly up to us. But he didn't look at Hetty; he looked at me. He crossed his arms and roamed his eyes over me, and then he said in a low voice, “Annie, I don't want you to be talking to that boy anymore.” He turned and went away.

I heard a little noise behind me, and I took a quick look around. Tom Thrush was standing there. His nose was bleeding and one of his eyes was swelling up. He was holding onto his side with his bad hand, and trying to wipe his nose with a piece of wool. His breath was coming fast and trembly, in big gulps. For a minute he couldn't speak. Then he gritted his teeth and said, low and fierce, “I'm goin' to kill him. The first chance I git, I'm goin' to kill him.” He limped away, holding his side.

CHAPTER
FIVE

A
S MUCH AS
I
HATED
the mill, it was hard to stay angry with Pa, for sometimes he could be mighty jolly. The best times were when there was a corn-husking or a barn-raising, and a dozen families gathered to share out the work. Pa was always at the center of such things, laughing and singing, and raising up everybody's spirits. Not long after I started at the mill, we had a corn-husking bee. Pa and George had cut the cornstalks down at the end of August. The stalks had been lying in the field for a month now, drying. Pa and Ma and George gathered them all in, and divided them into two great piles in front of the house—six feet high, the piles were. Ma and I spent the next Sunday roasting meat, baking bread, making pies. That afternoon the people came—Robert and his family, and Hetty Brown and her family, who lived in the village on the green, and a whole lot of others. I shouldn't wonder if there were twenty of us all told. Pa handed the jug around among the grown-ups, and we divided up into two teams and pitched into that corn, each team bound and determined to beat the other one in husking its pile.

After that they set up trestle tables and benches, and Zebulon. North and George had a wrestling match, while Ma and me and Mrs. Brown and Hetty brought out the supper. Oh, it was just as jolly as could be eating out there in the Indian summer afternoon, with the sun warm on our backs and the haze sort of purple against the hills in the distance beyond our fields.

After supper we went into the parlor and danced. Mr. Bronson played the drum, and Mr. Stock the fiddle. We danced reels and contredanses, and it was so tight and crowded in that parlor that there hardly was room to move. But we danced anyway until past midnight, everybody but Robert, who had trouble enough walking, much less dancing. I wanted to dance with him, but I couldn't, and sometimes I'd stay out of a dance to stand beside him so as to keep him company until he'd tell me, “Don't worry about me, Annie, I don't mind. You go and dance.” So I did. I danced with everybody, including George and Pa. Pa was just the best dancer, for he made a point of learning the new dances when they came along. It made me proud to dance with Pa, because he, was so good, and still handsome, too, when he was dressed up. And the whole while we danced he joked with me, saying I was his favorite girl, and the prettiest one in the room, and my brown hair was the color of chestnuts, and a whole lot of other things that kept me blushing and laughing. How could I be mad at Pa when he was like that?

We stayed up mighty late dancing, and, of course, the next morning George didn't wake up as usual, and neither did anyone else. The first thing I knew I heard Ma banging around downstairs getting the fire roused up, and fixing breakfast. I leapt out of bed, my heart beating quick, pulled on my clothes as quick as I could, and jumped down the loft ladder.

Ma
looked at me. “Heavens, I thought you were gone,” she said. “You'll catch it from Mr. Hoggart now, sure.”

I glanced at the clock. It was five-thirty. What was the use of the thing if it let you lie in bed when you were supposed to be at work? Ma had laid out some johnnycake and pork on the table for George and Pa. I grabbed up a hunk of the cake and a piece of pork for dinner, jammed them into the pocket of my dress, flung on my cloak, and ran on out, the blowing rain pushing me along from behind.

Oh, how I wished I could stay home that day. It made me long for the days before I worked in the mill. I wanted to stay home and help Ma, because I knew it was baking day and that was something I loved. Baking was one of the things every girl had to learn—no man would think of marrying a girl who couldn't bake. Ma'd been teaching me how to bake bread in the big brick oven alongside the kitchen fireplace. The hardest part of that was the timing.

George would make a fire in the oven built into the chimney, using wood that burned hot, like hickory or oak or ash. If we kept that going for about two hours it would get just about hot enough. I could tell if it was right by holding my hand about four inches above the brick bottom. If I had to pull it out before I got to ten, counting not too fast, then it was hot enough for bread. We'd shovel all the ashes out, put the bread dough on a long shovel and reach it into the oven. We baked bread first when the oven was hottest. We could cook for about four hours, going next to pies and last, when the oven had cooled down, we baked puddings. Ma could get the timing pretty close on sunny days by watching the sun approach the noonmark—she called it a dinner mark—on the kitchen windowsill. But on cloudy days it was all guesswork. After a few years of watching her, I got so I could guess pretty well when it was done just right—not gooey in the middle or burned on the outside. Ma didn't even use the noonmark most of the time—she just knew how much time had passed by natural instinct, it seemed. She didn't need any clock for it. And out came the bread all golden on top and smelling so good, you just had to cut off a little piece right away—just to test, of course.

And, of course, it was always dry and warm around the oven. As I ran through the icy cold rain toward the mill, I kept smelling the bread baking in my mind and wishing I was home with Ma.