To Make My Bread (29 page)

Emma saw herself going in and coming out crushed and different from what she had been.

In the mountains she had thought of round silver dollars dropping into her lap, and of buying good food and fine things in the stores. But the people she had seen did not look as if they were used to many dollars. The women looked anxious about the mouth and fearful of something, and the men walked doggedly as if this was something they had to do, and they were going to get it done, simply for that reason. The young children in the pale early morning light showed up sad and pinched about the face, and thin in their bodies. Emma made up her mind further, looking at them, that Bonnie and John and Ora's young should go to school.

But she would not let them make her give up the thoughts she had had of the promised land. She said to herself, that she, Emma McClure, could make money if she tried hard enough. If she worked hard and gave the best she had to the mill, in some fine way she would be recompensed. Perhaps all these people had failed to give their best. Perhaps they were lazy.

“I'll work hard and show them what I can do,” Emma thought. She started forward just as Ora was about to touch her on the arm and wake her from that dreaming state that Ora knew so well as part of Emma. As they went through the door they heard the whistle blow.

Frank was to find the finishing room where he was to work as a beam hauler. Ora and Emma were spoolers. The finishing room was on the first floor. They left Frank there and walked up the stairs to the place where they were told to find the spool room. Emma found it hard to get up the stairs, for her knees had givenway with the sound of the whistle so close. Ora stepped hard on the stairs, but it did little good, for the sounds in the mill kept her from getting any confidence from her own firm steps.

They stood in the doorway of the spool room, quite alone, not knowing which way to turn. Here the floor shook to the machines. This rumble and shake was as different from the throb outside as the sound of a stream when there is little water is different from the sound when the stream is fed by snows and becomes a torrent coming down the mountain.

A man came up to them. “Are you the new spool hands?” he asked. Ora nodded.

“Come this way,” he said and led them between frames filled with long rows of spools and bobbins. The bobbins revolved and were emptied of thread onto the spools. The machines whirred and the spools turned with little jerks as if in a dance. At a place in the middle of the room the man stopped.

“Here,” he said to Ora, “you stop here.”

He called a girl who was at one of the other machines. She came over to give Ora lessons in running.

Then the man, who was the section boss, led Emma away. She followed him with her head bent over. He stopped at some machines next the windows that looked on the streets. Emma raised her head and for a moment she saw the street outside, and having left Ora and being alone, she wanted to run from the room and get on the street. If she could get there she would be free. She felt this in that moment, but her feet standing on the floor by the machine refused to move in accordance with her wish. In another moment the man was showing her which machines to manage, and another woman was telling her what to do. The man was gone.

If the thread broke she must immediately stop the machine and knot the broken threads together. There was something to learn about starting the machine and stopping it. And there was the special twist of the thumb and finger that made the knot in the thread. To keep the machine going and the threads intact meant walking up and down in front of the spools with eyes always on the thread that traveled with little jerks from the bobbins to the spools.

The girl left her, but had to come back. It was so easy, watching her, to think of twisting the thread in the right kind of knot. But it was very hard to do it. Thinking and doing were very different.

“I'll never learn,” Emma said.

The girl was very kind. “Yes, you will,” she said. “But you better remember. When the machine stops, pay stops. So you better learn quick.”

The spools and bobbins jerked in their little dance. They made Emma's eyes burn. She raised them a moment. In that time she saw Ora's head across the room. The frames were high but tall Ora was higher. Her head moved along, and Emma saw it cut off below the eyes by the frames, with the eyes down, watching. She jerked her own eyes back to her machines and began the walk again. One of the spools and its bobbin were whirling on their rests, which meant they had parted company and she must tie them together again. Seeing Ora made her think again of Sally. Perhaps the girl was just now going by outside with Jesse, traveling to the mountains. Emma would have liked to look out of the window, but there was no taking time from her threads.

When the bobbin was empty and a spool full she must put on a full bobbin and an empty spool. She watched the box on wheels in which were put the full spools that the girl had told her must be taken to the creels. The box did not fill very fast. That was because she had not learned to watch the frame with eyes that saw, or tend it with fingers that knew. If they would just give her time, though, she would be the fastest among them.

The twelve o'clock whistle blew sooner than she had expected it. There was so much to learn the morning had passed quickly. Emma joined Ora at the door. The section boss met them there.

“How far do you live?” he asked. They told him. “Better bring your lunch to-morrow,” he said. “You'll have to be here at a quarter to one.”

They had no time to speak much about Sally at home. Bonnie had food for them and they gulped it down, for it had taken some time to get out to the far end of the village where the house was. After the quick dinner Ora gave the baby some milk, but had no time to let it finish nursing. She left it crying in Bonnie's arms.

In the afternoon Emma's fingers began to learn. But she must work a long time before she could do as well as she wanted. Now she noticed the young boys, like John, who pushed the boxes on wheels, to her place. She saw the black woman who swept that side of the great room. But she said nothing. They went about their work quietly, without a neighborly word, and she kept to her work, because it took all of her time. She was fully concentrated on the thread. That was important. That and nothing else.

At night she and Ora met Frank outside, and they stopped at the store to buy food for supper, before they joined the stream of people going down the street. These people looked neither to the right nor to the left, enjoying, but went straight ahead. And those three, Ora, Emma and Frank, looked neither to the right nor to the left, but walked straight, wanting to get home for supper and rest, and to see that nothing had happened to the young.

Only some of the young girls, like Sally, walked slowly and talked and laughed to each other.

“At that age,” Emma thought, hearing them, and looking up for a second, “you can be happy anywheres—in any kind of place.”

Now she felt old and not new as she had when they first started out from the mountains. She thought of the man who had watched her, the section boss. Even when he was at a distance, she could feel his eyes on her, a sort of burden. She felt the burden of the spools and the thread; the sound of the machines was still in her ear, and she could still feel the throb of the floor going through her feet into her body, making it ache.

B
Y
the end of summer Emma and Ora had both learned their trades well. They were good spoolers. The first week Emma made only a few cents. Now she and Ora filled their boxes quickly, yet the amount that came in on their pay checks seemed very inadequate for all the expenses. They had bought a few extra fixings. There was a bed for Granpap and John paid by instalment, and an alarm clock. The man came around regularly every week for his dollar. They took out insurance, and the insurance man never failed to come for his toll. The electricity was a fine thing to have in the house. It was still a new experience to twist the button and get light. But the pay for electricity took something every week from the pay check, more than would have been given for oil.

Frank had been put in the slasher room, to run the warp through a starch bath. The hot starch made a vapor in the room, and when a draft came in from an open door or window Frank often got a bad cold. Ora was anxious about him.

“Hit's nothing,” he said to her when he got over a spell of coughing. “And hit's a good place to work.” Even when he had a very bad cough he went on working, for he had heard from others that the management did not like people who stayed out on account of sickness. And since they were docked if five minutes late, a day's absence would take too much off the check.

Young Frank was working at hauling spools, but he had been promised that he might go to school when it opened. When Young Frank went in the mills John wanted to go, though he was younger. Emma knew from talking to others that the preacher would sign a paper that he was old enough, as he had done for other young ones, but she felt what people told her was true: “once in the mill always in the mill.” And she wanted John to get some schooling. So she asked him, “Do ye want schooling or work?” And he said, “Schooling.”

Ora had wanted to do the same with Young Frank and kept him out as long as possible. But one day after work Frank met her outside the mill and said, “They want me in the office.”

They looked at each other, and each wondered what was coming. Ora waited for Frank. He came out looking as if he had heard bad news.

“Have ye lost—your work, Frank?” she asked, wanting to meet the trouble.

“No—hit's something else . . . . He says since Sally has left, we must send Young Frank into the mill. He's the age.”

“No,” Ora told him. “Frank ought t' have his one year at school. That much anyway.”

“He says hit's better for him to be working than running around loose, getting into trouble, or eating candy and making himself sick.”

“I'd see about the candy and the trouble,” Ora said.

“There don't seem any other way, Ora.”

There was nothing to do but send Young Frank. Ora promised him and promised herself that at the end of summer the boy must go to school with the others. For he wanted to go. He did not say much; he was more like Frank there. But long before he had spoken his wish, and she wanted it for him.

Granpap and John took long walks during the summer. Sometimes they went part of the way to the mountains. They had a secret together, for neither one had told Emma or the others about Granpap getting drunk in the city and losing the name of the street from his mind. They had blamed coming back earlier than had been expected on John's burns, and to each other they did not speak of that night in the street. Granpap had told Emma, “I forgot your quilt at the lady's house.” And Emma said, “Hit was just like ye.” She might have said more but she wanted to hear over and over about the house and the big meeting and the fires in the street.

John said nothing to Granpap about that night, but each felt that the other remembered, and it became a secret between them. And John felt something else. For a night he had taken care of Granpap, and since then his feelings toward the old man had changed. There was a difference in their relationship. Now, at times, John spoke his mind as if he was a grown-up person.

Granpap wanted to go back up to the mountains, and it was John who said, “Wait, maybe there'll be some work yet.” There was no work yet in the factory. Granpap was angry when they took Young Frank. “Hit seems they want just the young,” he said to John. “And the young ought to be out a-playing and enjoying. Hit's like in the Bible where they used to put babies in the red hot arms of the idol. I'm a-getting to believe the factory's an idol that people worship and hit wants the young for a sacrifice.”

There was no work for him in town. He knew how to cut wood and tend a garden, but this sort of work was done by the black men. “If hit wasn't for niggers,” Granpap said to John while they were sitting at the side of the road, “I could get work; but they want niggers, because the black man charges less than the white.”

Granpap found it hard to keep himself busy, and sometimes with the few cents Emma could give him he bought foolish things. Sometimes he went to the restaurant where the McEacherns brought their liquor and, sitting in the Blind Tiger, filled himself as far as the money would go.

Once he bought an ornament for the house to bring to Emma. He felt that it would please her, and it did after she got over the feeling that he shouldn't have spent the money. It was a large piece of cardboard decorated with colored flowers. At the top in gold letters was a sign that said, according to the man who sold it, “
GOD BLESS OUR FAMILY
.” At the left was a smaller sign that said, “
MARRIAGES
,” and under this was space to write the names of those married. At the right was “
DEATHS
,” and at the bottom “
BIRTHS
.”

“When you young ones learn to write,” Granpap said to John and Bonnie, “you can write all our names in the places up there. Maybe,” he said, for he was feeling mournful before the family these days, “maybe ye can soon write John Kirkland under the deaths.”

They hung the picture on the wall in Ora's front room where everyone could look at it while they sat. Emma put her Bible that Basil had given her on the table Ora bought from the instalment man. They covered the table with a clean towel and laid the Bible on top. In this room they invited neighbors who stopped to talk. Not many came. Everyone seemed busy with his own household, especially the women. There was plenty to do at home, without gallivanting to other people's houses.

The Mulkeys lived next door. Mrs. Mulkey was sick with pellagra and sometimes she had spells. Mr. Mulkey worked in the factory. They had three rooms and kept a boarder, Mrs. Mulkey's younger sister Alma. She worked in the factory, in the warp room, so Mrs. Mulkey was at home during the day with the three small children. The preacher came to see her once a week, for she and Mr. Mulkey were both very religious. It was Mr. Mulkey who came over one night when Granpap was playing “Bile them cabbage down” on his fiddle and asked him to stop playing dance tunes. No one had asked that before, and Granpap stopped only because Mrs. Mulkey was sick, and if he worried her it might bring on a spell. The Mulkeys were not alone in their feelings against dance tunes. The preacher—not the one they had stayed with the first night in the village, for he was of another sect—their own preacher, spoke against dance tunes at church, and many in the village did not approve. Granpap fretted because he was forced by the opinion around to give up his playing, and sometimes he got out his fiddle and played anyway, to show that he was not to be ruled.