a fight with other children on the way home from the village school one day. Walter Eason tolerated misconduct from the children and families of his millhands no better than he did from the millhands themselves.
What a pretty hell I’ve bought for us, Janson thought, staring up at the house, realizing that no matter how satisfied he felt to be doing something on his own for his wife and for the family they were making, he had very likely gained that satisfaction by selling their souls to the devil in exchange.
The first night Janson worked in the mill, he saw a man mangled in the machinery.
It had been a careless movement, a moment’s inattention, and the man’s arm was jerked into the cards while he was stripping cotton dust out of a machine. From that moment, the sight of that mangled arm would not leave Janson, giving him a healthy aversion for machines that could cost him an arm, or even his life. There was too much talk in the mill of lost arms and broken bones, of women who had their hair ripped out by machinery in the spinning room, or of a card hand killed when he had gotten caught in the belt that ran from the machinery to the drive shaft near the ceiling. Janson could not afford to take chances; Elise was depending on him. He knew he was risking enough to be working for the Easons in the first place, for he well knew what they could be capable of doing to a man in Eason County—and, if he had not known, Walt Eason had given him a clear reminder on his first shift in the mill, coming into the card room only minutes after the bleeding man had been taken out, to stand staring at Janson for an interminable time, his arms crossed before his chest. The man had not spoken, but his eyes had never once left Janson—it had been a clear warning, a warning that Janson had understood. He was being watched, and it would take only one mistake to cost him home, shelter, livelihood, and much more in Eason County.
To Janson, the first weeks working in the mill seemed to stretch into forever. He saw Elise only for the short while between the long rides to and from town and an exhausted sleep, with what seemed almost too little time in the afternoons when he finally woke to dress, eat, and begin the long ride back to town to start the next shift. He found as the days passed that he hated the mill more than he had thought possible, but the time away from Elise was even worse. The twelve-hour shifts five days a week left little time for anything except eating, sleep, and the never-ending rides in the creaky wagon to and from work, rides ending in the walk across town from the wagon lot on Main Street to the mill village, since the town would no longer allow mules, horses, and wagons free roam of the village any more than they would the town area on the other side of the railroad tracks. Janson stole whatever time he could to be with Elise, even though his body was exhausted from both work and the wagon rides, his mind numb from the machinery and noise he had endured through the night, and his lungs choked on the cotton dust he had breathed in the card room. He told himself that things would be better once they were living in the village, even though he hated the thought of bringing Elise to live in this place. At least they would be alone, in half a house that would be their own, until the baby came. At least there would be no more endless hours behind the plodding mules to get to his shift—things would be better then.
On the last night of the two weeks, Janson sat on an overturned dye-can on the loading dock just outside the large doors that led into the opening room of the mill. He had chosen this place to take his brief, middle-of-the-night break to eat once he had his job caught up enough to take the time. The air was almost unbearably cold, chilling him through his worn coat and the legs of his overalls as he sat eating, but he would not go back inside until he had to. The open sky was far preferable over the noise and cotton dust within the confines of the card room, or even the stuffy atmosphere of the lunch room where he knew he could have gone to eat.
The sausage sandwich he ate, on thick slices of home-baked bread, was long ago cold, but he was so hungry that it did not matter. It was good to be hungry, good to be working, sweating and earning a wage, even if it was over machinery and not behind a plow or dragging a pick sack. He missed the sky, the sun and earth as he worked. It seemed so odd to look up during his shift to see the dark ceiling overhead, beyond the glaring electric lights that lighted the card room, so odd to have the noise of the machinery in his ears, a noise that stayed in his head even when he was far away from this place.
Janson bit into the cold, fried apple pie that was the last of his meal, listening to the sound of a train whistle as boxcars and a caboose moved down the nearby tracks and at last left his sight, then his eyes moved back to the darkness of the village. There was no light showing anywhere that he could see, except for the mill itself. A light burning at some unusual hour would bring a neighbor or even someone from the mill to investigate, to make certain there was no sickness or trouble, and, as Janson had already learned, most of the people who lived on these peaceful streets preferred not to bring attention to themselves.
By the next night Elise would be sleeping in one of these dark houses. It would be good to have her so close, to know he would be able to return to her once the shift was over, without the long wagon ride to get through, to be able to touch and love her and glory in the daily changes in her body that the baby was causing, without the worry that Gran’ma or Gran’pa or someone else would hear them. There might be neighbors on the other side of the house, but it would be more privacy than they had known under his grandparents’ roof.
Janson closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall, thinking of having Elise all to himself at last, thinking of her hair, and the feel of her skin, the newly gentle rounding of her belly against him, and the knowledge that his child was inside of her. He could see her so clearly in his mind, more lovely now than when he had first met her—less than a year ago, and both of their lives changed so completely since then. It still amazed him that she was his wife, as he guessed it would amaze him to the day he died.
There was a sound from the doorway, and he opened his eyes and turned in time to see the dark form of a man starting back into the mill. For one brief moment Janson saw the man’s face, and what he saw there in that instant was more anguish than he had ever thought to see in any man.
“Nathan, what’s wrong?” he asked, recognizing the man as the night janitor of the mill, Nathan Betts, whom he had seen in passing over the last two weeks.
Nathan stopped, but did not turn back. It was a long time before he spoke, and, when he did, there was a choked sound in his voice. “We—” he stopped for a moment again, his eyes set on a place somewhere in the distance as he took a deep breath before he seemed able to continue, “we buried my wife this mornin’.”
Buried—the word sat on Janson for a moment. He had no idea what to say. He rose from where he had been sitting on the dye-can and went to stand beside the older man, watching as Nathan pulled a handkerchief from the back pocket of his trousers to wipe at his wet eyes.
“What happened?” Janson asked at last.
“She had a boy, th’ boy we’d been hopin’ for after our two girls—but, after, th’ bleedin’ wouldn’t stop. It hadn’t been like that before, with th’ girls, an’ th’ granny woman, no matter what she did, she couldn’t make it stop. She sent me for th’ doctor, but it was too late—”
Tears started down his cheeks again, tears he did not try to wipe away, as he looked at a memory that Janson knew he could not help but to unfold.
“She bled to death before we could get back. Th’ granny woman had her covered over with th’ sheet.” His words trailed off as he stood in silence and cried, the tears rolling from his cheeks now and dripping onto hands that Janson could see were shaking.
“You don’t need t’ be here t’night, Nathan—”
But the older man shook his head, anger mixing in his voice with the grief. “I asked Mr. Walt for a few more days, t’ give me time t’ find somebody t’ keep my girls an’ th’ baby while I’m workin’, time t’ just take
