September 1944
Justine Byrne liked taking out the trash. It was her favorite part of the workday.
Her factory work was monotonous by design. She understood that, and she was more or less resigned to it. The whole point of an assembly line was efficiency, and efficiency apparently required a whole lot of people to do the same thing, over and over, all day and every day. Monotony got the job done.
Since the world was at war, and her job was to build war machines that would fly and float the Allied troops to victory, Justine was happy to stand at her station all day and every day, plucking parts off an endlessly moving conveyor belt and bolting them together. Well, mostly happy. Daydreams of romance and faraway places helped the long days pass.
She didn’t even know exactly what she was building. It wasn’t her job to know, and she had sworn not to tell anybody about it anyway. She just did what she was told, and she did it well. One of the things she was told to do was to take out the trash every afternoon.
On this particular afternoon, Justine carried a wooden crate loaded with soiled packing material and flattened cardboard boxes that were past reusing. Her destination was a lowly trash pen, a square area enclosed by tall wooden fencing that stood behind Higgins Industries’ huge Michaud plant. In the Carbon Division, the part of the factory where Justine worked, there was no exterior door other than the big, open loading dock where trucks made pickups and deliveries. This meant she had to go through the main part of the plant to get to a door when she needed to get her trash outside.
Passing through that back door took her away from the cacophony of an industrial plant where boats and ships and airplanes were taking shape. It took her to a swath of pavement bounded by low vegetation, green and shrubby, that stretched all the way to the bank of the industrial canal where barges brought raw materials and carried away finished products.
People who had lived in New Orleans for a good long while called this area east of the city Prairie Tremblante, and Justine thought there was a sweetness in the way the French words described the land’s understated beauty. She was looking at grassland, yes, but the scene had an only-for-now feeling. If she stepped into the waving grass, she might sink or she might just feel the earth tremble, vibrating at a frequency peculiar to this time and this place. It was a beautiful place to be outside on an afternoon that was cool for late September.
She passed through the trash pen’s gate, emptied her crate into a bin, and walked back to the factory door, but she did these things slowly. Fresh breezes and silence were hard to come by for the workers at the Michaud plant, and Justine liked to make the most of them. She used her slow stroll to admire the afternoon sunshine and the smell of damp earth. Then she opened the factory’s heavy door, bracing herself for clanging metal and whining machinery. Walking through that door was always like falling into an ocean of sound, but Justine was used to it. She was new to the Michaud plant, but she’d worked at one Higgins factory or another for three years, since she was eighteen.
She guessed she’d never get over her awe at walking past the long lines where Navy boats were built. Those boats, Higgins Industries’ original product and still the pride of the company, took shape as they moved across the factory floor, one after another. An entire flotilla of watercraft hung overhead, some of them belly up and some of them belly down, while workers welded and riveted and bolted them together. Beyond them was a row of half-built airplanes getting ready to fly. Their tremendous bulk made the carbon and metal assemblies that she bolted together look piddly and small.
Hanging over those flashy war machines, a banner proclaimed that “THE GUY WHO RELAXES IS HELPING THE AXIS!” Justine could vouch for the fact that Higgins workers had precious few chances to relax.
She knew the sounds of a manufacturing plant so well that she felt something was wrong before she’d traveled ten steps down the boat manufacturing line. Far above the shrieking of saws, she heard shrieking human voices. Accompanying the thunder of sledgehammers, she heard the pattering sound of human feet on the concrete floor. And high overhead, she heard a rhythmic clanging that just wasn’t right.
Looking up, she saw a tremendous wooden assembly, probably part of the hull of a PT boat, dangling from the hoist of a gantry crane. The metal beams supporting the crane were supposed to stand still, vertical and strong, but they weren’t doing that. They were swaying so hard that their load swung like a pendulum, and Justine knew that this couldn’t go on for long. The crane wasn’t made to move like that. Justine knew that even steel will fail when stressed beyond its design limits.
She let the empty wooden crate fall from her hands. Her instincts said to run toward the failing equipment and help, but she had taken just a step toward the swaying crane when it collapsed, taking its load to the factory floor where a cluster of three workers stood. Justine saw it take them down.
Trying to walk upstream through the crowd of people fleeing a disaster that had already happened, she raised her voice, hoping someone would hear her over the din. “Somebody get a floor crane. We’ll need it to get those people free of the wreckage.”
She couldn’t tell if anybody heard her, so she kept pushing against the crowd, one step at a time. She knew where to find a portable floor crane, mounted on wheels and stored in a nearby corner. If she got to it, maybe she could get someone to help her move it to the scene of the accident. Through a gap in the throng, she could see it dead ahead. Its blue-painted steel beam called out to her. After a few more struggling steps, she had her hand on it, ready to roll it to people who needed help.
Then a voice sounded over the loudspeaker that Sam-the-Timekeeper used to make announcements.
Sam’s voice was calm but insistent. He might be only a timekeeper, but he had an air of command about him. “Everybody to their stations—unless your station is in the immediate vicinity of the accident, in which case we’re gonna need you to gather outside the east entrance. We’ve got a rescue crew on its way.”
Justine was absolutely in the vicinity of the accident, and her station was nowhere near where she stood. She needed to do what Sam said and get moving, but still she lingered, one hand on the blue floor crane.
Justine couldn’t see two of the injured workers. That was a bad thing, since it meant they were probably under the pile of debris. The third worker had pulled herself to a sitting position, but her leg was trapped under the collapsed crane’s steel beam.
Five men ran toward the pile of splintered wood and mangled metal. One of them carried a first aid kit and the others carried hand tools, but she could see that they were going to need much more than that to get the three workers free. She could also see that the first aid kit was woefully inadequate.
Justine knew one of the men slightly, a burly red-haired custodian named Martin, and she waved both hands to flag him down. Gripping the floor crane’s supporting beam, she called out, “You’ll need this.”
Martin skidded to a stop and grabbed one of his companions by the arm. “Help me move this.” He directed a tense nod at Justine, saying simply, “Thanks. You saved us the time we would’ve spent looking for this,” then he turned his back on her and got to work.
As they wheeled the crane away, Justine walked toward the door to the Carbon Division section of the plant where she worked. Her legs went unexpectedly wobbly beneath her, so she paused to watch the rescuers at work. They were getting the blue crane into position to lift wreckage off the sitting woman’s leg. From this angle, Justine could see the other two workers, and bile rose in her throat at the sight of their still bodies pinned to the floor. There was almost no blood, just a few crimson drips and spatters on the smooth gray concrete beneath them. Justine almost wished for a more obvious marker of calamity to mark the spot.
Broken bodies and death were the very thing Justine and the other factory workers were working to avoid. Everyone on the home front wanted to bring the soldiers home whole and in one piece. Nobody wanted their young, strong bodies to lie limp and still on beaches or in jungles or at the bottom of the sea. Justine saw her job as a real, palpable thing that she could do to end the war. She knew it was dangerous. She knew that there had been industrial accidents at Higgins plants before. She knew that there would be more because entropy dogged all human endeavors, but this was the first time that her day-to-day danger had been rubbed in her face.
Justine ordered her wobbly legs to take her back to her station. She was needed there. She was needed to help stop a war that was consuming the whole world.