Justine’s parents couldn’t have known that World War II was waiting like a lion licking its chops outside a nursery school door. Or maybe they did know. They’d lived through the first worldwide war, and they could surely see that humanity hadn’t changed very much in the years since the Treaty of Versailles.
They were teachers at heart, so Justine spent her first eighteen years learning things, then she spent the rest of her life being grateful she knew them. By the time she was eighteen, she could cook and sew. She could read German, and she could speak it, too. She could mow the grass with a push mower that ran like a top, because she knew how to grease it and sharpen its blades. Best of all, she could weld.
Girls didn’t weld when Justine was growing up in 1930s New Orleans, but her father was never much for rules. He showed her how to stick weld, then he backed off and watched his undersized, freckle-faced daughter make an unholy mess with a rod and a torch. All the while, he whispered things she needed to know if she hoped to make a better mess the next time.
“Justine, honey, watch the puddle,” he said as her yellow-orange curls escaped from her tight braids. “And soften your wrist. If you tense up, your weld will show it.”
And her welds did show it, until they didn’t. But how’s a girl supposed to learn, unless somebody’s willing to step back and let her try?
Justine’s mother was willing to step way back. She stayed busy during those welding sessions, planning lessons that taught Justine things like differential equations and quantum mechanics, things that other people thought girls didn’t need to know. Even after she lost her sight, Justine’s mother had continued those lessons, carefully explaining the most exacting subjects without a book or notes. If a person is going to do something so stupid as to be born a girl in 1923, she could do worse than to be born to two physicists, even if it did mean that every dinner conversation was a Socratic dialogue and every playtime activity was a demonstration of the mechanical advantages of simple machines.
Justine’s parents died before the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, thanks to a flooded Louisiana back road that hadn’t offered enough friction to keep their car from skidding into bayou water so dark that a day passed before they were found. When the war came, the only good thing about it was that it gave Justine a chance to weld for real. She burned to weld her heart out, so that the Axis powers would take a well-deserved fall.
***
Sonny, the Carbon Division’s daytime foreman, had gathered everyone on his shift in the open area around the loading dock, the only place inside that part of the factory where hundreds of people could stand together. All those bodies made the air so hot that Justine could barely breathe.
Sonny always wore his braggadocio like an ill-fitting sport coat, but knowing that all of his workers’ eyes were on him only made it worse. He preened under the unaccustomed attention. Justine found his grand stance appalling, since he had almost certainly gathered everyone to give them tragic news.
He cleared his throat loudly to quiet the crowd. “I’m sorry to inform you that one of our fellow Higgins employees has died. Her name was—”
He checked a crumpled piece of paper in his hand. “It was Cora Becker. Al Haskins is in the hospital, but they say he’s doing good after his back surgery.”
He checked the paper again. “Yolanda Bergeron’s gonna make it, but they’re doing an operation on her leg right now, so say some prayers. Say some prayers for all of ’em.”
He paused, mouth agape like a man who has forgotten what he meant to say. Justine could see it on his face when the words came back to him. “Mr. Higgins has been in touch with their families. And…um…he says that he’s coming to the plant a week from Sunday. He wants to say some things to y’all about how grateful he is for what you do here every day. And I’m sure he wants to say nice things about Cora, Al, and…Yolanda. Yeah, Yolanda.”
A tall woman next to Justine bent her head as if to send up a prayer for Cora, Al, and Yolanda. Then she raised her eyes to look at Sonny again, and their expression gave no doubt as to what she thought of their boss. Justine noticed an elegantly coiled chignon at the nape of the woman’s long, tanned neck. She’d seen that hairdo before. This was Georgette Broussard. Justine didn’t know her, but she automatically liked her because of the irritated way she looked at their foreman.
Sonny stood before them, obviously pleased that he’d remembered all three victims’ names this time. He closed his speech by saying, “So get back to your stations, but know that Mr. Higgins himself is proud of you. Me, too. I’m proud of you, too. Now go build some stuff.”
So they did—except for Justine, because Sonny walked over and grabbed her by the elbow.
“I need you to weld something. I don’t know what’s going on with the lateral guides, but this is the third one I’ve needed you to fix for me this month.”
***
Ships and planes and mysterious assemblages that are probably still classified or should be…the time came when Justine welded them all together. But in late 1944, the only welding jobs she got from Sonny were quick patch jobs that the real welders were too busy to bother with. Justine wanted to be one of the real welders, so she took Sonny’s patch jobs with a smile. She was theatrical about it, too, making a big fuss about doing her safety checks and donning her goggles, hoping that somebody might notice that she could be dropped into a high-paid job in aircraft assembly without needing to spend six weeks in welding school.
Justine occasionally fantasized that she would get one of those jobs and her supervisors would be so happy about the way her flawless welds always held—always!—that they would keep her on after the war was over, but she was a realist. Higgins Industries was well-known around wartime New Orleans as a place that hired women to do work that they usually weren’t allowed to do. Black people, too. But everybody knew what would happen when the soldiers came home.
She, along with a lot of other people working themselves to the bone for an Allied victory, would be back to slinging hash and mopping floors, with the best possible outcome for Justine being that she was slinging hash and mopping floors for a husband who paid the bills. Or so everyone wanted her to believe. Maybe Justine would believe them when she met the right man, but she’d never met one yet who made her burn to start her day by scrambling his eggs.
By the time Justine welded that third lateral guide, donning her welding goggles with a look-at-me-I’ve-got-valuable-skills flourish was automatic. This left her mind free to chew on an interesting problem.
Why did the same part keep breaking?
Not the exact same part. Her first weld of a broken lateral guide had been solid, and it had held. So had the second one. It was just that one lateral guide after another was failing. She pondered this problem as she laid down her usual beautiful bead.
Was the problem poor design? That seemed unlikely, since Higgins Industries had been using the same brand and model of conveyor belt for years.
Metal prices had skyrocketed as soon as the war broke out. Maybe the parts manufacturer was cutting corners. This was possible, even likely.
It seemed far-fetched, but she supposed that somebody could be deliberately tampering with the equipment. Mr. Higgins employed thousands and thousands of people, and sometimes people got mad at the boss. But would anybody really take their anger out on the manufacturing machinery when there was a war on? People’s lives depended on the things Higgins Industries built.
The constantly broken conveyor belt served just one line at one factory among hundreds of wartime factories across the country, but it was hers. Justine’s cousin Fred was in the South Pacific, and last she heard, her childhood playmate Harold was somewhere in Africa. She couldn’t go help them. All she could do was work her monotonous assembly job, fastening two pieces of bright, shiny metal together and making them ready to be joined to pieces of meticulously machined carbon.
Justine coveted the machinists’ jobs almost as much as she coveted a welding job. The Carbon Division was just two weeks old, but the division’s handpicked machinists were quickly acquiring legendary status. There they stood, long lines of workers, mostly women, using their drills and grinders and lathes and saws to shape pure carbon to exacting specifications.
And in return for that detailed work? Each and every one of them pulled down good wages. A man’s wages. A skilled man’s wages.
The machinists generated tons of coal-black dust. Or at least it seemed like tons of coal-black dust. There was always an unholy cloud of carbon over their heads, as black as a Louisiana thundercloud. As a result, the Carbon Division was tucked into a back corner of Higgins’s Michaud plant, surrounded by a wall built to contain all that dust.
After her first day on the job, Justine had run to the bathroom to rinse her face before getting on the bus, but she’d quickly found that nothing short of a full bath with soap and hot water would get all the carbon dust off. The black powder was a badge of honor, showing everyone that she’d been chosen to work on something special. It clung to her face, her neck, even her ears, making her oddly proud of being dirty at the end of the day as she hustled through a cavernous factory building to make it to the bus on time.
The carbon dust found its way inside the navy blue canvas coveralls that were supposed to protect her street clothes. It penetrated those street clothes. It was an all-pervasive nuisance. Still, the dust said, “I’m doing my part to bring our soldiers home.”
She couldn’t imagine how the machinists ever scrubbed the dust off after standing right at the source of it for a full shift. At quitting time, they looked like they’d been painted with the stuff. Maybe it was permanent. Maybe, over time, it would soak into their skin like a tattoo.
Justine wanted to look like that. She wanted it to be obvious at the sight of her that she, a woman, had skills that were needed. She also wanted to fatten up her nest egg as a defense against the day when she was once again stuck supporting herself on a store clerk’s paycheck.
Justine didn’t just envy the carbon machinists’ paychecks. She envied them for their specialized knowledge of whatever-in-the-heck she and her friends were making. They’d been told they were making radio parts, and maybe they were, but they were the weirdest-looking radio parts she’d ever seen. The company had been supremely close-lipped about its brand-new Carbon Division, even while focusing its attention on big things that flew and floated. Justine had been sworn to secrecy when she took the new job, which seemed strange for radio parts, but that was the nature of military contracting. Everything she’d ever done for Higgins had been secret. The only thing that had been different about this job was that the man training her for it had been really serious about the oath of secrecy. Maybe three years at war had just made everybody jumpy. These days, the Army probably made everybody in its vicinity take an undying oath of silence, even if they were just building latrine seats.
All that secrecy probably made the broken lateral guides seem more serious than they were. Still, any disgruntled employee targeting this assembly line was targeting her livelihood. Worse than that, the sabotage targeted Fred, Harold, and millions of soldiers, airmen, and sailors. She looked around at her coworkers. Some of them she liked and some of them she didn’t, but she couldn’t imagine any of them doing such a thing. It was far more likely that the repetitive stresses and strains of long hours of service were simply snapping the metal at a vulnerable point.
In any case, she had to make it whole so that the assembly line could keep running. Jerry, the Carbon Division’s maintenance chief, did the best he could, but metal parts were hard to come by after years of war. He had no spare parts to speak of.
She vowed that she would do whatever it took to keep the line running, no matter what. Probably, that vow just meant that she would weld anything that broke. If somebody was breaking things on purpose, though, then she would find them, and she would find a way to put a stop to it.
Justine kept her wrist soft and watched her puddle while she plotted a betrayer’s downfall.