IT was just daylight. Emma hesitated on the walk, while the people hurrying into the mill passed around her and Ora and Frank as they stood together. The people entering the door of the mill seemed to Emma as if they were corn being fed into a hopper to be ground up.
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.