Hellfire

But Beth wasn’t at all sure that would ever happen.

She started spending more time at the mill, and finally it got so that the workmen expected her to be there, and stopped worrying about her every minute. They were always friendly to her, and she wandered around anywhere she wanted, watching them work, bringing them tools, sometimes even helping them.

It wasn’t so bad, really, except on the days that Phillip Sturgess came to inspect the progress of the work, and brought Tracy with him.

Phillip was always friendly to Beth, interested in how she was, and what she was doing.

But Tracy never spoke to her. Instead she just stared at her, a little smile on her mouth that told Beth she was laughing at her. Beth tried to pretend she didn’t care, but of course she did.

Sometimes, during the afternoons, she’d see Tracy outside, just standing there watching the mill, and Beth knew what she wanted.

She wanted to come inside, and go down into the basement.

But she couldn’t. All day there were people there, and at night, when everyone had gone home, the building was carefully closed up, and the padlock on the one gate in the fence was always checked twice.

But for Beth, going down to the basement, and the little room under the loading dock, was simple. No one ever missed her, and part of every day she spent sitting alone in the darkness of that room, feeling the presence of Amy, who was now her only real friend.

At first it had been a little bit scary being down there by herself. For a long time she’d always left the door open and kept her flashlight on, using its beam to search out every corner. But soon she’d decided there was nothing to fear in the darkness of the room, and began closing the door behind her, turning off the light, and imagining that Amy — a real Amy — was there with her.

After a while even the strange smoky odor of the room didn’t bother her anymore, and in late July, she’d brought an old blanket to the mill. Now she kept it in the little room, where sometimes she’d spread it out, then lie on it while she daydreamed about Amy.

She knew a lot about Amy now. She’d gone to the library, and found books about what the towns like Westover had been like a hundred years ago when Amy had been alive.

She’d read about children like Amy, who’d spent most of their lives in buildings like this, working all day long, then going home to little houses that had no heat, and no electricity, and no plumbing.

One day, she’d wandered around Westover, trying to decide which house Amy might have lived in.

Finally, in her own mind, she’d decided that Amy’s house was the one on Elm Street, right by the railroad tracks. Of course she knew that part of the reason she’d decided on that house was that her mother had showed it to her a long time ago, and told her that the house, abandoned now, its roof sagging and its windows broken, with weeds growing wild around its weathered walls, had once been her own family’s home, long ago, even before she herself had been born.

As Beth had stood on the cracked sidewalk that day, staring at it, imagining that this was where Amy had lived, she’d thought she could hear Amy’s voice whispering to her, telling her that she was right, that this was the place which had been her home.

Then she’d begun dreaming about Amy. The dreams came to her only when she was in the little room behind the stairs, and she wasn’t even sure they were really dreams, for she couldn’t remember being asleep when they came to her, nor could she remember waking up when they were over. Indeed, she decided that they weren’t dreams at all.

They were visions.

They were visits from Amy, who came to show her things, and tell her things.

She never talked to anyone about Amy’s visits. She’d learned by now not to talk about Amy to anyone. The one time she had, no one had believed her. And now everyone thought she was crazy.

Everyone, that is, except old Mrs. Sturgess, and Beth hadn’t seen her since the day after she’d gone to the hospital. Once Beth had gone back to visit her again, but the nurse had told her that there was a list of people who were allowed into the old woman’s room, and her name wasn’t on the list.

So Amy had become her secret, and it didn’t really matter to Beth anymore if old Mrs. Sturgess could prove that there had really been someone named Amy or not.

To Beth, Amy was as real as anyone else.

Amy was a part of her.

And then one day late in August, in the little room in the basement of the mill, she actually became Amy for a little while, saw what Amy saw, felt what she felt.

It was a particularly hot afternoon, but down there, in the darkness, it felt different. It felt cool, almost as if it were a perfect morning in spring. Beth spread the blanket out on the floor, then lowered herself down onto it, switched off the flashlight, and let the visit happen.…

It was the kind of spring morning Amy had long since learned to dread: the sun was shining brightly, and the air was warm even at a little before six. By ten, she knew, it would be getting hot, but there would be just enough breeze to make lying in the square and staring — daydreaming — up into the spreading maples the most alluring experience she could think of. And in the afternoon, when the heat reached its peak, and the air was getting so muggy that breathing was hard, there would be the stream, just a few yards away, its cool waters beckoning to her.

Yes, today was the kind of day she had come to dread, because for some reason, this kind of day never seemed to come on a Sunday, when she might have had at least a few minutes to enjoy it. On Sundays, even though she didn’t have to go to work, there was too much to do at home, taking care of her sisters and brothers, keeping out of her fathers way, helping her mother with all the things she never had time to do during the week.

Almost unconsciously, she slowed her pace, as if by taking a few more minutes now, she could put off the inevitable. But she knew it was impossible. As she turned off the railroad tracks to make her way up the path toward Prospect Street, and the shadow of the shoe mill blotted out the sunlight, she began steeling herself for the hours ahead. Long ago her mother had taught her the trick of survival in the mill. All you had to do was shut everything out, until the little room you worked in was your whole world, and nothing beyond that little room could enter your head at all. Then all you thought about was the work: cutting the little pieces of leather out of the tanned hides, making sure they were all exactly the same size, stacking them carefully but quickly in neat piles so that when they went to the assembly room upstairs the assemblers would have the right pieces at the right time. And you had to work fast, because you got paid by the piece.

You had to ignore the smells, too, or you’d quickly get sick and not be able to work at all. Sometimes Amy wondered which smells were the worst — the acrid odor of the lye used for tanning the hides, or the sour smells of the dyes used to color the leather after it was tanned. Or maybe, she sometimes thought, the worst smell was the smell of the people themselves, all of them sweating in the heat, their eyes fastened on their work for fear that if they looked toward the filthy windows the light and air outside would overpower them, and they’d drop their work and run away from the mill forever.

But they couldn’t do that — Amy least of all. This was 1886, and there weren’t many jobs, and at home her mother, who had no job at all, always told her how lucky she was to have a job in the middle of the depression. And even though Amy wasn’t quite sure what a depression was, she knew that she couldn’t give in to her impulse to run away from the mill, because if she did, there wouldn’t be any money at all, and her mother and sisters and brothers would have nothing to eat.

The door of the mill loomed a few steps ahead of her now, and she paused. According to the clock on the church steeple above the square, she still had four minutes before the morning whistle blew and everyone had to be at the tables, ready to work. Her eyes darted around, as if gathering images to put away for examination later, but then fixed on a group of three children — children her own age — who were walking along the other side of the street. She knew their names, but had never spoken to them, as they had never spoken to her.

Fleetingly, she wondered if they knew her name.

Probably not, since they didn’t work at the mill.

They didn’t work at all.

They were the lucky ones, whose fathers ran the mill, and who lived in nice houses, and went to