school in the winter and played outside all summer. And they had pretty clothes, clothes that never looked as though someone else had worn them before; never looked as though they needed mending two or three times a week. Involuntarily, Amy’s hands dropped down and ran over her own dress, as if by some unseen force she could make the stains on it disappear, or smooth over the rough stitches that held its tattered pieces together.
For a moment, she wondered where they were going today, then decided it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered, really, was that now she had only one minute to get to her table, and if she was late, the shift supervisor would yell at her; might even fire her. And if that happened—
She put the thought out of her mind, and hurried through the door into the dimness of the mill, doing her best to put the rest of the world out of her mind.
A few people spoke to her as she started toward the stairs at the far end of the building, and she nodded a brief response. But most of the people were already hard at work, their fingers moving quickly in unchanging routines that had long since become automatic as they assembled shoes from the piles of leather around them. The people seemed to have a sameness about them: their eyes were vacant, and their skin seemed to have the look of worn leather. Their clothes, shabby and ill-fitting, all looked alike, and marked them for what they were — millworkers. For a fleeting instant, she wondered if they, like herself, dreamed of getting out of the mill, but then she decided they didn’t. For most of them, the mill was their life, and they would be here until they died.
As the whistle sounded, its piercing scream slashing through her like a knife, Amy hurried down the stairs and into the little room under the loading dock where she worked with the other children her age, cutting the freshly dyed hides into the many pieces that went into the shoes.
It was here she had started working three years ago, when she was eight, tending to the vats in which the hides were soaked, then moving on to the dyeing itself. Finally, she had begun training as a cutter, and now she worked her twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, cutting soles from the rough leather, training herself to work as the others worked, without thinking.
Even as she put on her apron and took up her position at the cutting table, she began the process of closing down her mind.
She started with her eyes.
She had to keep her eyes on her work, even though it had been months since she really needed to watch every move she made. But if her eyes stayed on the leather, and the hypnotically moving knife in her right hand, they wouldn’t stray to the children around her, and she wouldn’t see things she didn’t want to see. She wouldn’t see her cousin, who worked only a few feet away, and whose face was always streaked with tears. She knew why her cousin cried while he worked, but he had sworn her to secrecy, knowing that if anyone found out he was allergic to the dyes he worked with he would lose his job. So he worked on, and even though the dyes hurt him to the point where he cried all day, he never said anything, and turned away whenever the foreman was in the area.
Amy closed her ears as well, for if she didn’t, she would hear the other children talking, and if she let herself listen, she would soon begin talking, too. And if she talked, she would think, and if she thought, she didn’t know what might happen.
The only way to get through it was to close herself down, let herself be hypnotized by the dull routine of the work, and get through the hours one at a time.
She picked up the knife, and began cutting. Within thirty seconds, she was into the rhythm of movement that would carry her through the day. Hold the hide down with her left hand, cut straight through with her right, cutting off a strip exactly three inches wide. Pick up the three-inch-wide strip in her left hand, and give a quick cut, twisting the knife slightly to turn the curve of the heel. Flip the heel over, repeat the cut. Put the heel piece in the box, and start the next one. Slowly, as happened every day, her senses began closing down, until all she was aware of was her tiny area of the workbench, the knife in her hand, and the leather in front of her. Soon time would have no meaning for her, and she would continue to work, oblivious not only of what was going on around her but also of the pain in her arms and shoulders, the pain that would creep up on her every day. She would not allow herself to feel it until the evening whistle had sounded, and she was on her way home. Then, as her senses came back to her, the pain would come too, and by the time she got home she would be unable to move her arms. But her mother would have a tub of hot water waiting for her, water she’d been heating on the wood-burning stove, and she would sink into it, waiting for the pain to turn to numbness, and then the numbness to turn into the tingling sensation that meant soon she would be able to move her arms again.
But during the day, the only thing she could do was shut the pain out, as she had learned to shut everything else out. Shutting things out was the only way to get through it.
And then, when things were shut out, and she was no longer aware of the mill, she would live in her own world for a while, a world where there was no mill. In her world, she would live outside, in the warmth of the sun, with the breezes blowing through her long hair, caressing her skin. The air would be filled with the scent of flowers, and she would lie by the stream for hours, letting the water play over her fingers. And someday, she knew, she would go to live in that world. Someday, she would find a way to leave the mill, and then she would never have to shut things out again. And when that day came, she would take her cousin with her, and all the other children who, like her, were slowly dying in the mill….
She had no idea what time it was when something encroached on her closed senses. Indeed, for the first few minutes, she wasn’t even sure what it was that was playing around the edges of her mind. All she knew was that something wasn’t quite the way it should be. Something, somewhere, was disturbing her protective trance.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, she began opening her mind to the world around her.
It was the smell.
The room, always airless, always choked with fumes and the sour odor of sweat, contained something new. Hesitating at her work, the knife poised in mid-stroke, she sniffed at the air.
There was an acrid smell, somehow familiar, but out of place.
And her eyes were stinging.
Her senses coming fully alert now, she felt tears welling in her eyes, running down her cheeks. She dropped the knife, and painfully raised her right hand to wipe away the tears.
The smell was stronger now, and she turned, forcing herself to look around the room.
And then she saw it.
In the corner near the door a pile of rags, stained dark with oily dyes, had burst into flames.
Amy stared at the flames for a moment, uncertain they were really there. And then she looked around.
The other children, the children she thought spent their days talking among themselves while they worked, were standing at their stations, their expressions glazed over as their hands moved in the same metronomically regular rhythm she herself experienced every day.
A few yards away, his eyes streaming, her cousin stood at one of the dye vats.
And even though he was crying, she knew immediately that he, too, had retreated into a private world where the mill could not penetrate. He, like herself — like all the children — had escaped into another world, oblivious of the world in which his body toiled.
The fire was spreading now, sending tongues of flame out across the floor as billows of smoke rose from the rags and filled the room with a choking fog.
And then, from beyond the little room, she heard the sounds of people calling out: “Fire! Fire in the cutting room!” And then the voices were cut off by the scream of the whistle, this time not signaling the end of the morning shift, but blaring out in short, urgent bursts, alerting the workers to the danger. In a moment, the fire squad would appear, and begin dousing the flames.
All around her, she could feel the other children coming alive, hear them begin coughing, hear the first sounds of their terror.
