But on the spring equinox of 1893, she is weak.
The shift bell rings and Agnes sags against her loom, listening to the tick and hiss of cooling metal and the rising babble of the mill-girls. Cotton-dust coats her tongue and gums her eyes; her limbs ache and rattle, worn out from too many extra shifts in a row.
One of those nasty fevers is spreading through New Salem’s disorderly edges, festering in the boarding houses and barrooms of West Babel, and every third girl is hacking her lungs up in a bed at St. Charity’s. Demand is high, too, because one of the other mills caught fire last week.
Agnes heard women had leapt from the windows, falling to the streets like comets trailing smoke and ash. All week her dreams have been crimson, full of the wet pop of burning flesh, except it’s a memory and not a dream at all, and she wakes reaching for her sisters who aren’t there.
The other girls are filing out, gossiping and jostling. You headed to the rally? A huff of laughter. I got better ways to waste my time. Agnes has worked at the Baldwin Brothers Bonded Mill for a handful of years now, but she doesn’t know their names.
She used to learn their names. When she first came to New Salem, Agnes had a tendency to collect strays—the too-skinny girls who slept on the boarding-house floor because they couldn’t afford beds, the too-quiet girls with bruises around their wrists. Agnes tucked them all under her scrawny wing as if each of them were the sisters she left behind. There was one girl whose hair she brushed every morning before work, thirty strokes, like she used to do for Juniper.
She found work as a night-nurse at the Home for Lost Angels. She spent long shifts soothing babies who couldn’t be soothed, loving children she shouldn’t love, dreaming about a big house with sunny windows and enough beds for each little Lost Angel. One night she showed up to work to find half her babies had been shipped out west to be adopted by settler families hungry for helping hands.
She stood among the empty beds, hands trembling, remembering what her Mama Mags told her: Every woman draws a circle around herself. Sometimes she has to be the only thing inside it.
Agnes quit the orphanage. She told the boarding-house girl to brush her own damn hair and started work at the Baldwin Brothers. She figured you couldn’t love a cotton mill.
The bell clangs again and Agnes unpeels her forehead from the loom. The floor boss leers idly as the girls file past, reaching for skirts and blouses with pinching fingers. He doesn’t reach for Agnes. On her first shift Mr. Malton had cornered her behind the cotton bales—she was always the pretty one, all shining hair and hips—but Mags taught her granddaughters ways to discourage that kind of horseshit. Since then Mr. Malton saves his leers for other girls.
Agnes watches the new girl flinch as she passes him, her shoulders sloped with shame. She looks away.
The alley air tastes clean and bright after the humid dark of the mill. Agnes turns west up St. Jude’s, headed home—well, not home, just the moldy little room she rents in the South Sybil boarding house, which smells like boiled cabbage no matter what she cooks—until she sees the man waiting at the corner.
Hair slicked earnestly to one side, cap clutched in nervous hands. Wholesome good looks, clean fingernails, a weak chin you don’t notice at first: Floyd Matthews.
Oh hell. His eyes are pleading at her, his mouth half-open to call her name, but Agnes fixes her gaze on the apron-strings of the woman in front of her and hopes he’ll just give up and find some other mill-girl to pine after.
A scuffed boot appears in her path, followed by an outstretched hand. She wishes she didn’t remember so precisely how that hand felt against her skin, smooth and soft, unscarred.
“Aggie, love, talk to me.” What’s so hard about calling a woman by her full name? Why do men always want to give you some smaller, sweeter name than the one your mama gave you?
“I already said my piece, Floyd.”
She tries to edge past him but he puts his hands on her shoulders, imploring. “I don’t understand! Why would you turn me down? I could take you out of this place”—he waves a soft hand at the dim alleys and sooty brick of the west side—“and make an honest woman out of you. I could give you anything you want!” He sounds bewildered, like his proposal was a mathematical equation and Agnes produced the incorrect response. Like a nice boy told no for the first time in his nice life.
She sighs at him, aware that the other girls are pausing on the street, turning to look at them. “You can’t give me what I want, Floyd.” Agnes doesn’t know what she wants, exactly, but it’s not Floyd Matthews or his little gold ring.
Floyd gives her a little shake. “But I love you!”
Oh, Agnes doubts the hell out of that. He loves pieces of her—the thunder-blue of her eyes, the full moon-glow of her breasts in the dark—but he never even met most of her. If he peeled back her pretty skin he’d find nothing soft or sweet at all, just busted glass and ashes and the desperate, animal will to stay alive.
Agnes removes Floyd’s hands from her shoulders, gently. “I’m sorry.”
She strides down St. Mary’s with his voice rising behind her, pleading, desperate. His pleas curdle into cruelty soon enough. He curses her, calls her a witch and a whore and a hundred other names she learned from her daddy first. She doesn’t turn back.
One of the other mill workers, a broad woman with a heavy accent, offers Agnes a nod as she passes and grunts “boys, eh” in the same tone she might say “fleas” or “piss-stains,” and Agnes almost smiles at her before
