Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [9]
It was a lovely wedding and you looked very pretty. As soon as you mail the suit to me, I will take it back to Bette’s. You have another two weeks, so there is no hurry. Let me know if you decide to keep it after all. As I said, you might like it for sentimental reasons.
I just realized that I have never had occasion to write you a letter since you have never gone away from home, which explains why this feels a little strange.
Write and tell us about Labor Day as Harold and I would like something to look forward to.
Love,
Mother
McDermott
“You heard about Gastonia,” Ross says.
Ross’s voice is hard to hear in the din. McDermott watches his mouth. “I read about it,” he says.
The speak is crowded with the day shift — warp twisters and slasher tenders and mule spinners and carders — all drinking away their pay packets. Mahon makes the drink in Exeter, brings it over in a bread truck to the speak. The first whiskey always hurts McDermott’s stomach, and he’s pretty sure he has an ulcer. The noise in the mill has ruined his hearing, ruined his nerves. Lay off the drink, the mill doctor said, and gave him a bottle of white pills to take. Sometimes McDermott shits blood.
“They’re on trial now,” Ross says.
“So I hear.”
“They’ll get off.”
Ross has bad teeth, horrible to look at, but McDermott has to watch his mouth in order to understand him.
“The police chief was killed,” McDermott says.
“Lackey for the bosses,” Ross says, and spits on the floor.
“You think it’ll happen here?” McDermott asks.
“I know it will happen here,” Ross says.
Though McDermott is just twenty, already he is a loom fixer. He reports only to the second hand. He has been in the mills since he was twelve, since the day his father pissed off. Every day except Sundays, the din rises up around him and makes a hollow sucking sound in his ears, as if he had dived into the ocean and was trying to come up for air. He repairs broken looms and checks others to make sure the cloth is weaving properly. He is supposed to report weavers who aren’t doing their jobs, but he hardly ever does. In return, any weaver in McDermott’s section tries hard to keep up. McDermott is careful not to take advantage of this goodwill or to take credit for a job another has done. A boastful loom fixer, he has seen, never lasts too long.
Still, the work is difficult and McDermott, like almost everyone in the mill, hates his job. Especially since the speed-up. For three months now, the bosses have ordered the machines to go at a faster speed. If the machines produce more cloth for the same amount of wages, the argument goes, then the northern mills might be able to compete with the southern mills that are taking away all the business. Already the Hookset Mill has closed because of lost business. The Dracut Mill has announced a 10 percent pay cut.
All his life, McDermott has lived in company housing, eight kids in a two-bedroom apartment. The babies, when they came, slept in bureau drawers. When he was thirteen and got his growth, he slept on three chairs in the kitchen. When his father left the family without a note or a word, his mother moved into a cot in the kitchen to let the three older girls, who needed privacy then, have the double bed in her bedroom. Now his mother is gone — a stroke, the mill doctor said — and Eileen, who is nineteen, is in charge. McDermott moved into the men’s boardinghouse nearby, but he gives Eileen half his pay packet. He brings food when he can and eats with Eileen and his brothers and other sisters two or three times a week, mainly to keep the boys, who are a handful, in line.
McDermott, like everyone else in the mill, second hands and overseers alike, lives for the breaks. Even in December and January, when the weather is raw and freezing, McDermott likes to go outside during the ten minutes the workers are allowed in the afternoon. He once discovered a trapdoor that leads onto the roof, and as soon as the horn sounds, he pretends to head