Edna had come to rely on this idea anytime her work on the fuse line started to seem too oppressive. It was tedious to stand for long hours on a hard wooden floor, elbow to elbow with the other girls, the machines all humming and clattering, the spools of thread spinning on the rack above her head. It was impossibly dusty work owing to the fibers that flew about, but there was no time to stop and dab at one’s eyes or nose, as a single dropped thread could throw the machine out of joint and she’d have to unravel and start again. There was nothing to do but to let one’s eyes and nose drip. Sometimes she’d look up at the girl across, and see that they were both crying for no reason other than the lack of a free arm with which to wield a handkerchief, and they would both start to laugh at once, which only made the tears worse.
On her first day at the powder works, she asked the girl sitting next to her how one stopped the machine to go to the lavatory. She didn’t know it at the time, but in asking the question, she’d entered into a rite of initiation that every new hire suffered.
“Oh, just ask Mrs. Schaefer,” the girl said, never once looking up from her work.
Edna waited until the superintendent passed by, and turned briefly to make the inquiry. In the second she looked away, her foot pedal slowed and the fine fuse she’d been weaving collapsed into a tangled mess.
The other girls knew better than to laugh under the watchful eye of their supervisor. Edna asked her question and was pointed sternly in the direction of the privies. The need to go left her suddenly, but there was nothing to do but to run out, red-faced, already terrified that she’d broken some unspoken rule and lost her place, and would have no choice but to return home that night, defeated after only one day at work.
When she found the women’s privies, she understood the trick that had been played on her. The toilets were nothing but boards with holes them in, placed atop a trench, all housed in a slapdash wooden shack through which flies buzzed in and out. There was no paper—she was meant to bring her own, but how could she have known that?—and no one inside except two arthritic old women who, Edna would later learn, stole into the bathroom at intervals throughout the day and perched on the edge of the wooden boards to get some relief for their aching feet.
A woman of advanced years might be excused for taking a lavatory break in the middle of her shift, but Edna would never take one again. None of the girls used the factory toilets if they could help it. The rush to get out the gate at six o’clock, she soon learned, was a rush home to use a clean facility. The men knew it and liked to congregate around the gate, walking slowly with their arms locked, to impede them on their way home. (The men, apparently, had no qualms about their facilities and found them suited to their needs.)
By the time Edna returned to the boarding-house that night, the other girls knew all about what had happened and commiserated with her over dinner.
“You had to find out for yourself,” Delia said. “You wouldn’t have believed it otherwise.”
“If you’re nice to Mrs. Schaefer, she’ll take you to the one in the office building. But only if you’re sick,” Pearl added.
“At least it isn’t a trench,” Fannie said.
“A trench? Why, there’s a trench underneath! I saw it,” Edna said.
Delia laughed. “No, silly, she means a trench in France. Where the soldiers live. Their living quarters are nothing but a muddy old dugout in the ground. Think about that when you finish off your fuses. They’ll be sent to some boy in France who hasn’t seen anything as nice as a factory privy in months.”
That proved to be a useful thought to Edna, and a heartening one. Whatever discomforts she might endure, they couldn’t compare to the hardships of a trench in the Argonne. The idea stayed with her, as she grew more accustomed to the tedium of a factory job, the long hours on her feet, her red and swollen fingers, and the dull ache behind her eyes from staring at those spinning threads all day. Her brothers were eager to go overseas and endure far worse. Surely she could bear it for their sake.
And while there was nothing patriotic about a night in the county jail, she could bear that, too, if she thought of the boys in France. Still, she couldn’t comfort herself enough to ever once close her eyes. All night long she stared through the bars. She kept Deputy Kopp’s comb pressed tightly into her fist until morning.
7
“WE NEVER USED to see young ladies on trial,” Judge Seufert told Constance when she brought Edna into his chambers the next day. “It’s unseemly.”
The judge was a man of advanced age with a ridge of bluish veins across his forehead and hands that trembled when he shuffled through the papers on his desk. He sat rigidly upright, in a trim striped suit and a crisp bow tie, and looked down kindly on Edna from his high desk.
“She looks respectable enough to me,” he pronounced, squinting down at her from underneath the rims of his spectacles.
Constance found this enormously promising. Judge Seufert tended to be friendly toward the sheriff’s office, and moved by the sight of a girl in distress.
The prosecutor’s office was represented by the very same Detective John Courter with whom Sheriff Heath and Constance had feuded in the past. He was a stout man with a head that, when uncovered, most closely resembled a duck’s egg. His mustache formed an upside-down V that gave him the appearance of a perpetual frown. He kept his chin high, as if to lower one’s chin was the first step into moral turpitude. There was a self-righteousness about him that irked Constance, particularly when he took on these morality cases.
In a chair next to Mr. Courter sat Mrs. Monvilla Heustis, Edna’s mother. Constance wanted very much to be angry with her over the trouble she’d caused, but her irritation dissipated at the sight of a tired-looking woman of about fifty, with a pinched mouth and dull hair fading from watery brown to gray. She wore a wool coat whose cuffs had been replaced recently, and a pair of high leather shoes unsuited for walking in the snow.
Here is a woman who does not have much, thought Constance, and now she doesn’t have her daughter. Mrs. Heustis’s downcast appearance stabbed at Constance, bringing to mind the way her own mother had once clung so fretfully to her, contriving to push the world away and keep her stiflingly close by denying her an education, a profession, and friends, even. Mrs. Heustis had done much the same thing—only she had involved the police, and brought humiliation and the possibility of a criminal rec-ord down on her daughter.
As Constance and Edna took their chairs, Mrs. Heustis sat stoically and kept her eyes on Judge Seufert, refusing to even greet her daughter. He looked up at them with great animation, but then gave a little sigh when he saw Mrs. Heustis’s grim eyes fixed upon him.
“Very well. I suppose the prosecution has something to say.”
Detective Courter stood and put one hand inside his vest pocket. “Mrs. Heustis filed a charge of waywardness with this office on January 4, 1916. I alerted every police department in five counties, and yesterday the girl was found living in a furnished room and arrested. We ask that she be sentenced to the state reformatory until she’s twenty-one, upon which time she may be released to her mother’s care.”
Edna nearly jumped out of her chair. Constance reached out to put a hand on her arm.
Judge Seufert looked down at Mrs. Heustis. “I’d like to hear from the mother. Ma’am, what led you to go to the police?”