“Go on back up when you’re done,” Dobbins said. “Unless—” But he didn’t finish.
Ella walked the length of the mill toward the office at its far end, her eyes locked in front of her instead of grazing the faces of the men and women who worked at machines and the boys and girls who looked no older than her own and who pushed carts full of spindles and swept heavy, lint-choked brooms across the floor.
Aside from sanctioned breaks and shift changes, Ella had left the line only once in the years she’d worked at the mill, and the thing that had caused that leaving now passed through her mind. A new doffer boy, whose name she later learned was Giles Corley, had tottered on his toes when reaching too far for a full spindle and found his hand caught up and nearly yanked off in one of the operating belts that snaked through the mill and powered the machines through a system of pulleys. By the time Giles and the spinners around him realized what had happened he was holding a bloody appendage to his chest and three of his fingers had dropped to the floor and disappeared.
Ella didn’t know if he had screamed—it was too loud to hear a boy that size scream anyway—but the recoil of his hand away from the belt and toward his body had caught her attention, and without thinking she lifted the hem of her dress and knelt to the floor and started searching. Others searched too, but it was Ella who found them: three little fingers tucked against the base of the brick wall at the end of a trail of blood that had already begun to turn a deep brown on the dirty floor. She scooped up the fingers and carried them to the boy, who stared at them like creatures from a nightmare. He didn’t seem able to muster any interest in reclaiming his fingers, so Ella held them in her closed hand while she tended the spinners and she and Giles waited for Dobbins. When he arrived she showed him the boy’s fingers.
“I found them on the floor,” she said. “Over there by the wall.”
“Goddamn,” Dobbins said. He took a white handkerchief from his pocket and opened it, gesturing for Ella to drop the fingers inside, which she did. He closed the handkerchief and twisted it so that it formed a little satchel. Blood bloomed through the cloth. “Goddamn,” he said again.
The boy never returned to work. At first Ella assumed it was because the mill did not have much use for a one-handed doffer, but other forces had come to bear. A trip to the doctor who’d tamped the bleeding and tossed the three fingers and sewn the hand shut had uncovered the fact that Giles was only twelve years old. The boy, who was clearly in shock, had told the doctor his correct age, to the great disappointment of the mother, who stood beside him and did her best to focus on the loss of her son’s blood and fingers instead of what the loss of his three dollars a week was going to mean to her and her husband and their brood of young children.
Ella had seen the boy twice since the incident. A few days later she passed Giles and his angry mother and father on their way out of the mill’s gate as she and Violet headed inside for the night shift. The dirty, frayed bandages that covered the boy’s hand had come untethered and were spotted with blood. Ella thought she saw blood on the fingers of his good hand too, but when she looked at his face she realized that what she’d mistaken for blood on his fingers was actually chocolate, the same chocolate that smeared his lips and cheek. Word later came through the mill that the boy’s parents had gone to Goldberg’s brother looking for some kind of settlement that would equal the loss of three fingers, but instead they’d been turned away with the offer of a chocolate bar wrapped in foil and a promise “to think on it for a few days.” According to Goldberg’s brother the mill had taken the word of the boy’s parents when they’d vouched for him being fourteen, even though one glance at Giles Corley would have revealed otherwise. The mill had been willing to look the other way, and now they refused to look back, and so it went. Nothing about that surprised Ella.
She saw Giles Corley again a few months later—much thinner and perhaps a little taller—when she turned a corner in downtown Bessemer City late one afternoon before her shift, and someone ran smack into her chest and knocked her down. She reached for the knife she kept folded in her pocket and lifted her face to confront the offender, but her eyes paused for a moment when they registered the boy’s mangled hand and missing fingers. He looked down at her with desperate, hungry eyes. He stuffed something into his pocket, stepped over her, and ran on down the alley. She turned and watched him go, his feet kicking up dust where the asphalt turned to gravel as he disappeared into one of the settlements that ringed the town.
Now, outside Goldberg’s brother’s office, Ella closed her eyes and crossed her ankles and leaned against the wall, the mill causing her body to vibrate so that her bones rattled beneath her skin. She considered how the only thing worse than stepping off the line was missing a shift, and that’s what she’d done last night, and she knew that that was why she was sitting where she was sitting now.
She’d spent almost all of last night on the porch with her three-year-old daughter, Rose, asleep in her arms, singing and humming all the songs she’d ever known until she had run out of songs and begun to make up new words to old melodies. The air had been chilly, but Rose’s body had burned like a cinder against Ella’s chest. Sweat had soaked through the girl’s bedshirt, but her coughing fits had finally given way to sleep.