Excerpt: Beyond the Blue

The four women in the small tenement flat on Caldrum Street are no different than the other women in the town: women left abandoned, forgotten, freed. They keep their anger and secrets close as bone. The scent of tea and smoke fills their lungs and infiltrates their dreams. To dream of smokestacks, to wake with the scent of ash in your hair.

Morag and Wallis walk across Caldrum Street and into the grounds of the Bowbridge Jute Works. Always, there is the camel with its hump, its downward gaze, its hard eyes: the suggestion of something exotic as they all slip into the dullness, the boiled-down necessity and daily cruelty of the Works.

This morning, Morag walks under the high arch with the large, gloomy camel and sags just a little. Another reminder for her that there is only this town, only the plethora of mills and smoke and women learning disappointment. Morag steels herself to another long day with the incessant noise, the looms that need constant tending, the sight of children working through the complicated territory of exhaustion.

Wallis says, "Another day."

Morag looks at her youngest daughter with a mix of recognition and shallow guilt. Wallis walking with her under the arch, into the fumes and danger of the Works. Morag feels she has failed; she never wished this fate on her children, but now, here Wallis is, stoic as ever, walking in her black boots into the grounds of the Bowbridge Works.

Morag and Wallis part ways quickly once they enter the grounds; Wallis turns toward the carding room, and Morag disappears into the weaving warehouse, where she will tend her two looms for the next fourteen hours. Wallis, however, will have a more difficult day; she will be bent over a carding machine where she will pull the loose fibre until the jute is an even colour. Morag imagines Wallis watching the jute fade in her hands until it is paler, even, than dreams.

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Excerpted from Beyond the Blue by Andrea MacPherson. Copyright 2007 by Andrea MacPherson. Excerpted by permission of Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.