Wallis pulls at the thick, dull jute, lets it fall into the large barrels. The rollers revolve at various speeds, fleecing the jute with metal pins before it is condensed into the fibre they call silver. Silver, as if there might be something beautiful, something breathtaking about it all. Instead, there is this: women crammed into small, close rooms; heat, dust and fumes of grease and oil; noisy machinery that makes ears ache and heads throb with the constant whir and din.
Wallis looks down the row of girls at their carding machines, each surrounded by barrels quickly filling with the silver; she has learned enough about them in her years at the Works to feel that she knows each of them as she might know a friend, a sister. Lottie Duncan with her three small children and absent husband; Elsie McRae with her hard, difficult mother and her ailing grandmother; Jean Grant, another young Union member; Mae Abernathy with her lost fiancée, her unending, unflinching hope. Wallis does not need to be clairvoyant to know how all their lives will end. They will stay, work, and find themselves slowly, painfully dying from bronchitis, pneumonia or some other respiratory disease. She holds a hand to her chest, as if she might be able to feel the rumblings of disease there. Mill fever.
God help me.
Wallis tugs at the jute and lets it fall through her fingers. The jute might be something else, something kind and lovely, if she were only able to shut herself off to the carding room, the gossip between the women around her, the whine of the machines.
From the hardcover edition.
Page 3 of 3
Read an excerpt from the novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.
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.
