the kitchen

Five in the morning, and the kitchen is already too warm. Violet Lapoint chips ice off the block for the tea. The iceman comes Tuesdays and Fridays. Her sister in Woonsocket has had an electric refrigerator since the war and never lets her forget it, but an icebox doesn't hum, and Violet likes to hear her house.

The house runs on a schedule she keeps in her head. Mr. Nowlin in from the dyehouse at a quarter past eleven, up the back stairs, and out the attic window onto the roof, where he thinks she doesn't know he goes. Miss Sewell's light on until one. Mr. Goin out at a quarter to one and back at two, wet to the knees, as if he had walked in the river. The college boy up early. The Borges girl up early and humming, or she was, until this week. Mr. Cauley in the cellar.

Friday is rent. Six envelopes on the hall table, and this week a seventh, with a three-cent stamp, addressed to Arizona.

the hall table

The hall table is walnut with a marble top and a brass tray for the outgoing mail, and at nine o'clock on Wednesday night Agnes Sewell stands in front of it with an envelope in her hand, for the fourth summer running.

It's addressed to the superintendent of schools in Tucson, Arizona. Inside is a letter of application, a list of her qualifications, and one sentence she has rewritten eleven times, about why a woman who has taught third grade in Harlow Falls for sixteen years would want to teach third grade anywhere else.

She puts it in the tray. She takes it out.

Beside the tray, somebody has left a small black notebook. She opens it without meaning to: columns of numbers, very neat, sevens crossed like a European's, and at the top of the first page, HARLOW FALLS WORSTED. She shuts it quickly, as though she had been caught reading somebody's letters.

She puts her envelope back in the tray. This time she leaves it, and goes upstairs before she can change her mind, and leaves the notebook where it lies.

the parlor

Mrs. Lapoint lets the roomers watch television in the parlor in the afternoons, which is how Timothy McNichols, home from the mill office at four, comes to be sitting on the horsehair sofa beside Irene Borges, watching teenagers in Philadelphia dance. The program is new this month. It's on every afternoon now, and the whole country, apparently, is watching. Irene knows the steps already. She does them with her hands in her lap.

Timothy has a carbon copy of a letter in his room, under a book he isn't reading, and it says that the looms of the Harlow Falls Worsted Company will be sold to a firm in South Carolina after Christmas, and that certain skilled men may be offered places there. He typed it himself. He knows who Charlie Doud is.

He opens his mouth, and Irene says, "Oh, look at her skirt," and he closes it again.

Later he'll wish he had told her. Or he'll be glad he didn't. That depends, he thinks, on what Charlie says on the porch.

the porch

The porch swing creaks on the up-stroke and not on the down, and Irene has learned to time her words to the quiet half. Charlie Doud is beside her with his tie loosened and his jacket over the rail, and the falls are loud tonight, because the mill let water through the gates at sundown.

"They asked me to go south," Charlie says. "With the looms."

So now she knows what the timetable was. She found it on Saturday and has been waiting four days for him to tell her, and now that he has, she finds she doesn't know what she was waiting to say.

"All of them? All the looms?"

"All of them. After Christmas."

She thinks of her mother, who has woven in that mill since she was fourteen. She thinks of the river, and the Holy Ghost feast every summer, and the bakery on Water Street that makes sweet bread at Easter. She thinks of a place called Spartanburg, which she can't picture at all, except hot.

Above the back ell, a cigarette glows on the roof and goes out. Upstairs, a curtain moves in Miss Sewell's window. Irene puts her hand over Charlie's and doesn't answer yet, and the swing creaks on the up-stroke.