Soon, the moment ended. Bertie moved along. Charles Tuttle posed for some photographs in front of the bricked furnace, in front of the giant conveyor motor that resembled a whiskey barrel, in front ofthe rubber pullies that stretched to the machines that hung tenuously from the rafters. Finally, Tuttle led the newspaper man toward the narrow back hallway and into the mixing room with the large vats the more senior girls stirred with paddles.
Bertie wove herself in that direction, strolling with her arms behind her back, like one does at a museum to convey she has no intention of touching. For seventy-five years the factory had belonged to her family, and had she been born a boy, the factory would have belonged to her, too, her destiny thwarted the instant the midwife checked between her legs.
Bertie stopped near one of the windows and tried to open it, but the glass had been painted shut. From where she stood, Opal knew she could see the entire basin. The city squeezed itself between the Ohio River and the hills that sat above it like a shelf. Porkopolis, the city had been nicknamed long ago. Cincinnati was famous for its hills, for its pigs, for its steamboats and carriage manufacturers and breweries. It was a thick-aired, industrious city, a welcoming one, full of merchants and immigrants, full of people with dreams of new lives. People like Opal herself.
“Ladies,” Bertie said. She turned from the window to face the factory floor. She fanned herself with a gloved hand because the air was hot as summer, though it was only the first day of February. Fans overhead accomplished little but plowing heat from one side of the room to another. “My father considered himself a supporter of…” She trailed off. Something in her startled. She gazed to her left, to where a row of small boilers lined the wall.
That’s when that sound entered Opal’s field of awareness again. Tick. Tick. Tick. The metronome changed speed, increasing in tempo and volume, and she finally recognized what she was hearing: not a jammed machine or a pipe being repaired. No, a boiler on the verge of overheating.
The foreman recognized this, too. He sounded his buzzer. “Back,” he yelled into his megaphone. “Everyone, back. Now!”
The explosion itself was small. Still, the force of it knocked Opal to the ground and dislodged the fan from the rafters until it hung by a single wire. She placed her hands protectively over her stomach. The machinery came to a sudden halt, and the factory was quiet for a moment, so quiet Opal could hear her own breathing.
Then, chaos.
Some women fled toward the exit door—the one that was usually left propped open because it locked from the outside—but it was shut. Next, the panicked pounding of fists on the windows, and when that didn’t work, some began hurling soap cakes against the glass to break it. The fire grew teethy orange, then another small explosion. The foreman pleaded for calm before he and a group of machinists created an assembly line of water buckets. It took only a few minutes for the men to put out the fire.
After the flames were safely extinguished, Charles Tuttle ran onto the floor, followed by the newspaper man whose camera smoke did little to bring comfort to the scene.
“Darling, I thought you were behind me,” Tuttle said to his wife. From the way he saiddarling, one would not suspect he was the kind of man capable of an affair like Dixie had been reporting, but some men are like that: the more outwardly amorous they appear, the more likely they are to be hiding poor behavior. Jagr had been that way, too, always touching Opal in public, always staking his claim. Opal leaned against her station to steady herself. She hugged her middle. She was okay.
Bertie sat on the floor, her back to the wall, her knees tucked up to her chin. Her husband held out his hand. She stood and dusted her skirt. “I’m fine,” she said, and then to the newspaper man: “My father used to inspect the machinery himself. Weekly.”
“Broken gauge, I suspect,” the foreman said. “More bang than flash, luckily. I’ll see to its repair.” He cleared his throat.
“Does this happen frequently?” the newspaper man asked. He held his pencil to his notebook.
Tuttle took him by the elbow and directed him toward the exit. Henodded to the window that’d been shattered, introducing cool air to the factory for the first time in years. “Modern-day air-conditioning,” he said. Then he slapped the newspaper man’s back and ushered him out before any more photographs could be taken.
The foreman called for an early dismissal.
Shaken, Opal collected her lunch pail, and that’s when she heard the whimpering. It was Betsy, the girl who normally sat two stations away. Her whole body was a tight tendril folded in on itself. She writhed on the ground, moaning.
Maria squatted next to her and helped her to sit. Betsy’s breathing was ragged. A burn braised her arm.
“She needs a doctor!” Maria yelled.
“No—my husband would kill me,” Betsy said. Like the rest of them, she probably couldn’t afford one. She had dark hair cut bluntly across her forehead and the tips of her teeth were browned like cotton balls dipped in cod oil. Opal had heard a rumor that Betsy had once gotten pregnant by a soldier who’d fought in the Boxer Rebellion, but she’d never spoke of that child, and now she was newly married and pregnant.
She curled her body over her wound again. She whimpered, and Opal couldn’t bear it, the sound of the girl in pain when she knew she could do something to help. From Jagr, Opal had gained some training: She could dry herbs and seeds, and decoct leaves to extract their oils. She could measure milk of licorice or baking soda on the balance scale and add it to the powders he’d compounded. On a few occasions, she assisted him with emergency procedures—farm accidents, hunting wounds—threading catgut sutures like shoelaces.
She found a mason jar and gathered some ash from one of the stoves. From a barrel she poured some lard, then added sawdust from the woodpile. Opal reached down her dress and unraveled the bandage from around her breasts, which released them with an ache. Then she knelt beside Betsy.
By now, the wound was white as bone and angry around the edges.
“I shouldn’t have been standing so close,” said Betsy. “I should have noticed.”
“It’s the boiler’s fault,” said Maria, who knelt behind Opal.
“It’s Tuttle’s fault,” said another worker, and several others nodded in agreement.
Opal took Betsy’s arm. She applied the poultice with a gentle touch, then she wrapped the bandage as she’d seen Jagr do: twice around the wound, then spiraling up and down the arm to secure it.
“Are you a nurse?” Betsy asked.
Opal shook her head.
“A midwife?” Maria asked.
