Carolina Mill, 1932

IN THE SPRING OF 1932, when I was twelve years old — the last year of my childhood, as I understood it — my grandfather left the farm and came to live with us. His wife, my mother’s mother, had just died, and he could no longer get loans to keep the farm going. My father had already given up farming a few years earlier, and we were living in the village outside the Bell cotton mill.

Working in the mill proved hard on my grandfather, who had spent his entire life in the fields. He came home coughing from his first day of breathing lint, and he would cough through the night. He and my older brother Quinn and I slept in the living room of our house on Harvey Lane, though I was the only one who actually got any sleep. Quinn was courting a girl in town and stayed out until all hours, and my grandfather never really went to sleep anymore. He went to rest, he said, and that only if he was lucky. Cut from an ancient mold, conceived on a Confederate battlefield, he could handle sleeping on a rough mattress in a crowded room, but he was seventy years old. There came a time for any man, and his time was here.

The mill village was in upstate South Carolina. Springs Industries operated mills across both Carolinas, offering families like mine steady employment in a time when drought and heavy mortgages were breaking the backs of farmers, many of whom traded an uncertain, hardscrabble life for a guaranteed weekly paycheck and the clatter and clank of the machines. A brick wall surrounded the cotton mill, which could have been a prison or a large church without a steeple. Rising up on either side, two smokestacks coughed black into the blue summer sky. The houses in the village lay close together in rows, like stalks of corn, and were all of the same design: white bungalows with small, fenced-in backyards, clotheslines, and tiny gardens of tomatoes, squash, and bell peppers.

One Sunday in the middle of June, Quinn and I were working in the garden with our father, staking up the tomato plants, which were beginning to sprawl like wild vines. Daddy had been raised on a farm and had a way with growing things that I would never have. Quinn labored beside him, his arms thick and muscular from operating machines full time in the mill. I worked there only in the summer. At twelve I was still a gangly boy with freckles and a willingness to believe anything anyone told me. Once, when I was very young, I’d taken seriously my mother’s command that I wash off all of the dirt when I bathed. I scrubbed vigorously, trying to make my sun-tanned arms as white as my thighs. When I confessed to Quinn that I couldn’t get my arms clean, he played along and told me our mother would switch me good if she saw the “dirt.” I spent the next two days walking around with my arms held behind me.

Today I hung back while Quinn and our father did most of the work. “Willie,” Daddy said to me, “why don’t you get us some water?”

I slunk to the kitchen and looked for a pitcher and three glasses. Then I overheard my grandfather in the living room say, “I’m ok.”

Momma took in her breath. “What happened?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I was here, and then I felt dizzy, and then you were here.”

“You ought to take a day off.”

“I can’t.” He let out a loose, wet cough, as if he had gravel in his chest. “I can’t,” he said again.

“Daddy, you’re killing yourself.”

“I’m already worn out. Best not tell Joe. You know how he gets.” Joe was my father.

I tried to sneak back outside, but my foot caught on one of the chairs, and the leg scraped across the floor. My mother came in and saw me.

“Come here for a minute,” she said. “It’s all right.”

She led me into the living room, where my grandfather sat on the bed. “Hey, boy,” he said, and Momma put her arm around me. Her gingham dress was damp with sweat. I was nearly as tall as she was, and I realized she hadn’t held me close that way in a long time.

“Willie,” she said, “your grandfather just fainted, but he’s all right. You can’t mention this to anyone, not even Quinn.”

“Why?”

“Because if someone thinks your grandfather is ill, he’ll have to quit work. Your father and Quinn, they both work so hard, and they’ve got a lot on their minds without having to worry about your grandfather.” She released me and put her face up to mine. Her eyes were a washed-out blue, and her cheeks were slim and taut and unforgiving. The weight of this secret felt like no trouble I’d ever been in before. All I’d come in for was some water.

“Promise me, Willie?”

“OK,” I said, and it was like a curtain fell between us. She returned to my grandfather, and I returned to the garden, empty-handed.

“Did you get the water?” Daddy asked.

“I forgot.”

As if reading my thoughts, he said, “Everything all right in there?”

“Yessir.”

“Look at me, Son. Is something wrong? Is your granddad all right?”

“He’s fine,” I said, because to tell the truth felt on the level of a sin. Honor thy father and thy mother, the commandment said, but it didn’t say what to do when honoring one meant dishonoring the other.

My father squinted at me.

“I’ll get the water,” I said, and I ran back to the kitchen.

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