Chapter 17: The Mill Floor

The mill yard was full of men by the time the sheriff's car stopped.

They had come in from the night shift and the day shift both, sixty or seventy of them, and none of them were working.

A column of black smoke stood over a steel drum by the loading dock.

Two men were pouring buckets into it from the log pond.

"He's in the office," said the big man with the cap, the one who had stood up in the courtroom. "We locked the door from the outside."

"You locked the door?" the sheriff said.

"Fire hazard, sheriff. He was going to burn the place."

The sheriff rubbed his eyes.

"I'm not going to write that down."

I got out of the car on my own.

I took the cane in my right hand, and I did not wait for Jonas.

The crowd opened for me without being asked.

It was the same walk I had made through the courthouse, and it was shorter, and it hurt less.

Somewhere behind me, I heard Janet say, "Give her room."

Ernest's office was a glass box over the mill floor, with a metal stair up to it.

I climbed those stairs one at a time with my hand on the rail.

Through the glass I could see my father standing behind his desk with a cardboard box at his feet, full of ledgers.

A lighter was shaking in his hand.

He saw me, and he saw the men crowding the stair behind me, and he put the lighter down on the blotter very slowly.

The big man turned the key.

I stepped inside.

"Mara," my father said. "Honey. Thank God."

"Don't."

"They've been holding me in here. They're a mob."

"They're your employees, Dad."

He wiped his face.

"I was cleaning out my desk," he said. "I've been told I may be arrested. I'm entitled to clean out my desk."

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