Doma Reel didn’t climb onto the staging cart with haste. She placed her right boot on the iron hub of the front wheel, tested the timber spoke with her full weight. Then she drew herself up onto the oak floorboards with the steady balance of someone who had carried fifty-pound sacks of dry peas across slick kitchen flags for forty years.
She was fifty-eight years old. Her woolen skirt was stiffened with dried turnip starch and grease from the communal cooking pots. Her gray hair was pinned back with two flat iron skewers she had ground down from tram brake-pins. Her knuckles were swollen with the chronic bitter salt rheumatism that afflicted every woman who washed linen in the drainage water chutes. But her grip on the iron cart support post was firm. She reached the center of the tailboard. Then, she untied the strings of her stained work apron, folded the heavy canvas twice, and laid it neatly over the zinc file box that held the nursery registers.
The five hundred men and women in the square watched her hands. In the Tram Ward, Chancellor Morn was an abstract name written at the bottom of ration cards. Magistrate Pell was a smell of dried lemon peel in an upholstered carriage that rattled past the coal sidings once a month. But Doma Reel was the woman who decided whether a driller’s widow received four ounces of salt pork or half a cup of boiled barley. Just then, the freight cars…
