The boy tried to open the mill door with one hand, but it was oaken and heavy. He leaned his small frame against a panel so worn by decades of hands that the grain felt like rough pine-bark against his shoulder. When it eased open, sound hurled itself at him like a tossed bomb. Spindles clacked, weaving frames banged, leather belts slapped, bobbins whirred, and overall a steady roar of machinery and shouted human voices. His grandfather had once taken him through the mill, shouting out the process from raw cotton to woven cloth, naming each machine and each of its parts, ending in the weaving room, where he was a floor boss. The boy had made up a little verse to remember them:

All these strange things
What are their names?
Spindles and bobbins
Shuttles and frames.

There were spools too but the only rhyme he could think of was "fools."

He entered the picking room where the cotton bales were unpacked and the seeds and husks removed. The cleaned bolls were sent to the carding room, where they were scraped and teased into a crude thread. He hated this room the most: The dead smell of extinguished fire hung over it, and white lint filled the air, settling on girls barely tall enough to tend the carders. They stood in a line before their machines, white figures repeating in a fog. They look like Halloween ghosts, he thought. He covered his mouth and nose with one hand, plunged past coughing girls into the spinning room where the rough thread was made into strands, six strands twisted together and the whole wound onto spindles, ready for the dye shop. To watch one spinning machine was dizzying. Trying to take them all in, he could not move for a long minute, then sidled along the wall. The air was clearer here but it still took a minute or two before he could draw a full breath. He paused at the entrance to the dye shop, knowing that he would have to pass through a band of hot air from the boilers that made the steam to power the mill and which would steal his breath again.

He slipped through, not breathing, past the dye works with their great vats of dye in every color, yarns running through them dripping rainbows, the odor pungent and acrid. He felt squeezed as if the heat and smell were pushing him, while the sound of the weaving room ahead held him back. He entered the vast weaving room and saw his grandfather at the far end, talking, or rather shouting at one of the girls, for the noise was thunder-loud. The girl responded only with gestures, pointing to something in her machine and making circular motions with her hands. He began to thread his way through the narrow aisle between the weaving machines. Bobbins flashed through the looms at dizzying speed clacking as each in turn reversed at end of the shuttle, one color, then another. And over everything, the noise. No wonder his grandfather was deaf.

The sudden light from the door drew the old man's attention. He looked down the long, narrow room, across the clacking spindles, the slamming shuttles, past the girls waiting to snatch away an empty bobbin and replace it with a full one and tie the ends together, hoping not to lose a finger in the process, to the boy entering. He saw the boy hesitate, open-mouthed before venturing farther into the room. "Probably the smell from the dye vats bothers him," he thought. He had not heard the noise for decades.