Author’s note: In the old mill where we now live, I often wonder about the generations of people who worked here, laboring in difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions. From old men and women, stooped with age from the backbreaking work, to the young child laborers, what would they think of our world today and the changes that have happened in a place where they spent so much of their time on this planet?

This is a short story from an upcoming collection of stories.

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They come back on the night the nor’easter turns the Warren River the color of old iron, when the wind pushes against the brick walls the way it always did—the way it did when Elias Pomeroy was still alive, and the building smelled of machine oil and cotton dust and the sweat of three hundred bodies bent over their work.

Elias comes first, as he always does. He was the night foreman in 1863, and old habits hold even after a century and a half. He climbs the stairs; he knew when they were raw pine, unvarnished, and worn smooth in the center by boots—the same stairs the developers later refinished with that dingy green lacquer that makes them look, to him, like something pulled from a department store catalog. He does not mind. He has seen worse.

Tonight, he stands in the hallway of what used to be the spinning floor and is now six apartments, their doors numbered in cast brass, their walls exposed brick, which the real estate people charge extra for. The brick was covered in whitewash in his time, to brighten the room and to hide the stains. Now the grown men and women who live here pay a premium for the stains to be visible.

Elias has a dry sense of humor about this. In life, he did too.

Behind him the others arrive—Mary Donoghue, who came from County Cork in 1851 and was at the ring frames until her lungs gave out at twenty-nine; Antoine Boudreau, who traveled down from Quebec with nothing but a sack and a prayer book and fell into a loom in his third month; and little Jonas Smith, who never saw his eleventh birthday and still wanders the building with the slightly distracted air of a boy who thinks his mother is about to call him for supper.

There are others. There are always others. The mill took what it needed.

They gather, as they do, in the corner apartment on the top floor—formerly the room where the bobbin boys slept four to a cot during the long summer runs. A young woman lives there now. Her name is Priya. She is twenty-seven, a nurse at the hospital in Providence, and she came to Warren because the rent in Boston was absurd and a friend told her about the lofts.

She is on the couch with her laptop open, eating something from a paper carton with chopsticks, and has no idea she is being watched, or is it protected?

“She works the nights,” Mary says. Mary’s voice still has the music of Cork in it, softened by a century of not being used for anything but this. “Same as us.”

“Different kind of work,” Elias says.

“Is it?”

Elias considers. He watched Priya come home at three in the morning last Tuesday, her shoulders low, her face that particular gray of someone who has been standing under fluorescent light for fourteen hours. He watched her drop her keys on the counter and just stand there for a full minute, staring at nothing. He remembers that posture. He remembers it exactly.

“No,” he says. “I suppose not.”

Antoine drifts toward the tall windows. In his time, the glass was smaller, set in iron frames, smeared with the residue of the river and the smoke of the coal fires that ran the engines. Now the panes are enormous, clear as still water, and through them he can see the Warren River moving its dark bulk toward the bay. The view used to be of barges, the wharves, and the coal yard. Now there is a kayak rental place, a coffee shop, and a brewery where the ropewalks used to be.

“They drink beer where the hemp was twisted,” he says. He is smiling. Antoine, in life, was not a man who smiled often. Death has loosened something in him.

“They make it there,” Mary corrects. “They pay ten dollars a glass. I watched a man order four.”

“Four,” says Elias.

“Four.”

Elias shakes his head. In 1863, a pint cost three cents at Murphy’s on Main Street, and he would not have been able to afford one if he had not been a foreman.

—–

On the second floor, a couple is arguing. The ghosts do not go in—they have rules about this, unspoken but observed — but they can feel it the way the old timbers feel it, a vibration running up through the floors. Jonas sits on the hallway runner with his legs crossed and listens with a face like a small, sad moon.

“She’s going to leave him,” Jonas says. He is eleven. He has been eleven for one hundred and sixty-two years. He is, in some ways, very perceptive, and in other ways, still a child.

“Maybe,” Mary says. She settles next to him. She can still do that after all this time—sit down with a frightened child and make herself small and warm even though she has no warmth to give. “Maybe she’ll stay. Some do.”

“Da left.”

“I know, lamb.”

“And Ma cried.”

“I know.”

Jonas leans his head against the wall that used to be a support beam in the carding room. Through it, faintly, the woman on the second floor is crying now. The man is silent, which is sometimes worse. Mary has heard both kinds. She knows.

—–

They do not haunt, exactly. That is not the word for it. They watch. They are witnesses.

Elias has thought about this a great deal in the long gray tide of years. He has decided that what they do is something like what the old people in the villages did, back in Ireland and Quebec and the hill towns of Massachusetts — the grandmothers and great-uncles who sat in their chairs by the fire and paid attention. Who saw. Who held, in their memory, the shape of what a family was, what a town was, what a life was supposed to look like. Someone had to hold it. Someone had to remember.

No one remembered *them*, he thinks, not for long. The mill records burned in 1889. The gravestones in the paupers’ field at the north end of town have worn blank. The town historian mentions the mill in her book, but not the people in it—not Elias, not Mary, not Antoine, not Jonas, not the hundred others who made the cloth that made the money that made the brick that still stands. The brick is their monument. The brick and the river and this watching.

So they watch.

They watch Priya fall asleep with the laptop still open, and Mary drifts close enough to see that she has been looking at apartment listings in Providence, closer to the hospital. Mary hopes she finds what she is looking for. Mary hopes she finds more than that.

They watch a man in a small unit on the third floor, a retired schoolteacher, sit at his kitchen table with a glass of red wine and a photograph of a woman who has been dead eleven years. He does this every Thursday. Antoine stands with him sometimes, in silence, because silence is a language Antoine has always been good at.

They watch the young couple in the penthouse bring home a baby in a car seat. The baby is three days old. The mother is terrified. The father is terrified. They set the car seat on the kitchen island and stare at it as if it might bite them. Mary laughs—a real laugh, the first one in weeks—and the baby, unaccountably, turns its head toward the sound.

Mary loves that. She loves that the babies still hear.

—–

Near dawn, when the nor’easter has spent itself and the sky over the Warren River is the color of bruised pearl, they gather again on the roof.

“It’s changed,” Antoine says.

“Everything changes,” Elias says.

“Not the river.”

“The river most of all. You just can’t see it.”

They stand in a loose row. Beneath their feet, the building hums with the small sounds of a hundred sleeping lives — the refrigerators, the heat pumps, the soft clicks of a dog’s nails on hardwood, the breathing of people who believe, as people always believe, that they are the first to live here.

Elias feels the old pull—the pull of wherever it is he goes when he is not here. He does not know what to call it. Not heaven. Not the other thing. Something quieter. Something that waits.

“Same time next storm?” Mary says.

“Same time,” he says.

Jonas has already faded. He fades first, always, the way children do—sudden, mid-thought, gone between one breath and the next. Antoine goes with a small nod toward the river.

Mary lingers. She always lingers.

“The nurse,” she says. “Priya.”

“What about her?”

“I hope she stays.”

Elias looks down through the roof, through the old timbers and the new drywall, to where the young woman is sleeping on the couch with the carton of noodles going cold on the coffee table.

“Mary,” he says, “I hope they all stay.”

And then the light comes up over the bay, and the mill is only a mill again—brick and glass and the smell of someone’s coffee rising through the floors—and the watchers are gone, and the river, as always, goes on.