Mrs. Riley - now what a story that was! She's dead now, so's all her folks, so it doesn't matter it's told. I think it's only right that I do tell it.

You know, I cannot imagine a father expecting his little girl to keep a secret like that for all those years. Nor, for that matter, his daddy forcing it on him, either. Changed the whole face of a town, that secret. I'm surprised some of the hotheaded boys from The Corners, didn't burn the Riley's place down. Though, maybe they tried, and I didn't hear.

Tansey Riley lived in an old white wooden farmhouse out on the edge of town. You know, where the old stone walls of the factory lie to this day, right before where the Krumps' fields began. It set up on a bit of a rise, and from the front porch, you could see most everything that was going on in town - from whose car was parked at the church, to whose wagon was hitched behind what barn.

The house had been in Tansey's family for a hundred years or so, but everyone in town started calling it the Riley place as soon as she married Mr. Edmond Riley. Maybe giving it an Irish-sounding name was a bit of atonement for the sins of the town. Yes, I believe the whole town sinned, not just Tansey Riley's family.

Prejudice was alive and well in our little town, just like it is in all small towns.  Big cities too, I suppose, but it's more pronounced in small towns, because you can't really get away from it. A small town like ours is closed in on itself, for all that the main state highway runs straight through the center of it. Folks tend to  stick to their own, and see all outsiders, or those who believe differently with suspicion. They're born, live, marry and die, all with people who are familiar, and those that aren't, scare them. If you're a thinkin' person at all, you know that as well as I.

So it was with our place. No different than anywhere else, though we weren't guilty of the prejudices you might be thinkin' on. In our case, most of us had never seen a person of color - negros, or blacks, or whatever your preference of names. There just weren't any in our part of the country. There are other kinds of prejudices you know, and they run just as deep as the ones that have branded the South for these past few hundred years.  Now, keep in mind, while I'm telling you this, that I'm just doing the tellin', not the hatin'.

Our little town was a Presbyterian town, you see, with a few Lutherans thrown in just for spice. What "we" hated you see, was Catholics. I was never sure what prompted that hatred, other than the usual religious nonsense. Most likely the usual "baby eating" hoo-haw  that folks always try to lay at the feet of "the others."

By extension, since "we" hated Catholics, the Irish weren't much in favor in our town. The jobs they were able to get were mostly helping to build the part of the highway that passed a stone's throw from The Corners. That's how The Corners came to be, come to think of it. It was where the Irish lived, and where they went home to die.

All except those that worked in Tansey Riley's daddy's factory.

Well, obviously I can't keep calling the man "Tansey Riley's daddy", though that's a more comfortable name, since most good folks here can barely abide hearing his true name. You know how names like "Adolph" come to be reviled all because of one bad apple that bear them with no pride? So too, in our town, became the name "Warner". That was Tansey's grandaddy: Warner Cooper. That was her daddy's name too, Warner Allen Cooper II, to give it in full.

Warner Cooper the elder came here as a youngster. His parents were said to have grown up in a big eastern city, though if I ever heard which one, the memory is gone now. They bought a large spread of land from a German family that had decided to go back to their homeland, having decided that homesteading just wasn't for them. Bought it for pretty cheap too, I imagine, times being what they were. Some say, the old man was even meaner than his son, and that he bullied them into selling. I don't know the right of that, so I couldn't really say.

Warner Cooper (despite his name) was in the clothing business, I guess you'd say. He started off selling dry goods from a small storefront over on Second Street in town, and as business eventually grew, his ambitions grew with it. Since we had the railway stop here then, and the main road was fairly straight and true, transporting goods, even though we were far from any seaport, was relatively cheap. So was importing labor, for that matter.

For some folks, when labor is cheap, the lives that labor represent are also held cheaply. That was Warner Cooper's greatest sin,  the fact that he respected and held dear no one who worked for him, especially anyone who paid homage to "that devil-spawn in Rome."  Devil-spawn is a good name, but not for the man in Rome; better for the man that lived right here amongst us. Well, his greatest sin in the beginning, anyway.

The dry goods business was good, and Warner Cooper decided he could make more money if he was controlling the makin' of the things he was selling, rather than having to pay the wholesalers. With the new highway going in, and more and more Irish families coming into the area to work it, there was ready labor available, folks eager for work. Not just the men, but the women and the children too. Now, remember, that back in those days, children going to work wasn't unheard of, it wasn't even all that unusual. Kids worked on farms in the country, and in factories, street corners, and in sweat shops all over this country. It was just the way of things for some. Still is, if you think about the migrant farm families that to this day work the fields in California and out west. But that's not what I'm here to tell you about, so I'll get on with things.

Warner Cooper hired the wives and children of the Irish, for the most part, though there were some other folks as well. A few Jews, some Poles, as well as folks just plain down on their luck, and unable to make a go of their farms. A job at Coopers', was food on the table, mealy though it might be. The women and girls were put to work, embroidering, tatting, and painting fabrics for Warner. They made lace there, too, expensive as all get-out, because there were only a few of the women that brought that skill with them, and it took years to teach. The boys ran the dye vats, the little ones sweeping up, the bigger ones handling the more dangerous machinery.

That factory hadn't been in place 5 years before the rumors started.