Set in the gloomy depths of the granite-block textile mills of the industrial Northeast, Warp & Weft illuminates the lives of three generations of men who toil together. Carey, the leader of the small crew who load and unload the endless procession of trucks at the Chace Mill, worries about his wife’s illness and tries to distract himself by pouring all his hopes into the fortunes of the mill’s ragtag softball team; his wife, Joyce, finds herself facing the void more and more on her own. Dominic, the new hire who quit high school and arrived at the mill on his sixteenth birthday, tries to free himself from the inexplicable disapproval of his father, who was paralyzed years before when he, too, worked in the mills, and who has extolled his life of honest work he lost. Bento, who immigrated mid-life, worries about the decline of the strength he so proudly possessed, but fends off his wife’s pleadings to move back to the old country before they die—she has become determined to not be buried in a place that never stopped being foreign from her beloved islands. As the summer of 1978 wears on, each man finds himself in more untenable struggle with gathering events, and with each other. Each will see his life changed, the interlocked threads of life’s fabric in a world of unrelenting work and scarce circumstance.
