Immigrants and steel tell the story of Pittsburgh in the late 19th century, a time when Eastern Europeans were pouring into Western Pennsylvania. It's the debut novel by Kristin Bair O'Keeffe, 43, a Bethel Park native who lives in Shanghai with her husband and daughter. Her maternal grandfather and two great-uncles were Croatian immigrants who worked in U.S. Steel's Clairton Works.

Starting Sept. 7, you can read the remaining chapters of "Thirsty" at PG Plus the Post-Gazette's new premium Web site.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, at a time when a stout rotten-egg stench billowed up out of the steel mills and coated the earth, sinking fingers and toes into skinny places between houses, Thirsty was carved into the steep slopes above the Monongahela River. It was just outside the city of Pittsburgh in the southwest corner of Pennsylvania, and although on the map, the town was called Pleasant Slopes, its residents--mostly immigrants from eastern and southern Europe--called it Thirsty.

While most mill towns were perched on sheer slopes, Thirsty was built on a terrace, with several hundred acres of scruffy farmland surrounding it. One precipitous, winding road connected it to the river valley below, but because gravel, mud, waste, and discarded odds and ends often washed down the hill during rainstorms and gathered in unmanageable piles in the crooks and coils of the snaking road, men heading to and from their shifts in the mills chose to trample footpaths through the dense forest of straight-backed pines and leafy maples.

Not many outsiders had cause to visit Thirsty back then, but every ten years a neatly pressed census-taker from the government bureau would climb the hill for a head count, trying to figure how many lost and how many gained. When he finally made it to Thirsty, sweat-soaked and panting, he always glimpsed a few pale-skinned, dark-browed Croat women huddled on a stoop, brooms gripped in raw-knuckled hands, babies cradled on their hips. He would stand there, on the edge of their lives, shifting his weight from one foot to the other while soot gathered in the folds of his shirt and smeared his spit-shined shoes. And the women, who rarely saw the cut of a man's face in the daylight unless he was crawling from bed for the next shift or stumbling from the chilled darkness of Penny's Saloon, would cock their heads and squint their eyes, trying to place him in their world. They would wonder over him, this short-winded, sugar-bellied man who bore no resemblance to their own lean-muscled, taut-jawed men who stood with their weight planted evenly on both feet. But even so, they always smiled and opened their circle to him. And he, mistakenly thinking them not so different from his own wife and her hen friends on the stoop of their cool valley home, missed the gravity lining their smiles. He missed the longing in their eyes, not knowing which had lost their husbands in mill accidents and which wished they had.

On the backs of these solid-footed men, steel magnates had built up their mills until they stretched like great fire-breathing dragons along the banks of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, all the way to the point where the two meet to form the Ohio, and beyond. The platforms and furnaces, ladders and ladles, railroad tracks, sheds, columns, and smokestacks were strung together like the bones of a massive metal skeleton. In these places, the air boiled, heavy with soot. Flames lapped, sparks skittered, and a single dissonant note was drawn out over space and time. It spread between the banks of the rivers--the clanging of metal on metal, the slur of shovel-heads into slag, the screech of train cars pulling in and out, the grind of wheelbarrows, saws, and chains--sound that shook the earth from water's edge to highest peak.

Intoxicated by the exchange of hot metal for money, mill owners ignored the filthy falling-down towns that littered the mountainside like abandoned bird nests. They settled their own families in the gently sloping valleys where water was easily pumped from fresh springs to fill their bathtubs and porcelains pitchers, while mill families had barely enough water to boil an egg. Back then, the City Council Water Commission laid pipe according to how much potential tax revenue the residents of any given town offered, so it wasn't until well after the turn of the twentieth century that ditches were dug for pipes and pumps in Thirsty. Each morning, until that time, as the sun crept unwillingly into the yellow marbled sky, the women trudged to the pump at the base of the steepest hill and lugged buckets of water, slung on yokes over their shoulders, back to their kitchens and alleyways.

The Bozics' house was plain. A squat, gray box in a line of squat, gray boxes, houses built out of necessity, not love. But despite its shape and color, Klara saw that the house had potential. There was a kitchen, a living and dining area with a large fireplace, and three small rooms upstairs for sleeping. There was even a cellar and a small crawlspace above the second floor for storage. Katherine and Jake's house was on one side, so close the women could pass a cup of polenta from kitchen window to kitchen window. On the other side and behind were a garden and a small copse of fruit trees. While Drago and Jake unpacked, Katherine pointed to the house across the way, a ramshackle shed with planks patched over holes and a leaning roofline.

"That's Tiny's house," she said. "He's been a bitter, coarse man since his wife died ten years back. Stay clear of him."

The new house was much larger than the one Klara had grown up in, but since the last tenants had packed their belongings and left the house clean and bare, it didn't have the markings of a home yet. That will come, Klara thought, and in spite of her trepidations, she considered her blessings. She would no longer have six brothers sleeping in the room next door; the garden offered promise with hard work; and already she'd made a friend.

As she walked up the stairs for the first time, Klara noted the creak on the third step. She thought about Drago's behavior in the wagon when she cried. Any tenderness he'd shown throughout their brief time together in Croatia and on the boat had nearly disappeared. She was looking out the window in the second bedroom when she realized she'd married a man just like her father, and just like her father, she'd have to watch Drago now. She would have to be on guard. Though she'd come into this marriage wide open, already she found herself closing slowly, like a honeysuckle bloom in the afternoon sun.