Counting on Grace (10 page)

Nobody speaks. Then Mamère nods to Henry to pick up the spoon. She pulls herself to her feet, takes it from him and heads over to the bed to feed Pépé. Before she can get to him, he throws the bowl. It hits my mother square in the chest and bounces off her onto the floor. Her arm rises up automatically the way it does when she's reaching for the shipper handle and before she can stop herself, it swings across and smacks my grandfather full in the face. The sound of her flat hand against Pépé's old cheekbones makes a noise in the room like a bullet.

Papa pulls Mamère away and goes to comfort my grandfather. Delia dabs at the gravy stains on my mother's skirts, but Mamère don't seem to notice. She is staring off at some distant place, swaying a little. I squat down to mop up the spilled soup.

“Maybe Pépé should go back to Canada,” I say to myself. I'm so tired that my voice slurs around and I expect nobody is really listening in the commotion. “He would be happier then and we could be eating this food, not wiping it off the floor.”

Mamère cuffs me on the top of my head and the blow is hard enough to snap my neck back. I go still.

“And maybe you could learn your job,
mademoiselle
, instead of thinking you're quick or smart enough to do mine.
And then we would have food to eat and shoes for your brother and all the sausage Pépé deserves.”

Everything is my fault. I'm the slow doffer and the one who made Pépé throw his bowl, which made her slap him. I'm more trouble than I'm worth. Maybe that sickly sister of mine should have lived. Maybe she would have turned out better than me. A bubble of fury rises up inside me at the idea, but for once, I know enough to lock my lips together. Seems whenever I talk I get myself in trouble.

I squeeze the soup-gravy rag into the sink and slide back into my own chair. The soup is cold now and hard to swallow, but I force it down. If I don't eat, I won't sleep. And if I don't sleep, I won't doff no better in the morning.

After supper, Mamère kneels in front of Pépé before we gather for the rosary to ask his special forgiveness and his blessing. He looks at her out of his cold blue eyes and nods, but he don't speak.

Papa has to lead us in the rosary. Pépé's fingers move the beads, but he mumbles so low in his beard that we cannot tell whether he is praying or prattling nonsense again.

Later I hear my father say that we'll have to tie Pépé to his bed when we leave in the mornings. That way he can't go wandering off and we won't have to pay Mrs. Boucher. My mother don't answer. Or maybe she does and for once, her voice is so low that I can't hear it through the wall.

I remember the night Miss Lesley caught us dancing. How long ago that seems.

It takes me four whole weeks to come off learner's pay. Two longer than most kids. Some days go better than others, but I can't count on my fingers to behave. They don't hold the learning in them the way my brain can hang on to a word in a book. I wish I were a machine. Then there'd be a reason for my mistakes and the loom fixer could oil my roll drive or straighten my spindles and that would be the end of it.

Arthur tells me it's ‘cause I'm too smart for the work. If it interested me, I could pay attention better. I don't say nothing to that, but I do know when I'm at the frame, it's easy for my mind to fly off just like an end that ain't piecing up proper. But Arthur is smart and he can think and doff at the same time. I can only do one or the other.

And no matter what, I cannot please Mamère. There's always an end I haven't caught or a bobbin I've dropped. Things people say get stuck in my head and I waste time fussing over them so I try to close my ears against her voice. She sees that and yells even louder. She don't care no more what the other women in the spinning room think of me ‘cause she's given up on me herself. She's got one good daughter and one bad doffer.

“I told you she can be that way,” Delia says to me at night when I'm lying stiff in the bed. “Don't pay no mind to it, Grace. It's her way of worrying.”

“I don't care,” I tell Delia, but the words don't come easy. It's always hard for me to tell a lie.

We're trying to keep it a secret, but we're tying Pépé to the bed now. In the beginning, he batted Papa's hands away and spat at the ropes, but Mamère give him some mixture of herbs those first few days that made him quiet. Then he seemed to get used to it. Now he sleeps most of the time. Papa comes home at the dinner break to get him up and feed him something. If the weather is good, Papa sets him in the chair outside our front door for a while so Pépé can turn his face up to the sun.

We told Madame Boucher that Pépé is much better and we don't need her to look in no more. But Henry knows to lock the door when he leaves for school so the portly Madame don't poke her nose into our business anyway.

It ain't right for Pépé to be tied down like that. I remember him telling me how much he hated the work inside the mill ‘cause he felt so cooped up.

One time the circus come through our town on its way south. It didn't stop ‘cause there's no money to be made in a little postage stamp of a town where the mill workers put all their extra pennies in the church basket. But I remember seeing the lion curled up on his side, staring through the bars of his cage as it bumped along the main street of the town behind a wagon. His fur was matted and in some places, the bare skin showed through in patches. He didn't even move or lift his head when Dougie and Thomas threw pebbles at him.

Pépé used to be as strong as that lion and now he lies still and stares at the wall as if he can see right through it. I want the old Pépé to come back to us. When his eyes are open, they never blink. I still read
La Justice
to him Wednesday nights and I talk to him all the time when I'm home.

For once, Mamère don't hush me up. Maybe she's glad someone is talking to him. Ever since the night she slapped his face, it's hard for her to look at him.

I can't tell if he hears me. Sometimes he hums, sometimes he mumbles deep in his throat. But whenever I squeeze his hard bony hand, he squeezes back.

Sunday morning I wake up choking.

Delia shakes me. “What's wrong with you?”

“My throat is swollen shut,” I croak. I was dreaming that all the lint I'd swallowed had come crawling back up from my stomach.

“Don't be stupid,” says Delia. She puts a hand to my forehead and calls to Mamère that I have a fever.

Mamère is late for Mass already when she comes in to have a look at me. “You can stay home, Grace. The good Lord understands that we need you doffing tomorrow more than praying today.” But she says this in a low voice so that my father don't hear. “You can let your Pépé up to sit in the sun. When he woke earlier, he was making sense. Just like his old self,” she adds, talking more to the air than to me.

I nod and when she leaves, I let my pounding head fall back on the mattress. I sleep and wake again to a cry from Pépé.

He is struggling up, fighting the ropes, but when he sees me, he calms down.

“I'm here, Pépé,” I say, taking his hand. “I'm here.”

“I see you,
mon petit oiseau,”
he says. He is speaking clearly and calling me his little bird again.

“You look well this morning,” I say. My voice sounds thick.

“And you do not, my little Grace,” he says. Maybe whatever sickness he had has passed to me.

“Delia says I have a fever,” I tell him.

“Your hand is warm. Let me up.”

“Are you strong enough, Pépé?” I ask.

He looks sternly at me. “Grace, I am your Pépé. Now, let me up. I will pick the root vegetables from the garden and make you a healing broth.”

My old Pépé is back again. He will spoon warm soup between my lips and put a cold rag on my head to stop the pounding. The world has turned again so things are as they should be. I am just a girl sick with a fever, and he is my grandfather, the one who's always taken care of me.

My fingers are used to piecing up fine strands of cotton yarn. They struggle with the thick ropes. Then they stop.

“Pépé, it's June. Henry started the planting just two weeks ago. There are no vegetables in the garden yet.”

He looks confused for a minute as if he's thinking this problem over. “June,” he says. “Radish soup.”

He used to make me radish soup when I was little. With the green radish tops dropped into the water at the last minute. My fingers start working through the knots again. Pépé is acting like his old self. Won't Mamère be happy?

His legs start to slip out from under him the first time he tries to stand. He puts a hand on my shoulder and I almost crumple under his full weight. He grabs the doorknob, straightens, sways, tests one foot, then the other.

“Stiff,” he says. Then he turns to me. “Back to bed with you. I shall go out to pick the radishes.”

This worries me. He ain't been outside in days and only then to sit on the chair in the sun with Papa watching him. “No, Pépé, I'll go to the garden. You boil the water.”

He looks at me again, thinking through this new idea, and I almost laugh out loud at the pair of us. My throat stuffed as fat as an uncooked sausage and his old legs creaking their way around our kitchen while his brain tries to sort out my words. We're not much good for each other, are we? But Pépé is talking to me and making sense again. That's all I care about.

“You're right,” he says. “You dig up the radishes and I shall boil the water for soup.”

When I see he is able to lift the dipper from the pail
Henry brought in from the pump, I head out the back door to the garden.

He calls once more to me.

“Grace,” he says, “tell your mother it's time for me to go. You give your mother that message. From me.”

He's talking about Canada again. “But, Pépé, she'll be home from Mass soon,” I say. “You can tell her yourself.”

“Yes,” he says, and he stares at me hard as if he's trying to hold on to the idea of who I am. “Get the radishes, then.”

I'm dizzy myself, especially when I lift my head too quickly from rooting around in the ground. I think of all the days I've ached to be outside the mill, but this morning the sun on my back feels like a heavy package I have to carry. The radish plants way off in the north corner are puny-looking little things, but the greens will be good. On the way back down the row, I break off some early shoots of lettuce, one or two from each plant the way Pépé has always learned me. Two for eating, three for growing, he says.

When I don't see him by the stove, I think he must have gone to rest in the other room. I take care to pile our small store of June vegetables neatly on the kitchen table where he can reach them easily. Mamère will not like the mud on the tablecloth so I must remember to clean that off. I slump into the seat, everything aching from the short trip to the garden and back.

“Pépé, the radishes are small, but they'll do,” I say, my head down on my hands.

He don't answer. How can he possibly hear me when my lips are pressed against the scratchy wooden planks of the table?

“Pépé,” I say louder. “Is the water boiling?”

I stumble to my feet again. He's not resting in my room or on his bed in the corner. Pépé is not in the house.