Counting on Grace (12 page)

I eat by myself. I can see the other kids thinking a death in the family is something you can catch as easy as a fever.

Arthur's the only one who comes near me. When he sits down, he says, “It's bad what happened to your Pépé.”

“I don't want to talk about it,” I say. I'm thinking if I don't talk about it then it didn't happen and Pépé is just visiting family in Canada. One day he'll come back. We'll pick the vegetables together and I won't rush so much. I'll wait for them to grow big enough.

But I don't mind Arthur being the one to sit next to me. He knows about losing people.

I lean over and spit through a crack in the floor. The glob is thick and flecked with lint. We both watch as it makes its way between the boards and disappears. Pity the worker down below.

“What's happening to the soldier?” I ask.

“Remember how he didn't run away from the first battle? But he did from the second. He figured out that he had to save himself. He done the right thing.”

Then Arthur blurts out this long passage from the book
that he memorized. It's that same thing he told me before about every little piece rescuing itself.

“He said the rest of them be damned.”

“Arthur, you shouldn't swear.”

“I'm just quoting the book. So I'm going to save myself, Grace. You'll see. I'm figuring a way.”

“Save yourself from what?”

“From the mill.”

I shake my head ‘cause I have no idea what he's talking about, but it must be the fever ain't left me yet.

I am slower doffing than usual. Mamère watches the hank clock, but she holds herself back from pushing me too hard.

Three days in a row she lets me off early and doffs the bobbins herself till the closing bell.

At suppertime now, Henry does most of the talking like our house is one big hole of silence he's got to fill up somehow with words. He tells us what's coming up in the garden, the news of the town, who's been smacked by Miss Lesley's ruler. The rest of us watch with hollow eyes and say nothing much.

Papa has started up smoking Pépé's pipe, but he never touches the accordion. Mamère has stopped humming. Delia spends hours down in the basement scrubbing the grease off the hem of her skirt. Night after night, Mamère sends me to fetch her.

Washing days we carry buckets of water across the yard from the pump and down the rotting wooden stairs. The basement's colder than ice in the winter, but summertimes it holds the cool in a good way. Baggy spiderwebs sway like hammocks from the rafters. You can hear muffled sounds
through the floorboards from our kitchen, which is directly above.

The whole house has to do their washing in the two big laundry sinks so Madame Boucher assigns each tenant a washing time. We get Wednesday nights and Sunday afternoons.

Lately Delia's been living down there, it seems. If another family is using the big sinks, she just hunkers down in the corner, working out of the bucket.

“Come on, Delia, your supper's cold.”

“I'm not finished.”

“If it's grease you're getting out, you'll never be finished. There's always more.”

She lets me lead her back upstairs and suddenly I feel like the older sister. I wonder some days if now she's the one with the fever. But it's not that. We are all of us looking for ways to hide from the ghost in the house. We keep hearing Pépé's voice and the rattle of his newspaper, keep seeing his thick fingers sliding around the circle of the black wooden rosary beads.

Henry sleeps in Pépé's bed now, except on the nights when we have boarders. The first man who came was a mill agent, sent by Mr. Wilson. He snored so loud the walls shook. Henry moved back in with me and Delia.

In the morning, the man was gone, leaving the slop jar full for me to wash out and his fifty-cent piece tucked under the sugar bowl. We used that money to pay down some of our bill at the store. Still, I hated the idea of that strange, smelly man in my Pépé's bed. Two more have come since. The second one complained at supper that there was no
meat in his stew and the next morning, he left no money at all on the table.

Now Mamère knows to collect the board money first thing before she serves the evening meal.

The days after a bad sleep, the bobbins won't sit right in their cradles and the clearing board reaches out and snatches at every thread. Sometimes, I feel as if the cotton has filled my head and blocked my ears against most things, except Mamère's words. They slip past no matter what.

I'm not fast enough. Or I'm ahead of myself. Or I'm thinking I can do her job. Or I was born with clumsy fingers. Or I dream too much. Or my hands aren't quick like Delia's. Every order has got those two words tacked on at the end even when she don't say them out loud.
Like Delia.

One day, this idea pops into my head and I've been nursing it ever since. Maybe I don't want to be like Delia. Maybe I want to be somebody else.

All week long I lean toward Sundays, when I slip off to the school with Arthur after Mass. Every single time, Arthur asks whether we got any answer to that letter he wrote, but Miss Lesley shakes her head and tells him to be patient. I can tell he don't like that one bit.

Miss Lesley has a new crazy idea. She says that I should take the certification test for teachers when I'm fourteen so
I can go to the Normal School up in Bennington. Arthur is going to be a lawyer according to her, but I could be a teacher. I don't waste breath arguing with her.

She makes us do arithmetic for the first hour and then she turns us to reading and writing. One day she give me a book to take home so I could practice my reading. I slipped it into the house under my smock. I haven't taken it back to her yet ‘cause I've only gotten through the first chapter. I don't get much time for reading.

“Grace, you don't walk around anymore when you read,” Miss Lesley says to me one day.

I nod without telling her how bad my feet ache. At least in the schoolroom I get to sit for two hours. Henry don't know how lucky he is still to be in school.

The words I'm reading fly around above my head when we start the lesson. But by and by, they drop deep down inside my brain and stay there. Seems I'm hungry for the learning now that it's crammed into those two hours every week.

But I don't like Arthur getting too far out ahead of me. I can still read second best, but my fingers act as stiff and clumsy as ever when it comes to the writing.

One Sunday Miss Lesley folds her hand over mine to direct the pencil and I cry out. She uncurls my fingers and stares at the big cut in the middle of my palm.

“Albert took a bite of me yesterday,” I tell her.

“Who's Albert?” She starts to clean my cut with a rag dipped in something cool, but it stings.

“My worst frame.”

“She calls them all names,” Arthur explains.

“What are the others?” Miss Lesley asks.

“George, Edwin, Therese, Bernadette and Marie,” I spit out. She's still poking at my hand with that cloth, making it hurt more.

“You doff six frames?” she says.

“Her mother's the best spinner in the room,” says Arthur. It surprises me that he's even noticed with all the time he spends studying the world outside the grimy windows. “So she's got the most machines.”

“That makes it hard on Grace,” says Miss Lesley. They're talking over my head again as if I'm just one of the floorboards.

“I can do it,” I say, and at last she lets go of my hand.

“You've got to keep that cut clean, Grace, or it will get infected.”

“Miss Lesley, how much is twelve times one hundred and thirty-six?”

“You figure it. You know how.”

It takes me a while what with the carrying over and getting all the numbers in the right columns.

“What's your answer, Grace?”

“One thousand six hundred and thirty-two.” She leans over me to check.

“That's right.”

“That's how many bobbins she doffs,” Arthur says without looking up from his book. Seems he can read and do arithmetic and stick his nosy self into everybody's business all at the same time.

“It's a wonder you don't have more cuts,” Miss Lesley says.

It's a wonder my hands don't fall off.

One day Papa stands behind me at the store and makes me read out loud to him every item Mr. Dupree puts on the list. Everybody knows that Mr. Dupree charges things to the mill workers’ bills that he takes home himself. I'm the only one in the family who can read and count well enough to catch him at it.

“Grace is a good reader, is she not?” says my father.

Mr. Dupree grunts. He knows exactly what we are about.

“She can write too.
Go
ahead, Grace. Copy that list for me.”

It takes me a long time with that cut-up stubborn right hand. The people behind us in line begin to grumble and stir.

“Now add up the numbers,” says my papa.

“Get along now, Joseph,” says Norma's mother from her place in the back. “We've all got business here.”

“We'll be done soon,” Papa says in a loud voice to the whole line. “Grace is quick with numbers.”

I show him the total and he reads it to Mr. Dupree. “Now put the date on the top of the page,” Papa says to me. “We'll take that home with us. For the record.”

Dougie's father standing behind us chuckles. “Looks like you've met your match, Mr. Dupree,” he says as we walk on past.

The rest of them make way for us and I like how they look at me. That paper record stays tucked safe in the pocket of my smock. When we get home, Papa puts it away in a jar at the top of the kitchen cupboard.