Counting on Grace (15 page)

“We're not shutting down the mills. My pictures are going to show people out there what your lives are like. Then you won't have to work such long hours and you'll get to stay in school at least till you're fourteen.”

I don't bother arguing with him about my age. I've got big feet, but my arms are scrawny. No matter how many birth papers Mamère pulls out of the trunk, I know I don't look fourteen.

“We've already got laws,” Arthur says. “Nobody pays them no mind. Besides, you can buy fake papers that say you're old enough.”

“Is that what you two did?”

“My mother got some,” I say quickly. Everything we tell Mr. Hine is sure to end up in his little notebook. I don't want him to write notes about my dead sister. That's private.

“French Johnny didn't even bother asking for my papers,” Arthur tells him. “After my father died, I had to work or we couldn't stay in mill housing. French Johnny says he
was doing us a favor.” Arthur spits out this last idea like it was giving him a bad taste in his mouth.

Mr. Hine stops in the road and takes out his notebook. “How many of the kids can read?” he asks.

Arthur wiggles the strap over his head and lowers the leather pouch to the ground. He looks glad to be putting it down. “Me and Grace. Her brother Henry's starting.”

“Norma can't. Rose can't,” I say, going around the old classroom in my head. “Thomas pretends. My older sister Delia can write her name and read a little of the prayer book at Mass.”

“Dougie can't. Julien don't even speak English. Neither do Hubert or Lucien. They didn't go to the school at all.”

We go on listing the names while Mr. Hine scribbles away. Finally, he says, “I'd like to take a picture of the two of you.”

He takes it right then and there, with me and Arthur standing side by side in the grass. Mr. Graflex don't scare me no more. When his eye starts moving toward us, I just glare right back at him, like the two of us are fixing to fight. Arthur stands easy this time, shoulder to shoulder with me, his hands on his hips. I can't see him but I know he's got that “So what do you want?” look on his face.

“You and your committee better hurry up,” Arthur tells Mr. Hine when he's saying goodbye. “I'm not waiting much longer.”

“I'm doing what I can.”

Mr. Hine sticks out his right hand. Arthur stares at it for a moment as if he don't know what it's there for. Then he wipes the grease off his own best as he can and shakes.

When Mamère sees Mr. Hine standing behind me on the doorstep, she shuts her mouth against what she was going to say.

Henry yanks open the screen door.

“Hello, young man,” says Mr. Hine. “Good to see you again.”

“Bonsoir, monsieur.”

Hine's got that hand of his out again, this time pointed at Papa, who puts his pipe back in his mouth so he can shake it.

“Thank you for letting me board with you tonight,” Mr. Hine says. “I understand from Grace that I'm to pay first.” He pulls a silver dollar out of a mess of stuff in his pocket and lays it on the kitchen table.

For a minute we all stare at it as if it's a live thing before Papa snatches it up with a nod and tucks it away in his shirt pocket.

“We're not fancy,” Mamère says. She points over at Pépé's corner. “That's your bed. We'll eat presently. You can wash your hands outside at the pump.”

“I'll show him,” I say.

“No,” says my mother. “Delia's going down to the basement with the first load of laundry. She can show him on the way. Grace, I need you to do some work for a change.”

“Grace was working pretty hard in the mill this morning,” Mr. Hine says, and I cringe. Be quiet, I mouth in his direction, but he's already following Delia out the door.

I set his dog legs down in the corner by the bed and pick up the first potato that needs peeling.

“Where have you been?” Mamère asks.

“Showing Mr. Hine the way up here to French Hill.”

“You've been gone longer than that. Did you walk him all the way to Massachusetts and back?”

“He needed to take some more pictures.”

“Good thing he's scrawny. Maybe he won't eat much.”

The screen door opens again and I feel Mamère stiffen beside me. I hope Mr. Hine don't say nothing more to set her off. She can be touchy at the end of a long day like this, especially when our hank clock numbers are way down. She'll take it out on me, but it was as much his fault as mine.

Suddenly he pulls up next to me and starts in peeling a potato. I never seen a man do that before. Except for Pépé.

“No cause for that,” Mamère says across the top of my head. We're all three standing in a row. “You'll get your supper.”

“My mother and father owned a little restaurant back home. This comes to me naturally.”

“Where's back home?” Delia asks from where she's laying the table. Usually she don't talk to strangers the way I do, but he must have made friends with her at the pump. He makes friends quickly.

“Oshkosh, Wisconsin,” barks Henry as if it's the answer to a test question.

“Good memory, son.”

“How do you know that?” I ask Henry. Suddenly Mr. Hine ain't mine no more. It feels like everybody owns a piece of him.

“Miss Lesley made him give us a talk about his life and then we looked at his camera. And he took a picture of us.”

“So you know Miss Lesley?” Mamère asks later when we're settling around the table. I suck in my breath and hold it. Let's not start talking about her.

“No, ma'am. I only just met her this afternoon. She seems a good teacher.”

“Notre Seigneur,”
says Papa. We bow our heads for the blessing and I thank God for the food and pray that Mamère will forget about Miss Lesley for once.

She don't.

“That Mademoiselle Lesley may know how to teach, but she wants to keep our children from working in the mill. It's not for her to decide.”

Dear God, I pray again. Please keep Mr. Hine quiet. Then I stare across the table at him with my eyes very big as a warning.

He's not looking at me when he opens his mouth to say something, but Papa speaks first.

“What is your job, Mr. Hine? Why are you taking all these pictures?”

This time I try poking my foot across the table to knock him in the knee, but I hit the wrong person.

“Grace, what are you doing?” Delia cries. She pushes my bare foot away, then wipes her hand off on her napkin. More grease on her smock.

“I take pictures of machines. And the people who work with them.”

“And the school?” Mamère asks, her voice sharp.

“And the school. The mill owners pay to run it, so they want to be sure Miss Lesley is giving them their money's worth.”

I start breathing again. I don't know if he's telling the truth or making up a pile of lies, but I can see Mamère smiling a little. Maybe it's ‘cause of what he's saying about Miss Lesley. More likely, it's ‘cause Mr. Hine didn't ask for seconds even though his one small helping of stew was mostly potatoes.

And the dollar I got him to pay is already safely stowed away in Papa's shirt pocket.

After dinner, it's my turn at the washing.

“Hang the clothes inside, Grace,” my mother says. “It smells like rain to me.”

“Could I go down with Grace to the basement?” Mr. Hine says.

Now why would he want to do that?

He answers the question nobody asked out loud. “I need
the use of a sink and some water to develop my glass negatives.”

We're all still standing there, hands in midair. This man is speaking English, but not words any of us know.

“What does that mean?” I finally ask.

“He makes the camera draw the pictures on pieces of glass,” Henry says.

“How can that be?” asks my father.

“Henry's almost right. I actually use a chemical solution to make the pictures show themselves on the surface of the glass.”

“No fire?” my mother says.

“No, ma'am. No fire this time.”

“Grace has a pile of washing to do,” my father says.

“I can help her,” Mr. Hine says. “So the sink gets freed up faster.”

Imagine a grown man doing the laundry. Mr. Hine is
complètement fou
, my mother is thinking. And she may be right. But I don't care. Anybody who wants to help me with the washing is welcome to join me in the basement.

He's a good scrubber, but he gets mad when the grease don't come out. I have to move him along or else we'll spend all night in the basement fussing over the hem of Mamère's skirt.

“You a smoker?” I ask.

“No.”

“Your fingers are colored dark like my Pépé's. He said it was from the cigarettes he used to smoke.”

“It's the developing chemicals,” he says.

Now he's scrubbing away at his fingers. They're like the dress. They don't come clean either.

“Does your Pépé live with you?”

“He did but he left,” I say. “You're sleeping in his bed.”

“Where did he go?”

My throat feels like it's closing up. “Back to Canada. He
don't like me working in the mill either. He wants me to go with him.”

“Will you?”

I shake my head. I don't want to talk about Pépé no more. “Are you married?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“What's your wife's name?”

“Sara Ann. She's angry with me at the moment.”

“Why?”

“Because I'm always on the road taking my pictures. Sometimes she travels with me, but not this time. She wants me home.”

“Do you have children?”

“Not yet. But I used to be a teacher.”

“I figured that,” I say. “The way you act with kids.”

“Why?”

“You're not scared of a bunch of us all together and you're not mean to us. Seems you're used to kids.”

“Maybe I even like them,” he says.

“Miss Lesley wants me to take the test for the Normal School so's I can learn how to be a teacher.”

“I trained at a Normal School myself. Miss Lesley is right. You should do it, Grace.”

I roll my eyes. “I'm a doffer and one day I'll be a spinner,” I say. “That's my life.” But even as I'm saying it, I know some little corner of me is hoping it's not true. “Leave it be,” I say, snatching Mamère's green skirt away from him. “The grease never comes out completely. Even if it did, it'll just be back tomorrow.”

“Let me try one more time.”

“No,” I say firmly, as I feed it through the wringer. “I'm not going to waste no more time on a smock that's going to spend next week mopping up the mill floor.”

What I don't say is that my feet are swollen so big from standing that it feels as if the blood might burst through the skin. And I have to stand on them all day tomorrow and the next day and the one after that. But I'm not ready to leave. I want to see what he does with those pieces of glass he's been hauling around.

So finally when the clothes are hanging on the line above our heads, we carry in three full buckets of water from the pump. Then he shuts the door against the last bit of light and turns up the kerosene lantern he's hung from the clothing line. It glows red. His face takes on the color and mine must too.

“What's that for?”

“That's called a safelight. It lets us see what we're doing, but it keeps the picture safe so it doesn't develop too quickly. You remember the way I store my negatives in their holders? That's so the light doesn't hit them. Bright light will make the images come too fast.”

It sounds as if he's delivering babies.

“Rose's baby brother come too early and he died. The pictures can die too?”

Mr. Hine's face looks gloomy. “Pictures die for lots of reasons,” he says. “If the subject doesn't stand absolutely still, then the image comes out blurry. Or if the flash powder doesn't light, then the picture's too dark and you can't see anything. Or if I drop the glass plate, then there's no picture at all.”

No wonder he stuck so close when Arthur was walking up that hill carrying his precious pouch.

He sets up four tin trays in a row. He leaves the first one empty, pours half a bucket of water into the middle one and powder from a little bottle into the third one. He makes me put water in there too.

“Shake it back and forth a little,” he tells me. “Good. Now we're just about ready.”

“How does it work?”

“First one is the developer, second the rinse, third the fixer. That stops the developing right where you want it. And the last one is another rinse.”

One by one, he pulls the glass plates in their wooden holders from the pouch and leans them up against the wall. They look like a line of kids waiting to be picked for a prize.

“How do you know which one's me?”

“The notebook,” he says, sliding it out of his pocket and leafing through the pages. “I keep a record of each picture as I take it. Here you are. Number fourteen.”

I lift it so's to carry it over to where the trays are lined up.

“Careful,” he says. I am watching every step I take. Even though it don't make no sense to me, he says this piece of glass has got me trapped inside it. I certainly don't intend to drop myself.

With my hands tight on the wooden frame, he pulls out that dark metal piece the way he did just before he squeezed the bulb that set off the flash and started all the commotion. Then he flips down the edge of the holder so he can slide the piece of glass free.

“The surface is coated when I buy it,” he says as he lowers “me” carefully into the first empty tray. “You must be careful never to touch it because finger marks will show up in the final print.” He pours a little bit of liquid from a vial onto the sheet of glass and then rolls that puddle back and forth until it drips off all the edges.

“Watch,” he says, whispering now. Suddenly, like magic, the glass is changing. Dark spots come up a little bit at a time and then faster. It's hard to see what they are because the tray underneath is black and the red lantern makes so little light in the room.

“All the dark places you see here will be white in the final picture. That's why it's called a negative. The final paper print, the positive, is the photograph,” he tells me, his voice as low as a prayer. It's as if he don't dare talk too loud or the magic spots will disappear on him. But I don't see why he's so worried. Those spots don't look like me or anybody else that I can make out.