Counting on Grace (16 page)

I put my nose closer. The nasty smell makes me pull away as he lifts the plate from that tray and slides it into the rinse. If I am there, I'm drowning under all the water he's swishing back and forth.

“Follow me,” he says, walking to the corner. He holds up the glass piece right in front of the white sheet we just washed. The water drips off onto my bare feet. “There you are.”

I can't make my brain understand what I am seeing. A black-skinned girl with white hair is staring out at me from her deep dark eyeholes. It looks like that developing of his conjured up a ghost.

We're both silent, studying on the person trapped in the glass, who's looking right at me. She is holding still the way he told me to do, leaning back against a frame.

“I know it's hard to tell from the negative,” he says, his voice quiet. “I'll send you a copy of the print once I get home. Look closely now. That's your smock with the fat pockets and your arm leaning up against your machine. What do you call her?”

“Marie. But what's wrong with my face?”

“Nothing. You're very pretty. That's the same face you see in the mirror every morning.”

“We don't got a mirror.”

Delia's always trying to catch sight of her reflection in the store window when we go past on the way to the mill. Whatever for, I wonder.

“Everything you're seeing is in reverse,” he says. “So your legs are white and in this picture they're black.”

I finally begin to get it. “And my feet are black from the grease, so that's why they're white in the glass here.”

“Exactly.”

I reach out my finger.

“Don't touch,” he warns.

He's right, it is me. You know how I can tell? Marie's got two spindles that are missing their guides. And there they are just below where I'm resting my elbow. Nobody else doffs Marie. So it has to be me. And now I'm looking closer I can make out Delia's old shirt with the little white flowers that got passed down to me and the little checks in my gingham smock. I'm teaching my brain to take everything it's seeing black and turn it around.

But there's such a scared look in this ghost girl's face. How could she be me?

I slap him on the arm and he flinches.

“That's not me,” I say. “Your notebook is wrong. That's some worried little woman.”

“That's you, Grace,” he says, and lets out his breath as if he's been holding it.

We stare some more.

“I've got big eyes,” I say at last.

“You see that cut?” He glances at my right hand and then back at the picture.

Sure enough, old Mr. Graflex caught it too.

“See what I mean about the grease?” I tell him. “You can't never get it out.”

“You don't have shoes?”

“No use messing them up in the mill.” I keep wanting to touch my glass self, but he won't let me. “My arms look awful skinny. But they're strong. I can even lift the roving creels for my mother.”

“I'm sure you can. You've got to be strong, Grace, to survive in the mill.”

He looks at me with such a sad face that I feel like shaking him. Without another word, he takes the negative back over to the third tray, and I trail behind as if he's carrying a piece of me and I can't let him out of my sight. He lowers me into the water mixed with the fixer and leaves me there. I lean over to stare but I can't see nothing. The smell of that one makes me wrinkle my nose, but I don't pull away.

“I disappeared,” I cry. I didn't like that ghost girl, but
that's all there was of me. I jiggle the tray and some water sloshes out. “Mr. Hine, come quick.”

He's not paying no mind.

“The picture died already.”

He looks up finally from his place by the wall. He's working a second piece of glass out from the other side of the holder. “It's all right, Grace. The background is too dark for us to see anything when the negative is resting in the trays. In a few minutes, I'll take it out of there, rinse it again and set it up in a drying rack. Meanwhile I'll start on this one of you and Arthur.”

Mr. Graflex has got me trapped inside two more pieces of glass, I know, but suddenly, I don't care no more. I feel limp. My feet are aching something bad.

Above my head, I hear the pounding of my father's boot on the floor. “Grace,
viens ici!”
he orders.

“It's time for the rosary,” I tell Mr. Hine.

“Off you go then,” he says. “Open the door quickly and be sure to close it tight behind you.”

“It's dark out now,” I say.

He don't answer. I can feel him waiting for me to go so he can get on with his work. Mamère holds herself the same way when her foot's itching to jog the rail.

“Goodbye,” I say. “Maybe I'll see you in the morning.”

“Goodbye, Grace. Thanks for your help.”

Moment I shove that door to, I know he'll be pouring the liquid over me again. Me and Arthur.

Mr. Hine must have caught the first train out, the one that goes before the mill bell even rings.

Mamère wakes me. Usually it's Delia.

“The man's gone already,” she says. “He left you something.”

Everybody is gathered around the table staring at the note as if it might bite them. Except for lucky Henry. No need for him to be up this early.

“What does the writing say?” my father asks.

I read the note to myself first.

But I don't read it like that to my family. I skip over the part about Miss Lesley and the normal school and the words I don't know. Truth is I do a lot of skipping and some making up.

“Dear Grace,” I read. “Thank you for your help. You are a very smart girl. Say hello to your family and Arthur. Lew Hine.”

Mamère stands behind me. “That's a lot of words he wrote down when he don't have that much to say,” she says. She touches the word
Lesley
and the word
Lew.
“This one looks like this one.”

I fold the paper up real quick and tuck it in my pocket. “You have sharp eyes, Mamère. I could teach you to read.”

“You teaching Mamère?” Delia cries with a hoot of laughter.

“Hush, Delia,” Mamère says, and I wonder what she is thinking. But then the mill bell starts to ring and we're all caught up in the morning scramble.

I hope Mr. Hine keeps his promise and sends me that notebook. Then I'm going to write my life down like he said I should so it don't get swallowed up and forgotten.

I give Arthur the message about biding his time, but every day he gets more restless. He's making a rut in the floor going back and forth to that window as if some other person will hop off the train and rescue us from the doffing.

“I'm going crazy,” he whispers at me one Saturday weeks later when we're clearing the lint out of the frames. I give him the cleaning hook my father made him, but he still uses his fingers most times. “Same thing every day.”

“Except Sunday,” I tell him.

“I can't be waiting all week for that one day.”

“Mr. Hine is working on it.”

He sneers at me. “I bet that Mr. Hine's forgotten us already, Grace. Every man for himself is what I say.”

Arthur don't explain no more than that, but later I see him measuring the space between the sprockets in the gearbox, trying to poke the end of a bobbin in there. Maybe he's fixing to shut down the frame, but I don't know what good that will do. They'll get it up and running soon enough and all he'll have to show for himself is lower pay from his mother's hank clock.

All the kids are out of school now and most of them spend their days in the mill the way I used to do. They come and they go, toting dinner pails, sweeping around our feet and playing the same games I remember. They get in
my way and I know now how Delia must have felt all those summer days when the mill was a place for me to play and a place she was never going to leave.

It makes me restless too. I sure don't want Mr. Hine and his glass plates to be the most exciting thing that ever happens to me in my whole entire life.

A girl named Valerie's been left with me for training. When her mother died, her father sent her and her little sister, Ora, down from Canada to live with their cousins, the Vallees. Valerie's a quick thing, eager to do the work, and she don't get underfoot like some of them. But she'll slow down like the rest of us when the dullness gets to her.

One rainy Sunday we find the schoolhouse all locked up. Arthur bangs on the door, but I can see through the dirty window that nobody's there.

“Maybe the rain held her up,” he says. “She'll be along. It's a three-mile walk.”

“How long does it take her?” We never walk farther than the mill or down to the river.

He shrugs. “More than an hour.”

First time I ever thought about Miss Lesley and that walk to and from her boardinghouse. More than an hour and the fire to light winter mornings. Summers she comes in to watch the kids that are too small to go into the mill. Sunday's the one day she don't need to make the trip. ‘Cept for our lessons.

“Maybe she don't want to teach us no more.”

He glares at me. “That's crazy thinking, Grace.” But I can tell he's worried himself. Miss Lesley's always been there before. If we don't even have Sundays to wait for, then what'll we do to make our lives go by faster?

When we're settling ourselves against the wall to wait, we both spy a piece of paper sticking out from under the door. Arthur gets to it first. He holds it away from me and does all the reading.

“What does
urgent
mean?” I ask.

“Don't know. But it must be something important or she wouldn't go off like that.”

“You didn't tell me you finished the soldier story.”

“You didn't ask.”

“Henry the soldier fought in the end?”

“He fought like a regular devil. He didn't sit around and wait to get himself killed, I know that.”

Then I tell Arthur the bad thing I heard my mother talking about with Delia.

“They're fixing to move your mother to those three frames on the other side of ours next to Delia. They're
giving your two to Bridget's mother ‘cause with Dougie doffing for her now, she can handle more.”

“The back of the room?”

I nod. “But we can still talk ‘cause my Edwin shares a row with one of your new ones.” I don't tell him how my mother was grumbling on about being stuck next to Madame Trottier and that dizzy boy of hers.

“How do you know?” Arthur asks.

“I heard talk.”

He studies on this for a while. I know what he's thinking. He'll die if they move him away from that window. No train to watch, no mountains, no river. Nothing but bobbin counting to mark the time.

“I won't be doing that,” he says real quiet and certain.

“You got to.”

He just gets up and walks away without even bothering to argue with me.

Suddenly I feel sick deep inside my gut. Pépé floated away up the river and no Miss Lesley for a whole week ‘cause of her urgent business and Arthur talking like that and Mr. Hine come and gone with no pictures like he promised to send.

It feels like everybody's moving on to somewhere else and leaving me behind.

Miss Lesley come back the next week. She snuck off to one of those committee meetings up in a little town north of Bennington. She told us she heard there that Mr. Hine took pictures of kids working in all the mills around Vermont and that he was fixing to write up a report with those pictures and send the committee a copy.