Counting on Grace (18 page)

She goes to help him, but he waves her away and slides into Dougie's old seat. I don't think he can make it all the way over to his regular place. His face is still looking doughy and his other hand is shaking bad.

“Oh, Arthur,” Miss Lesley cries suddenly. “I warned you and warned you to pay attention.”

“I said I was going to take care of things.” His voice sounds cracked and old.

“Don't tell me you did this on purpose,” she whispers in a shocked voice. How come she didn't figure that out before? She knows him as well as I do. She heard his talk.

“I wasn't getting out of that mill no other way that I could see.”

Now she's got her hand back over her mouth and her eyes look scared like she really is seeing a ghost.

“Do it hurt bad?” I ask to break up that stare they're locked into.

“Something awful,” he says.

Miss Lesley brings him a glass of water from the bucket in the corner and he drinks that one and the next like his body's been suffering from a drought.

“You should be home in bed,” she says. “I'll walk you back.”

“Nah. I've been there four days now. I told my mother I can't stand it no more. I'll be coming to school tomorrow.”

“If that's what you want, Arthur.”

“It's the whole reason I did it.”

This should make Miss Lesley happy, him wanting so bad to come back to school, but she still looks miserable. My mother would say it's all her fault on account of the foolish ideas she's been putting in Arthur's mind about getting ahead in life. Him a lawyer or a manager. And me a teacher. She's been jogging us with her crazy notions.

“How you gonna write?” I ask. He don't answer me, just starts to unwrap that miserable string of a bandage.

“Leave it alone, Arthur,” she cries. “The doctor should be doing that.”

“He ain't coming back. He knows we can't pay the bill. Kept saying he shouldn't of bothered with a little thing like this in the first place.” He goes on turning the gray strip round and round and we can't take our eyes off what's coming. “Wound needs air,” he says. “I read about that in the soldier book.”

It looks bad. The place where Arthur's fingers used to be is sealed off with this bright red stitching that's as jagged and uneven as my mending. His whole hand is swollen up so tight that it seems whatever's been stuffed back inside might ooze out through the scar.

“It don't look so good,” Arthur says in this low sad voice. What a thing to find that two of your fingers is gone for good, not just folded over and hiding out of sight.

“Arthur,” I tell him. “Writing with your other hand ain't so hard as you think. You get used to it. I'll show you.”

I don't know if he hears me. He's sagging down in the chair like the fight's leaked out of him all at once.

Miss Lesley and I walk him home, one on each side, holding him up between us. The people we pass stop and stare and shake their heads but they don't get near. Bad luck like Arthur's could be catching.

His mother is waiting at the door like she's been expecting us. The two of them get Arthur into bed. He falls asleep before he's even lying down.

“Miss Lesley, I want to speak to you, please.” Something in Mrs. Trottier's voice sounds strong and sure like she's made up her mind in one direction. If I didn't know, I'd think it was Mamère talking.

“I'm so sorry. How terrible this must be for you—” Miss Lesley starts to say, but Mrs. Trottier waves her hands at the other woman the way you slap at a bug that's annoying your
face. “Excuse me, but pity don't help me none right now. I need something else from you. Mr. Trottier has a cousin in New Hampshire and I want to ask the man for money. Can you write the letter? Today?”

Miss Lesley sinks into a chair and for once, she looks like the student who's been given handwriting practice. “Of course. I'll do it now.”

It turns out that the Trottiers don't have no paper, so Miss Lesley sends me back to the schoolhouse and by the time I go down the hill and up again, I am sweaty and tired myself.

When I come in, Arthur is flipping back and forth and groaning something terrible. His mother gives me a wet cloth that ain't too clean and tells me to wipe his face and his arms.

“It will bring the fever down,” she says, but she don't even let Arthur's torment distract her from that letter.

Except for family, I don't usually get that close to a body, specially Arthur. For once he's not giving me his regular look that says, What d'you want from me? He's got this nice little spread of freckles that travel over his nose from one cheek to the other. His upper lip has a wrinkle in it that's deeper than the one in mine. His ears stick out some and they're big. They make me think of Mr. Hine and that first time I saw him looking at me from down the row. He never did send us no pictures and he don't know that Arthur is lying here missing two fingers with this sweet sickly smell coming up off his wound. And suddenly I feel lower than a snake's belly, as my Pépé used to say, and I start
to cry about all the things that have not gone right for me and Arthur. I don't make one sound and the two women are hunched over the table, so they take no notice.

Crying wears a body out. It's one reason I don't ever let it happen, but this time it took me by surprise. I'm fixing to lie down and rest right next to Arthur on his skinny excuse for a bed when Miss Lesley says, “Grace. I hear someone calling you.”

Sure enough it's Delia. Means Mamère is angry. She's been putting up with my Sunday schooling without saying nothing, but I better be home right after.

I fold the wet cloth and press it down on Arthur's forehead to make it stick in place. He's calmed down some.

“See you,” I say.

His eyes fly open at that and he stares up at me like I'm a stranger he's never seen before.

That's the worst. I run from that house without saying goodbye.

Mamère is trying to learn herself reading. I catch her at it, running her fingers over the letters on the stove.

“That's an A,” I say, and she snatches her hand back like it was burned. “Adeline starts with A.” The whole thing says ACME CHARM NEWARK STOVE WORKS, CHICAGO, but I don't confuse her with all that. I don't know what it means myself.

I pick her finger back up and run it over the E in
Acme.
“The E is in all our names.
Delia, Grace, Henry, Adeline, Joseph.
Even
Pipe.”

She points to the C. “What's this one?”

“That's a C. For
creel, carding, combing.”
I'm thinking fast as I can.
“Claire.”

She gives me her steady look.

“It comes right before D. For
Delia, doffing.
And right after B for
bobbins, boy, belt.”

“What's this last letter?”

“M. For
Mamère
.”

It gets to be a game between us. Suddenly she's finding letters all over the place where she's never seen them before. The frames got names on them down near the gearboxes. They say Fales and Jenks and I tell her the letter J is the same one that starts the word Joseph, which is Papa's name.

When I bring home supplies from the store, she picks out the different letters on the sacks and packages and I read her the words.
Flour. Sugar. Matches.
Pretty soon I see her lips moving all the time, but she ain't praying. She's saying the alphabet.

When I tell Miss Lesley that I'm teaching my mother to read, she gives me books to take home to her. They're the baby books that Henry and me started with, but Mamère don't seem to care. She studies over them under the kerosene lamp like she's figuring out some map to somewhere new. Everybody tiptoes around her and nobody in the family says one word against it. Papa even plays the accordion those nights out on the front stoop ‘cause the music calms her and helps her to think.

One night through the wall, I hear him say, “Adeline, you are something.”

“What?”

“Always fixing your eye on the next place to get to.”

She don't answer, least not loud enough for me to hear.

One Sunday when I'm hanging around after Mass, Mamère gives me a pinch.

“What're you doing?” she asks me. “It's time for your schooling.”

“I give it up. I don't go no more.”

She studies me. “You know as much as Miss Lesley then?”

“No.”

“Then go. You can quit when I tell you it's time.”

My mother is a confusion to me, but I trot off down the hill without arguing. Truth is I've been missing the Sundays now that the weather has cooled off. Besides, I may get to see Arthur.

Without him, the mill is real lonely. When we were both doffing, I didn't get to talk to him much, but I could feel him moving up and down his frames when I was working mine. Valerie's gone over to doff for Mrs. Trottier, but it ain't the same. We don't have no history together.

Mrs. Trottier is different now. Mamère says the accident, which is what we all call it, sharpened her up and I guess she's right. Even French Johnny says she's up to speed. That's what the hank clock shows and the hank clock don't ever lie. I hear her snapping at Valerie and hurrying her along. I expect it's so she can get home to Arthur.

Maybe she's thinking that if she keeps up her numbers, nobody will bother her about Arthur being back in school. Miss Lesley talks all over town about what a help Arthur is with the little kids, but she's not fooling me. I know Arthur
just sits in the back and reads to himself like he's always done. He's the only big kid left in there. Even Thomas got a job with a farmer upstate who don't care about his twisted foot, long as he can get about the place and work the horses. Papa says farming work ain't so precise as mill work. You can do it at your own pace with no hank clock counting.

Arthur's hand is still healing. It don't look so raw, but nobody sees it much ‘cause he keeps it hidden up inside his shirtsleeve most of the time.

So I go down the hill to school like Mamère told me to, but when I get there the room is empty. Of course. Miss Lesley don't think I'm coming back. And Arthur don't need to go to school on Sundays. He's there now all the other days. Getting ahead of me.

The latch lifts easy. For some reason, she didn't lock up. I go into the empty room.

It ain't so bad being in the place by myself. I settle down at my desk and since nobody's there to watch, I practice writing with my left hand. I love the way my pencil scoots across the page and fills it up fast. I'm copying over a page from my fifth reader. It's a poem called “Nathan Hale” and I know Arthur would like it ‘cause it has soldiers and drums and flags in it.

When the door bangs open, I almost fly off my seat.

“My Lord, Grace, you startled me,” says Miss Lesley. “I didn't expect you to be here. But I am glad to see you. We have word from Mr. Hine.”

I'm busy hiding the paper so she don't notice the way my letters are leaning, but she's not paying me no mind. She bustles around the room carrying a big yellow envelope.

“Arthur's coming,” she says. “He's right behind me.”

Soon enough, we're all there, the three of us again, and I'm glad for it. Arthur don't look so sickly. Maybe his mangled hand stops hurting now and again.