Counting on Grace (2 page)

All heads swing with the ruler as if we got no power on our own to decide where our eyes should go.

Last summer Thomas was fooling around when they were moving a big new spinning frame into the room. He slipped in the grease and the gearbox got rolled right over his bare foot. By the time they lifted it off him, harm was already done.

Thomas spent three months at home. His foot healed all crooked and he walks on the side of it now. Makes him lean far over just to walk and he falls a lot. No use for him at the mill no more.

He hates school. I hear him talking about running away, but that would be mighty hard with a foot that curls around under itself like a fern coming out in the spring.

Now French Johnny decides he's going to pretend Miss Lesley ain't there. They've been through all this before. Every time the overseer sends him up the hill to collect another child, Miss Lesley acts as if one of her arms is getting chopped off.

“Let's go, boy,” he says.

“Arthur, you stay right there,” she says, not taking her eye off French Johnny.

Arthur's gone back to reading our book. He's thinking, Maybe if I pretend this ain't happening, then it ain't.

I know he wants to stay in school. He's not like me or the other boys. Dougie is counting the days, begging his father to send him down the hill even though he's only nine.

I want to go too ‘cause of the money I can make. Ever since my father got sick four years ago, we've been behind in the store bills.

But Arthur is different. If reading like a machine makes you smart, then he's the smartest person I ever knew. Arthur hates noise, too many people around, loud games. I could give you a whole list of ways Arthur is different from the other boys. The only thing in the world that Arthur loves besides his mother is books.

His father died of the pneumonia last winter. That's why French Johnny come for him. Arthur and his mother live in mill housing up on French Hill like most of the rest of us. You can't stay in a mill house unless every able-bodied person works. Arthur's twelve, long past time for him to go in.

“Boy, no trouble now,” says French Johnny, his voice raised a notch. “Come along quiet.”

Arthur lifts his head from the page and looks at Miss Lesley.

“Do I have to go?” he asks.

The silence is so big it could make us all deaf. For just a moment. Then from the back row, one of the big girls calls out in an Arthur voice.

“Do I have to go?”

Dougie picks it up. “Miss Lesley, do I have to go?”

“Quiet,” says Miss Lesley. The ruler hits the nearest desk, two inches from my brother Henry's nose. He's calling out with the rest of them.

But there's nothing Miss Lesley can do. The chanting gets bigger, like some kind of balloon blowing up in the room, pushing out all the other air.

“Children,” Miss Lesley screams. Normally she don't need to raise her voice. So now we know she's lost the fight. This is the one fight she's always going to lose.

Arthur gets up suddenly. The taunting fades almost as fast as it started. We all watch as he snakes his way between the desks and flies out across the front porch, like some kind of trapped animal who just found his cage door standing open.

For a big man, French Johnny can move pretty quick. Suddenly he's gone too.

I look over at Arthur's desk. He left most everything behind. Except the book. The book we were all reading.

Miss Lesley's got her back to us and she ain't speaking. Her shoulders are moving up and down. I think maybe she's crying, but there's no noise coming from her. This is worse than her screaming. Nobody knows what to do.

My body is vibrating, I've been sitting so long. I get up and start to dance a little. Now everybody's looking my way.
I figure this is a good thing ‘cause I'm giving Miss Lesley time to collect herself.

“It's not so bad, Miss Lesley,” I say, sliding past two desks. “He took the book with him. Arthur is never going to give up his reading, no matter where he goes.”

“Sit down, Grace,” she says, and her voice is low and quiet again.

“We all got to go in sometime. My sister Delia gets her own spinning frames soon. Any day now I'm going to start doffing for my mother.” My voice just rattles on sometimes. Follows my feet. Times like these, I can't seem to control either one.

“Why don't you start now?” says Miss Lesley. Her voice has some kind of menace in it.

I can't be hearing her right.

“They don't need me yet,” I say. “But don't you see it's a good thing? I'm going to be making extra money so we can buy me my own pair of shoes and I won't have to share with Delia no more. And Henry can get a pair of his own so he won't have to wear those broken-down ones Felix's mother give us to use for Mass.”

All eyes turn to my brother in the front row and his bare feet swinging back and forth. He makes them go quiet and glares at me. Any day he can, he runs down the hill barefoot rather than squish himself into my old school shoes.

“You know if I start doffing, then Delia will work her own frame and my mother will still have a doffer and I'll get the two and a half dollars a week and—”

“Get out, Grace.” She is not screaming like before, but
she is talking loud. And she's walking toward me as if she's considering running me over.
“Go
on,” she orders. “I'm not going to stand here anymore and wait for that man to snatch another one of my best readers right from under my nose. You want to go doff your mother's machine, then go.
Get out!”

“But Miss Lesley, I don't mean now—”

“I'll go, Miss Lesley,” Dougie yells from his row, but she pays him no mind.

She's done with talking now. She grabs the back of my pinafore with her right hand and pulls it up all into a bunch so's I'm practically choking. Then she steers me out the door of the schoolroom with my feet barely skimming the ground. For a scrawny woman, Miss Lesley is strong when she wants to be.

My mouth is still working around what to say next when I find myself on the wrong side of the door.

All I can think of in that minute is what she called me. Another one of her best readers. Me. Of all people.

I stand on that porch thinking. I've never been out in the town before with nowhere special to go. If I'm not in school or at home tending to my grandfather, then I'm at Sunday Mass in the room above the store we use for a church or I'm stopping in at the mill to bring something to my mother or father. But from now on the mill is where I'll be spending every day. What should I do with this little pinch of freedom?

I shouldn't have wondered so long in such a public place.

“Why aren't you in school?” asks a voice.

Madame Boucher has waddled all the way down the hill without my noticing. She calls herself our landlady, but she don't own the house we live in. The mill owners own everything in town—the store, the school and our houses. They hired Madame Boucher to collect the rents on French Hill. Comes for her ninety cents every single Thursday night. Regular as a clock, my father says.

She has airs and calls herself portly. That's just a fake word for fat, especially when your belly swells from the money you make off your own people.

But the worst thing about Madame Portly is she's nosy.

“Answer me,” she demands.

“I've been sent to look for Arthur Trottier,” I say.

“And why is Arthur not in school?” she asks, but my feet are already dancing off the porch and around the corner of the building, so I can pretend I don't hear her no more.

She is still calling my name when I make my way down the path, but her voice gets fainter and fainter.

The one place in town you can go without portly women poking into your business is the river.

We live in a little town in the state of Vermont right by the side of the Hoosic—too bad it's not some musical French name like Riviere-du-Loup, which means Wolf River in case you don't know. That's where my grandparents lived in Canada before they come to America.

Pépé, my grandfather, says French is the language of music-making people. Not English. But English is what they speak in America, I tell him.

“Pas
pour toi,”
he grumbles with that thick old pipe stuck in his mouth and the dribble coming down his white beard. We speak French at home, but English
is
for me long as we live in America. In school they laugh at Norma and Felix and the other Franco kids from Canada who still speak with an accent.

Miss Sophie, the teacher who used to board with us, said Vermont means green mountain.
Vert
for green,
mont
for
montagne
, which is French for mountain. Miss Sophie learned me to speak English without no accent. In one year, I could speak pretty well. She said I was smart. Then she had to go away ‘cause she found a man to marry. That's when we got Miss Lesley as teacher. Four years ago. She boards with a Yankee farmer family a ways out of town. Sometimes the man give her a ride in on his wagon, but mostly she walks to school. Miss Lesley is a Yankee herself. Mamère says she prefers her own people to us Francos. I think Miss Lesley don't care who you are or where you come from long as you sit still.

When Pépé starts in about going home to Canada, my mother says, “Only place to get ahead is here.” Truth is her English ain't half bad either, thanks to Miss Sophie. But she's careful not to speak it in front of Pépé.

The mill needs the river, but the river don't need the mill. The water was flowing along for thousands of years. Then the people come and dammed up the river so it got fatter and the current got strong enough to turn the water-wheel. This time of year in the spring, the river runs high and proud and the wheel never stops, which means the machines got all the power they need. Until the summertime, when the water can go slack.

The river don't seem to mind. Borrow my water, it says. Long as you give it back. Trouble is when the mill spits the
water back out, it comes all dirty and it smells queer. Arthur caught me drinking it one time and said it would make me sick. Not me. I've got a stomach that can take anything, even that time I swallowed a rock on a dare.

Arthur's got himself a place down here by the river, a tumbledown old trapper's shack where he hides. If French Johnny didn't catch him going out the door, then that's where Arthur'll be.

You need to push hard to get the door through the brambles and briars growing round it.
“Go
away,” he snaps when I stick my head inside.

“I knew you was going to be hiding here,” I tell him. “They'll catch you anyways.”

“You going to tell them?” He's curled in the corner, his back against the wet wall, slimy from spring rains. His feet are tucked up close under him and his arms are wrapped around that book like it's his baby or something.

“Course not,” I say. “Miss Lesley kicked me out of school.”

He cocks his head. “Shhh,” he says. “You hear that?”

I listen too. “Just the river going over the rocks. Papa says the water's high even for May.”

He winces. Maybe at the word
Papa
‘cause he don't have a father no more to tell him things.