Counting on Grace (23 page)

Mamère comes too. They put me between them and we cross the room that way. They don't exactly carry me, but they make a wall around me until I'm safe in the stairwell.

“I'm fine now,” I say, my hand on the railing.

“Take your time coming back,” Mamère says.

Coming back, I think. I ain't never coming back.

When I turn around and look, they're both still there watching me make my way down the steps.

Au revoir
, I say without speaking out loud. I'm already adding them to the pictures of people I carry in my head. Arthur, Miss Lesley—now my whole family.

By the time I get inside our front door, I've made up my mind. I'm going to North Adams, where they won't let kids my age work in the mills. Maybe I can board in with Miss Lesley or I can stay in the convent with Père Alain's sister. Just until I find work. Maybe I can piece together a new family for myself after all.

Shaky as I am, it don't take me long to pull things together. What have I got, after all? One damp smock and some underwear that I put on, my Sunday dress, the shoes passed down from Delia, a winter coat, my notebook, my photograph, my sister Claire's birth paper from the trunk in case I need to prove I'm fourteen. After all, fourteen-year-olds get hired as teachers.

Mamère never could really count on me, I think as I bundle my things together. I'm not regular and easy like
Delia, satisfied with spinning, looking to make it to the weaving room. I've got my clumsy right hand and my jumpy brain and my big mouth making smart with Mr. Dupree. It will be better for the rest of them when I'm gone. Life will ease along without so much trouble. And now there'll only be four around the table looking to eat.

But I don't want to be thinking about them too much. I've got to hurry if I'm going to catch the southbound mail train that comes through at noon.

A long time before the engine turns the corner, the rails begin to shiver. I'm standing by the tracks a ways south of the station where nobody will think to look for me. I've been real clever, dodging through the woods and hunkering down low when I pass under Mr. Dupree's window. I plan to swing myself up onto the first freight car behind the engine. I'll have plenty of time ‘cause they take a while unloading the mail and the store supplies.

I know what I'm doing, I keep telling myself. I'm not like Pépé, who was wandering through the woods, crazy in his head. But my legs are still shaking, bad as the rails.

The train turns the corner, the brakes scream and it slows to a stop. I picked the right place ‘cause I only have to trot a little ways back toward the station to get to the first freight car.

But the sliding door is only open a half foot and I know I don't have the strength to budge it. The crack is so narrow
I can barely push my bundle into the car. Finally it pops through and then it's my body's turn. Lucky I don't got no extra fat on my bones.

The mail is all unloaded, but Mr. Dupree is chatting with one of the engineers. When I'm sure they ain't looking my way, I swing myself up and get my head and shoulders through the opening. But then I stick, halfway in and halfway out.

“Come on, Grace, come on.” My smock catches on a nail at the edge of the door and I can't work my hand back to free it. If Mr. Dupree takes one look this way, he's going to see a couple of legs sticking out in the air, waving at him.

Suddenly I hear shouting from down the line and the train begins to roll ever so slowly. I did it. I'm going to make it, even if my hips are caught in the opening as tight as my smock was in the spinning frame. But it don't matter. Now the train's moving, I've got time to slide my hand back, free the smock and inch myself inside. Once we get to the next station, I'll be safe.

Just as I manage to work another inch of myself inside, there's more shouting and the brakes squeal again and the train slows and stops. What now? I force myself to lie still and wait with my legs pulled up as close as they can be. The voices come nearer and then seem to pass right by.

“Where?”

“Maybe it's nothing.”

I'm holding my breath. The wind comes up. The train whistle blows once, but still we don't move. My cheek is pressed against the floorboards of the car. From the smell, I can tell the last thing it carried was horses.

I'm praying to Pépé. I've given up on God. “Pépé, get
me out of here. Get me somewhere safe. I can't be in that mill no more.”

But I'm not so sure that Pépé is going to answer my prayers. “Grace,” he's saying. “You're leaving your family?”

Then with a roar, the door slides open and the sun pours in. I pull up my legs and rub the scrapes. I can't see nothing in the sudden light.

“Just like you thought, Mr. Dupree,” says a man's voice. “We got ourselves a stowaway.”

“Bring her on out of there. Foolish girl. You'd think she'd know better. Her grandfather got killed by a train not three months ago.”

I never do see the man who helps me out of the car, but he holds me tight by the arms when he passes me like a sack down to Mr. Dupree.

Mamère come to get me. That's the worst part. I wish they'd sent Delia or Papa. But she's the one. More time on the loose pulley all ‘cause of me.

She takes my bundle, nods to Mr. Dupree and walks me up the hill. We don't say a word the whole way.

When she sits me down at the table, I open my mouth, but she shakes her head.

“For once in your life, Grace, be still and listen. I don't have much time and Lord knows, I don't have the strength for arguments. I told French Johnny to give me Valerie to doff. You can do as Miss Lesley says. You can be the teacher until Mr. Wilson finds the next one.”

I can't believe what I'm hearing. “What about the fifty cents?”

“We'll do without for now. You study for that test Miss Lesley wants you to take. Teachers who pass that test make good money, she told me. Better than you can make doffing. Almost as good as the weavers.”

“What about when the new teacher comes? Will I have to go back in the mill?”

“Grace, I can't tell you what will happen then.”

“I ain't going back in the mill, Mamère. I ain't never going back there. If I have to, I'll run away again.”

“Don't speak to me like that, Grace. You'll do what you're told.”

“Yes, Mamère.”

“All I know is you're better at reading and numbers than you'll ever be at doffing.”

I know she'll think I'm acting smart, but I speak up anyway. “And you're better at spinning than you ever were at farming, right, Mamère?”

She starts and lifts her hand to cuff me, but then her face breaks into a smile ‘cause my words do make sense to her.

“Yes,” she says at last, “I ‘spect I am.”

“You think I'll make a good teacher, Mamère?” I ask, shoring myself up against the harsh words that could come.

She studies on her answer for a while. “You taught me just fine, Grace. I'm already catching up to Henry with my reading.”

I grin inside. Mamère was my first student. I wonder how many more there'll be.

We sit together awhile longer, acting like there's no hank clock waiting. Just a girl and her mother with nothing special to do.

But she gets to her feet before long. “Clean yourself up before you start the supper.”

“Yes, Mamère.”

In the doorway, she turns around. “Your Pépé would be happy, Grace. He hated you working in the mill.”

Later on, I think it's all come around in a big circle. Mamère letting me out of the mill makes up for that slap she landed on Pépé's cheek. And if Pépé's in heaven, then maybe he knows I'm not working in the mill no more.

I wake with the mill bell, but when I put my hand out to snatch my smock off the hook, it ain't there.

Delia's laid out my Sunday dress.

“First day you wear this,” she says, moving around our bed in the early-morning dark. “You need to show them who's boss. I figure after today, you can use your old school pinafore.”

Ain't that just like Delia, worrying about my clothes?

My stomach don't take well to the cornmeal mush Mamère sets in front of me, but I manage to choke down a piece of bread dipped in hot coffee.

We all leave together, except for Henry, who will be coming along with the other children when I ring the school bell. At the turning to the mill, the four of us stop ‘cause for the first time in months, I've got to go a different way. The others streaming down the hill give us room.

“You make those kids behave, Grace,” shouts Mrs.
Cordeau as she sweeps past, and that starts up a lot of joking and carrying on from the rest of them. “Use that ruler, Grace.” “Don't let my girl get away with nothing.” “Make Pierre carry in the wood when the weather turns.”

I smile, knowing they mean well. We ain't never had a Franco teacher before and they're showing they're proud of me. But it don't help settle my stomach. What made me think I could do this?

Mamère takes my face in her two hands and I feel the rough skin of her palms against my cheeks. She looks at me straight without saying nothing, but it's a kind of blessing that she's giving me. Then they're all three of them gone, Papa, Mamère, Delia, running to slip through the big iron gates just before they swing shut.

The schoolroom feels like it's been holding its breath, waiting for something or someone to start it up again. I stand inside the front door, taking in the smell of chalk and book dust and woodsmoke from last week's fire, the first of the season.

I shut my eyes and for one minute, I can see Arthur at the desk we shared and Miss Lesley at hers. I remember the day Mr. Hine took my picture and how the flash left that ghostly shadow of him standing in a place he'd already moved away from. I wonder how long it will be before I come in this room and don't see their shadows waiting on me.

My mother's writing is still up on the board. With the chalk slanted proper in my left hand, I draw a tail on the
R
she started and finish up the name. Then I put a Miss in front of it. That's what a new teacher always does first thing. Writes her name on the board.

I circle the desk twice and then lower myself onto the stool. Lucky it's high up ‘cause it makes me look older and taller than I am. Miss Lesley has left the new teacher a pile of books and supplies. A folded note under the inkwell's got my name penned on it in her even, proper handwriting.

Grace
, it says.
1 hope you are the one reading this.
Then she give me a list of the students and what level reader they're using and what writing assigments each one can handle. Underneath that she's left me the studying book for the Normal School certification test. I can see by the pages she's marked that I'm only halfway through the lessons I've got to know to pass.

I get a dizzy feeling when I see all the books snuggled up tight against one another on the shelves under the blackboard. Miss Lesley never did let any of us get near those shelves, not even Arthur. She handed the books out and dusted them and put them away herself. But now I'm the keeper of the books. I hunker down to read the names.

Spenser's
Faerie Queene, Marjories Busy Days
, all the Appleton Readers in a row except for the one Mamère is working on, something called the
Iliad
by a man with just one name, and
The Red Badge of Courage.
Twenty-two books in all.