Counting on Grace (3 page)

“What are you going to do?” I ask.

“Run away.”

“Where to?”

“Massachusetts. Across the border.”

I feel a little pinch in my throat. Arthur's not exactly a friend of mine, but he's somebody to talk to.

“You going now?”

“Not till after dark,” he says. “I'll tell my mother goodbye.”

“You're going to leave her?”

I can see he don't like thinking about that.

“Why'd Miss Lesley kick you out of school?” he asks me.

“Said she didn't want French Johnny taking another of her best readers so I might as well leave school right then.” I'm proud for him to hear that. “You may be the best reader, but I'm second best.”

He shrugs like he don't care.

“It's fine with me,” I say. “Least I won't have to sit still all day long waiting on Miss Lesley's ruler.”

“You're stupid,” Arthur says. “Like the rest.”

I don't let people call me names. Ever. My feet are moving before I even think. I start pounding on him, but he just curls up tighter into himself. He don't cover his head with his hands and he don't cry out. I'm the one doing the yelling.

“I am not stupid, Arthur Trottier. You hear me? I am smart just like you. Miss Lesley says so and Miss Sophie before her.”

Then a voice behind me says, “Leave him be, girl. I need him in one piece.”

It's French Johnny.

Arthur lifts his head and spits at me. “You showed him where I was hid,” he screams, gathering himself to bolt again.

“I didn't,” I say, backing away. “I didn't show him nothing.”

French Johnny ain't taking chances this time. He grabs Arthur's arm in one of his big hands. Arthur twists one way, then the other.

“Not her fault, boy. I would have found you anyways. Even without the landlady pointing the way.”

But Arthur keeps yelling back at me as French Johnny hauls him up the hill. “I hate you, you tattle.”

That's the worst thing anybody can be. A tattle. I've never been that. But Arthur don't believe me. I know he's not ever going to speak to me again.

“Arthur, I'm not a tattle,” I yell, but nothing comes back at me ‘cept my own echo.

“Pépé,” I whisper. And I take off for home, where my grandfather will be waiting. When bad things happen, he's the only one I want near me.

Pépé can't work no more. He lies on a bed in the kitchen near the stove, chewing on his pipe. We made him give up his cigarettes so he didn't burn himself up, but we figure the pipe keeps him company and most of the time he forgets to light it anyway. That's a good thing, ‘cause there's no extra money for tobacco.

Pépé mostly lives in his bed. Every night we kneel in a circle around him so that he can lead the family rosary and bless us before we sleep. Sundays, Père Alain, our priest, brings him Holy Communion. On Wednesdays after school, I get him
La justice
, the French newspaper, from Mr.
Dupree at the store. I sit on the edge of the bed and read it to him. He likes to hear me using our language ‘cause he knows I've been studying English in school all day.

Truth is Pépé don't know how to read, but long after I'm done he worries away at those pages with his fingers as if touching the words will make them stand up and say their names to him.

The other day, Delia found Pépé walking down the hill to town when he hadn't been out of the kitchen for months. He told her he was going home to Canada and when she tried to lead him back to our house, he pushed her away. Even though Pépé spends most of his time in bed, his arms are still strong from years of plowing. It took two of the men coming up the hill from the mill to coax him home again. When they called him Monsieur
L’Habitant
, that calmed him down ‘cause that's the Canadian word for farmer.

But that night he shouted out in his sleep and I heard the squeak of my parents’ bed and then my father's voice calming him down. A little later on, Papa pulled out his accordion and played
“Les Bucherons,”
a song about lumberjacks that always reminds Pépé of home. Pépé must have fallen asleep with the music. I did too.

When I get home, Pépé is propped up in the corner of his bed, snoring. I tiptoe over to slide the newspaper from between his fingers, but his eyes fly open and he holds tight.

“Mon petit chou-fleur,”
says Pépé. He is always making up names for me. Cauliflower, jewel, bird. “You've come back to see your old Pépé.”

“I always come back, Pépé,” I say, and I kiss him on both of his leathery cheeks. He smells like stale tobacco and food gone bad. We clean him up real good on Sundays, but this is a Friday.

“So, how was that English school of yours today?”

“Miss Lesley said I'm one of her best readers.” I don't tell him all the rest. It's still working itself out in my mind. Pépé is the only one in the family who understands my ways. He don't ask me questions, but if I want to talk, he lets me go on without hushing me.

Truth is in this family, nobody pays either one of us much attention. Going home to Canada is all Pépé ever talks about. And we know he's never going there again. But I let him pretend. And he lets me chatter.

I dip water from the bucket into the kettle for his bowl of tea. In the distance, the whistle blows for the afternoon train. In our town, the noises all come from bells and whistles. There's the mill bell, morning and evening, the opening school bell, the church bells on Sunday and the train whistle four times a day.

The mill stands between the river and the train track and we got to cross those tracks whenever we go to the mill and the store. Every mother in town is always at us about those trains and the Dupree boy who forgot to look and was crushed. Even though that happened years ago before any of us kids was born, the town still talks about it. Strange thing is that boy's little brother, Mr. René Dupree,
is the stationmaster now. He also sorts the mail and runs the mill store, where we all buy our supplies.

That afternoon whistle always gets Pépé going and he tells me the same story over and over. I don't mind. I want to block out the sound of Arthur screaming that ugly word at me.

Pépé is already talking when I set up the board that holds his tea bowl on his lap. He knocks his pipe against his other hand even though nothing comes out.

“I'll tell you about the time we come down on the train, Grace.”

I nod like I never did hear that story before. I watch the whole time he's drinking so the hot tea don't tip over and burn him.

“It was January of 1892, your grandmother, your mother, your father and me.”

I lift a spoon of the tea. He sips a little, then waves it away.

“The train carrying us four pulled in next to the mill. It didn't stop but a minute so we barely had time to tumble off onto the platform with all our bundles. Your
grand-mère
wasn't feeling well. I pushed her up the hill in a cart that somebody brought and then I went back down for all our belongings. Nobody took nothing, because there weren't much worth stealing. But that gang of Irish boys in town were waiting on me. They lit out after me and pelted me with their hard ice balls.”

The Donahue uncles must have been part of that gang. And Dougie and Thomas's father. Dougie is the kind of kid who would have done the same if he'd been born then.

Pépé picks up the bowl of tea and slurps from it. A dribble makes its way down his chin, but I let him be. He don't like me fussing at him when he's telling a story.

“This is no way to start life in a new country is what I told your father when I stumbled in again. I was bone tired from my second trip up that miserable hill and from leaving my farm at such a mighty age and from the blood streaming down out of the cut in the back of my head. ‘The Irish don't want us taking away their jobs,’ your father told me.” Pépé snorts at the idea of that the way he does every time at this point in the story.

But my father was right. The Irish got here before us, but when they started wanting more money, then the mill sent agents up to Quebec looking for big Franco-Catholic families to hire.

It was Mamère's idea that she and Papa come down to work in the mills and my father agreed. But they knew they couldn't leave her parents behind.

I never met my
grand-mère
‘cause she died two years after they got here. “Back in Canada, she would have lived,” Pépé is always reminding my father. And what can my father say to that?

Pépé got work that first year in the mill, unloading the bales of cotton. It's the hardest job of all, but he had a
strong back and it meant he could be outside. Then when Delia got old enough to go in, he quit for good and took to fishing the river in the summer and keeping the garden. For a while, he peddled vegetables from the back of a wagon to the other mill workers near us and in the larger towns north of ours. He was happy ‘cause the growing season was longer in Vermont than back home in Canada. First frost sometimes holds off until October and you can plant by the end of May. After school, me and Henry weeded with him. Henry has the patience of a farmer, Pépé says. Not me. I'm always yanking the carrots out of the dirt before they're ready.

He's nodded off again. I catch the bowl just before his fingers let it go.

The mill bell is ringing. I can hear the workers starting to make their way up French Hill, where we live. There's no Irish Hill or Polish Hill. We're the only ones got a hill named for us, maybe ‘cause there's so many of us.

There is a Snake Hill. Mamère says that one must be named for the mill owners or the landlords or the superintendents. My father don't laugh like the rest of us when she says things like that. He sits back and lets her do the talking. But later, through the wall, I hear his low steady voice warning her to watch her tongue.

“Nosy old Madame Boucher must have told French Johnny to follow me,” I tell the family later. “That's how he found Arthur.” I'm still feeling sick to my stomach about this. If it hadn't been for me, Arthur could be miles away by now.

“Where did he think he was going to run to?” Delia asks.

We are sitting around the supper table. Now Pépé has his soup bowl in his bed. He is dribbling bits of food across the blanket. We never bother to clean it up until he's finished.