Counting on Grace (4 page)

“Massachusetts,” I say. “Across the border.”

“What was the stupid boy thinking?” Delia says. “Vermont and Massachusetts. It's all the same country.”

“There's a border between Canada and America,” I say.

Delia laughs. “Borders between the states don't count the same as borders between countries.”

I shrug, pretend I knew that all along.

My father snorts. “There are mills all over the place down there. Minute they see Arthur wandering the roads, they'll put him right to work.”

Arthur might know how to read big books, but suddenly I think he's not so smart about other things. Like getting along in Massachusetts all by himself.

“He's a lazy one,” says Mamère, sitting down. “He should have gone in last year, soon as his father died. Boy needs a firm hand.”

“Miss Lesley says he's so smart he could be a lawyer or a doctor.”

“That Miss Lesley,” my mother says. “People got—”

I cut her off. “Miss Lesley says I'm one of her best readers.”

“Don't be rude to Mamère,” Pépé barks at me from his bed.

“Pardon,” I say, but I use English. For Pépé, that's rude too. He gives me a look, but I pretend not to see.

“Good thing Arthur will be doffing for his mother,” says Delia. “Mrs. Trottier's machine is down more than it's running.”

“I told her today Delia won't be standing in for her no more.” Mamère smiles at my older sister.

“I'm getting my own frames next week,” says Delia. “Monday.” She's all puffed up with herself.

“That means,
mademoiselle
, that soon as school lets out, you'll be doffing for me,” Mamère says, pointing her wooden spoon at me.

“I can start now,” I say proudly. “Tomorrow even.”

Everybody looks at me.

“Grace got put out of school,” says Henry. I kick him under the table. I wanted to be the one to tell them.

“Perfect,” says Mamère. She's looking right at me. “Just when I need you.”

My heart beats fast. Imagine Mamère needing me as much as she needs Delia.

“With Grace working, we'll have two and a half more dollars a week,” says Papa, excited. Ever since he got sick, we've been trying to catch up. Even with Mamère and Delia working full-time and Papa in the picking room now, it seems the store bill gobbles up all the money. “Not right away, of course,” Papa adds. “She's got to be trained.”

“I know how to doff,” I say. Well, I almost know. From standing next to Delia summers when I carry in the dinner pails.

Everybody starts talking at the same time.

“You're a quick one, Grace,” my mother says. “You'll pick it up fast. We'll have to take in your papers. Tomorrow we'll go see French Johnny first thing.”

I nod. You can't work in the mill till you're fourteen and I'm only twelve and two months. But Mamère knows how to get the right papers.

“I'll be making four and a half now,” Delia says.

“We can pay off the bill at the store,” says my father.

“Did you hear that,
mon père?”
Mamère yells with her face close to his beard. “Meat in your pea soup. Grace is coming into the mill.”

“Mon
petit oiseau
, she is going home with me,” Pépé says. “This summer.”

Nobody pays him mind.

I jump to my feet and trot around the table. “Grace in the mill, money in the till,” I call, patting first Henry on the head, then Delia, then Papa. “Grace to doff and spin, money in the bin.” Pat on Mamère's head even though she tries to duck when she sees me coming. The others all begin to laugh and then Mamère gives that funny snort that means I've even gotten her going. I dance up to Pépé and pick up his hands and swing them back and forth as if we're turning round the room in a waltz.

Papa tunes up his accordion and Mamère begins to sing
“Si J'avais Ma Fronde,”
which means “If I Had a Slingshot.”

My father taps the beat with his foot and draws the sound out of the black bellows with one hand, while his fingers play the little keyboard on the side. My mother's voice skips along right behind. They don't take their eyes off each other for the whole song. The music always changes them. They look as if they've been glued together.

They met back in Canada when my father was hired to play and call a dance. Papa told us my mother stood in the front row for the first
chanson à répondre
and after that, he couldn't look at anybody else. She always says “Hush up” when he tells that story, but she don't mean it.

They start up a second tune about a growling old woman that reminds me of Madame Boucher. Delia grabs Henry for a dance and I jump up on the table and stomp my bare feet on the bare wood. The dishes are knocking about
and Mamère waves at me to get down, but she is laughing all the same. Pépé is keeping time with his wooden spoon, tik-tokking it against the wall.

When the banging starts, I'm sure it's Madame Boucher upstairs telling us to quiet down.

But no—somebody is knocking at the door. The accordion sighs into silence and Mamère stops in the middle of a verse.

“Entrez,”
my father says.

It's Miss Lesley.

“I hope I'm not interrupting.” She's standing just inside the open door.

My mother's face is flushed red and she pats a thread of her brown hair back into place. “Come in,” she says, but she looks as if she means go away.

I hop quick off the table and back into the shadow of the stove, next to Pépé's bed.

“I heard the music,” says Miss Lesley, stepping inside. “I should have known Grace came from a dancing family. Her feet are never still.”

Nobody says a word. That makes Miss Lesley fiddle with the fringe on the shawl around her shoulders.

“Mr. and Mrs. Forcier, you have heard that Grace left school today?”

I didn't leave. You run me out the door.

“Yes, that's fine with us,” says my father. “Her mother needs a new doffer.”

“Grace tells me Delia will be getting her own frames soon,” says Miss Lesley. She is picking up each word and
putting it down in its own special place, the way she does with the pens on that high desk she stands behind in the schoolroom.

Delia was never no good at school. She couldn't wait to get out of there and Miss Lesley remembers that.

“Monday,” says Delia proudly.

“Grace will doff for me,” says Mamère.

“Grace is a good student,” says Miss Lesley. “It will be a shame to lose her.”

“You told me to go,” I cry out, and they all turn to stare at me.

Miss Lesley is the first to look away. “I was hasty. I want you to let her stay in school longer, Madame Forcier.”

The word
madame
is part of her begging. She is begging to keep me. Suddenly Mamère and Miss Lesley are fighting over me.

“Why don't I cut myself in two?” I ask. “Half of me for the mill and half for school.”

Nobody laughs. Delia waves at me to hush.

With one long step, my mother is suddenly standing right next to my teacher. Miss Lesley shrinks a little.

“You were kind to come for a visit, Mademoiselle Lesley,” my mother says in a big voice with her heavy accent. The word
mademoiselle
is part of my mother saying no.

She rests a hand on Miss Lesley's shoulder where the shawl is slipping sideways. She ain't exactly pushing, but they move together toward the door. “Another time we will offer you coffee, but the morning mill bell will ring soon enough, won't it?”

Just for a moment Miss Lesley seems the tougher, when she plants both her feet. “You will regret this. The girl could do so much more with her life.”

“Yes, there will be time for that, I'm sure,” says my mother, her voice tight. “But first we have to eat. And buy shoes and another blanket. And fatten up my father so he don't sicken again next winter. You understand.” It is an order. If you do not understand, you should.

The door opens and closes and Miss Lesley is gone from our French Hill kitchen like a piece of dust blown out by the wind. I wonder if maybe I dreamed her there.

After Miss Lesley leaves, we stand for a minute without speaking.

“I'm sure that's her first visit to French Hill,” my father says with a chuckle.

Mamère looks at the rest of us as if she's coming out of a daze. Then she snaps to attention.

“Delia,” she says, “do Grace's hair so it's ready in the morning. Find her your old smock. Henry, clear the dishes and clean up your grandfather. I'll find Grace's papers. Tomorrow first thing, we'll go to see French Johnny.”

Delia sits me on the bed. Every girl in the mill has to have her hair bound up so it don't get caught in the machines. Nobody's bothered with my hair since before Mass on Sunday so Delia's taking out five days of knots.

I try to pull away from her, but Delia's fingers are strong from three years in the mill. She holds tight.

I don't cry out. I don't ever let on that something hurts me. I'd rather drink my own blood.

“Be still, Grace,” Delia says. “I'll tell you the story of the cotton.”

I settle down.

She says, “Think about a cotton-picking girl smaller than you, dragging a bag behind her through the fields. She lives in the South. It's hot all the time. She snatches the cotton from the plants, one-hand snatch, two-hand snatch, step, one-hand, two-hand snatch, step.”

“That sounds like Papa calling a dance,” I say.

Delia straightens my head and starts the comb working through another clump of hair.

The cotton travels on the train from the Southern pickers to the Northern doffers. I close my eyes and imagine a long white rope stretching from that cotton-picking girl all the way to me.

“When the cotton gets here, the bales get opened,” Delia goes on.

“That's what Pépé used to do. And Papa before he got moved up.” For a whole year, Papa was loom fixer in the weaving room, but he got a weakness in his bones from moving in and out under the machines. One day they brought him home on a board ‘cause his legs wouldn't hold him up no more. Mamère started in the spinning room that week to make up the extra money lost. She never come out.

It took Papa six weeks to get his legs to work right and by the time he was ready to work again, Mr. Wilson, the overseer, had given his own son the loom fixer job.
Everybody says the boy's lousy at it, nowhere near as good as Papa.

Delia's voice soothes while her fingers pull and straighten.

“The balers pick through the cotton just like I'm doing with this tangle of hair. The cotton's got leaves and grass and twigs caught up in it. And Southern bugs who took a big long trip on the train.”

“I don't have bugs in my hair,” I say, so she picks something out and shows me a beetle with a hard shiny shell, squirming between her fingers.

When she drops it on the floor, it skitters away. I would have squished it with my bare foot, but Delia lets living things live, no matter how small or squirmy. She's funny like that. And she still has me by my hair.

“It must have jumped on me today when I was down by the river looking for Arthur,” I say.

Delia's voice starts up again.

“So the cotton goes to the carding room and the machine combs out the cotton the way I'm doing now. Takes a long time to make that cotton behave itself.”

Finally the comb is traveling smoothly. I like the way the bone teeth scratch the itchy skin of my scalp.

Delia's talking again. “Then they send the cotton through the drawing frames to make those strands lie separate and flat, one next to another like your hair is doing now. They call it sliver.” That's sliver like
driver
, not sliver like
river.
That's the chant Miss Lesley made up when she was teaching us our vowels.

Papa's working the drawing frames now. I put my hand back to feel, but Delia pushes it aside.

“The sliver gets stretched out and twisted into roving. The roving is wound onto big bobbins, stretched out again and wound onto even smaller bobbins,” says Delia. Now the comb feels like a pencil drawing a line down the back of my head to split my hair in half. She divides those halves into threes to make the braids.

“The spinning machines twist that roving into thread,” Delia says as she winds my hair around her fingers. “So we're the ones who turn it from fat cotton to thin thread. Then we send it down to the weavers, who weave thread into cloth.”

Highest position Delia could ever get in the mill is weaving room supervisor. Delia wants it. Mamère says she's crazy to think that way. Most of the weavers are men and all of them are Irish.

“First the weft,” Delia says, and my head jerks one way. “And then across it the warp.” My head jerks the other.

She starts on the second braid. My head rolls back and forth between her hands, like a baby rocking in a cradle.

“Now you'll be the one doffing for Mamère, Grace,” Delia says.

“I know that.” Does she think I'm stupid?

“Don't mind her too much.”

I keep my body still. Delia's telling me mill secrets. Her voice is low and solemn. If I turn around and look at her, she'll stop talking.

“She gets angry a lot. You'll make mistakes. Bound to happen. When you let those threads break and the machine goes on the loose pulley—”

She don't finish the sentence.

“Her pay goes down too,” I say.

“That's right.”

“And it will be my fault.”

“Right again,” Delia says. She don't speak for a while. Maybe she's thinking of the times Mamère got angry with her. “But she can be funny too,” Delia says quickly. “She sings. And the women act like
she's
their boss, not French Johnny.”

Delia turns me loose.

“What do you mean?”

She grins and starts up a game we played when I was little. She takes someone's part and then I have to make up an answer. “Well, excuse me, Madame Forcier, but may I please take my break over in the weaving room so's that Cordeau boy can see how shiny my hair is this morning?”

“I don't believe so, Mademoiselle Senay,” I say in my best Mamère voice. “If you think I'll agree to that silly idea, then all that cotton you've been spinning must have woven itself right into your brain.”

Delia's smile comes, but it goes just as quick.