Counting on Grace (8 page)

Back in Canada, the people always collect themselves together on the steps after church and exchange news. Pépé told me that Sunday Mass was the only time you'd see your neighbors. Some of them had to drive two hours each way from their farms to get to church.

We still gather and talk even though now we're standing on the front porch of Mr. Dupree's store and it's spitting distance to our houses and to the mill, where we see each other every day. But this is the one time we can talk without the machines at our elbows.

Arthur is standing next to his mother. For once he don't have no book in his hand, but he looks restless. This is the tomorrow Miss Lesley was talking about and I want to know what the two of them are doing together. He may be her best reader, but I am the second best and that gives me rights.

Mamère's hand curls around my neck.
“Bonjour
, Grace,” says Père Alain.

“Bonjour, mon Père,”
I say, and drop into a curtsy. Mamère and the cure start in talking about the weather and Père Alain's sister, who's a nun in a little town right across the border in Massachusetts.

“Monsieur Cordeau is taking his uncle back to Riviere-du-Loup soon,” says Père Alain. “And your father says he'll be going along too.”

Mamère frowns. “Pépé's not right in his head,” she says. “He's not sure where he is.”

“And you started in the mill this week, Grace?”

“Yesterday,
mon Père.”

“You work hard now. You'll be a great help to your family.”

“Yes,
mon Père.”

“And Delia has her own frames now,” Mamère says. At the sound of her name, Delia walks over to join us.

I look around to see Mrs. Trottier standing in the same place as before at the edge of a group of women, but Arthur is gone. He must have slipped away when I wasn't looking. I twist out from under Mamère's hand and run to find him.

The schoolroom door is locked up tight, but when I tiptoe along the edge of the porch and peek in a window, I can see the two of them. Arthur's sitting where he always did right next to me, and Miss Lesley's in my old seat except her legs are stretched out straight and to the side ‘cause her knees don't fit under our little desks. You can't move the
furniture around in the schoolroom. Each bench is screwed right into the desk behind it so nothing gets out of line. That's the way Miss Lesley likes things.

Funny. Only two days ago I was sitting there.

Their heads are bent so close together that Arthur's dark hair looks like it's growing right off Miss Lesley's head. I can't see what book they are reading.

This makes me mad. Why didn't she ask me to come? Why is Arthur so special?

Before I think too long about it, I'm banging on the window. They both look up with scared faces like I've caught them murdering someone. Miss Lesley marches over to the door. I hear her shoot the bolt across and I expect she's going to order me off the porch, but instead she yanks me inside the room and locks the door again.

“I didn't tell her where I was going,” Arthur cries. “She followed me. She's always following me.” All the time he's talking, he's shoving some paper into the cubby under our old desk. It's getting crumpled up. When his hand stops moving, a corner of it is still peeking out.

So they weren't reading. They were writing.

Miss Lesley hushes him. “You're turning into a first-class sneak, Miss Grace,” she says in a quiet voice.

“Why won't you teach me on Sundays too?” I cry. I don't mean to say that. I don't mean to show either one of them that I care one little bit about the stupid old lessons they're having with themselves.

“You never asked me,” Miss Lesley says, and her voice sounds surprised.

It's a wonder when you can shock a grown person. Of course, this time the words that popped out of my mouth surprised me too.

For once, I can't think what to say.

“Have you swallowed your voice?” Miss Lesley asks.

I shake my head, but still I don't say a thing.

“Arthur, shall we let her stay?”

He looks me up and down like I'm some kind of farm animal they're selling at the county fair.

“She'll just keep coming back if we don't. She don't give up.”

He's right. I don't.

“You've got a secret, don't you?” I ask. And no matter what they say to me, I know I'm right. “What are you hiding?”

Miss Lesley puts both hands on my shoulders and steers me around so I'm sitting in my old place. It feels funny. Me and Arthur back in school. Except Miss Lesley ain't teaching us exactly. She's resting herself on top of the next-door desk where Norma and Rose usually sit. Now the three of us are all together like we're plotting something big.

And it turns out we are.

Miss Lesley nods to Arthur and he pulls out the paper and smooths the wrinkles he made when he crunched it up.

“Read it to her,” Miss Lesley says.

“Are you practicing your writing?” I ask.

“Grace, hush for once in your life and listen.”

It's a letter. Arthur's doing the writing. It goes this way.

To Miss Anna Putnam, National Child Labor
Committee, Vermont Chapter, Bennington,
Vermont.

It stops there.

“That's as far as we got,” Arthur says. “Before you barged in.”

“So now you can help us, Grace.”

My brain is whirling around. My feet start shifting under the desk.

“What is that child labor comm—thing?”

“They investigate places where children are not supposed to be working because they are too young. Believe it or not, there are laws against child labor. They're just not enforced,” Miss Lesley says.

“But we need to work. For the money.” I can hear Mamère's voice speaking right through my lips.

“Yes, Grace. But you also need your education. Then when you get older, you'll have a job that makes you much more money than you'll ever get working in the mill.”

“Stop arguing,” Arthur says to me. “You wanna leave?”

I don't. This is more interesting than reading
La justice
to Pépé for the third time this week. Or doing laundry with Mamère. Or weeding.

I'll help them write their dumb old letter. What difference does it make? When that inspector comes, we'll just hide in the elevator the way we always do until he leaves the premises. That's a fancy word Mr. Wilson uses for the mill.

“So back to the letter. What jobs do children do in the mill?”

“Doffing,” I say.

“Besides doffing,” says Miss Lesley.

“Sweeping,” says Arthur. “And carrying the bobbin boxes. They're heavy.”

“Good. Write that down. What else, Grace?”

I'm thinking hard. This is like a test and I want to do well on it. “Some of the boys work in the warping room.”

Arthur writes.

“And what about Thomas?” Miss Lesley asks.

“He was fooling around at the time,” I tell her. “He was standing too close to that gearbox.”

“More accidents happen because of the number of children working in the mill. But Thomas was legally old enough to be working so we'll forget him for now. What else?”

“We clean the machines on Saturdays. And some other times if the roving gets too bunched up. Delia's got scars on her fingers from the cleaning hook.”

“Perfect,” says Miss Lesley, and I smile. I'm passing the test. “Arthur, put down machine maintenance.” Then she writes out that big word for him so he can copy it.

“Why aren't you writing the letter to the committee place?” I ask Miss Lesley.

“She'll get fired if they find out it's coming from her,” Arthur says, and rolls his eyes at me as if everybody is supposed to know that. “You'd better not tell.”

“Who will fire her?”

“The mill owners,” Arthur spits. “They own the mill school.”

“Hush, Arthur,” says Miss Lesley. “Nobody's going to be firing me as long as we keep this quiet. Now sign it this
way.” She writes out another big word for him to copy. It says
Anonymous.

“What does that mean?” I ask.

“It means the person writing the letter don't wish to be known,” Arthur says. He acts like that's something he knew all along, but I bet Miss Lesley just told him that.

“Doesn't wish to be known,” says Miss Lesley. She's always correcting our ways of speaking, but we don't remember from one time to the next.

She reads the letter over, folds it into an envelope and puts a stamp on it. “I'll mail this next week when I take the trolley down to Massachusetts to see my sister. That way nobody in this town will see it going out. Especially Mr. Dupree, the postmaster. He's the nosiest person in the town.”

“Except for Madame Boucher,” I say.

We sit awhile like we got nowhere to go.

“Arthur is staying for a lesson, Grace. You're welcome too if you want.”

I do. We read a story in
Appleton's Reader
‘cause Arthur still has the soldier book. Miss Lesley directs me to read a poem called “The Brown Thrush” by Lucy Larcom.

When I start walking around so's I can read better, Miss Lesley opens her mouth to say something, but she shuts it again. Maybe ‘cause this ain't real school she decides for once that it don't matter what my feet are doing.

When I'm done, she says, “Do you know who Miss Larcom was, Grace?”

I shake my head.

“She worked in the spinning room in a mill in Lowell,
Massachusetts, when she was your age. Fifty years ago. She ended up writing books. You could do that too. As long as you have an education.”

“But you told me underage children don't have to work in Massachusetts,” Arthur says to Miss Lesley.

“Not now. Massachusetts is one state that enforces their child labor laws. But back in the 1840s, girls like Lucy couldn't wait to get to the mills. They were running away from the drudgery of the farms.”

“So that's why you were running away to Massachusetts,” I blurt out to Arthur. “So they wouldn't put you in a mill.”

“Of course. I'm not stupid.”

I look back and forth from one to the other. Seems Miss Lesley and Arthur talk about everything. I wonder again about all this happening right under my nose without me knowing it. Maybe it started when Arthur's father died. Maybe Miss Lesley took his place even though she's a woman.

On the way up to French Hill, Arthur tells me the story of the soldier in his book.

“Henry's worried that he's going to run away when the battle starts.”

“His name is Henry then. Just like I said when we started that book.” This is a wonder to me, that I could guess the same name for the youth as the man who wrote the book did. Maybe it means I will be a writer like Miss
Lucy Larcom. Except I think the poem about the brown thrush was boring and too-easy reading for me.

“Stop interrupting,” says Arthur. “The soldier is wishing he's back on the farm, milking the brindle cow.”

“Is there fighting yet?”

“No. Any minute now.”

“You tried to run away,” I say.

“Maybe I won't need to now. If those child labor people come, they could shut down the mill.”

My heart stops. “If they close the mill, we won't have jobs.”

“There's other work to do. We can go back to the farm and milk the brindle cow,” he says with a grin.

“That's what Pépé wants, but my mother says that farming is much worse than the mill. She hated it just like Miss Lucy Larcom and those other mill girls. She never got paid one penny for her work.”

“Nothing is worse than the mill,” says Arthur before he turns off into his own house.

They would never shut the mill, I tell myself. Not ‘cause of a bunch of kids.

“Arthur,” I yell. “What does brindle mean?”

But he don't hear me.

I name my machines to help me keep them straight. The ones that give me the most trouble are boys. Albert, Edwin and George. Albert's got just about everything wrong that can go wrong. Even Mamère has trouble with him, but the machine fixers don't have time for little adjustments here and there. Mamère says long as we keep an eye on Albert, fuss over him, then he'll keep on working for us. Just like a man, she says. That's where I got the idea to name the bad ones after boys.