Counting on Grace (5 page)

“Are you girls fooling around in there?” calls Mamère.

“Yes, Mamère,” I answer just as Delia puts her finger to her lips.

“Stop it,” she hisses. “Don't get her fussing at us tonight. It's bad enough all day long.”

We wait, but Mamère don't bother to answer my nonsense.

I liked having my sister hold on to me for that time. With Delia holding you, you wouldn't blow away like a speck of lint.

I run my fingers down the bumpy road of my braid.

She slaps my hand away. “Stop messing. That should hold for the night. Won't take me two seconds to pin it up in the morning.”

Which is good, I think, ‘cause two seconds is just about all we got in the morning before the mill bell starts to ring.

That night in bed with Henry tucked in between me and Delia, I think about Miss Lesley. She climbed up French Hill to get me back in school.

And we was all dancing and laughing and Mamère started singing again just ‘cause I'm going into the mill.

But then I remember what Delia said about our mother in the spinning room and a little shiver runs round my skin.

I hear Pépé snoring in the kitchen. And then loud and clear right on the other side of the wall from my head, I hear my mother say, “It must be in the trunk.”

We keep the important things in Pépé's trunk, the one he dragged up the hill from the train. The Bible, the tiny painting of Grand-mère by a wandering peddler who come through Riviere-du-Loup, the deed to Pépé's land, the rosary, my first Communion card.

If we ever have to leave in a hurry, that trunk is always packed, ready to go.

“Come to bed, Adeline,” says my father's voice. “We'll look again in the morning.”

“No time tomorrow,” she says. More banging around. Then I hear her call, “Found it.”

I'll never fall asleep, I think, but the next thing I know Delia is pinning up my braids when I'm only half-awake.

She drops her old mill smock over my head.

“Remember today—right for waste,” she says, putting that hand in the empty pocket. She tucks a kerchief in my left hand and shoves it into the other one. “Left for lint. That's to remind you to clear the cotton from your nose and throat. Don't mix them up or you'll be sorry.”

She leans down to look into my face. “Grace, every second. Pay attention.”

I've been in the mill lots of times.

Summers ever since I was nine, I've been cooking the hot meal for Mamère and Papa and Delia and taking in the dinner pails in the middle of the day. Delia let me push her bobbin dolly. I played mumblety-peg or roll the bobbin with Dougie and Bridget and Felix when he was a summer sweeper boy in the spinning room. And grease skating. That's the best. Thomas invented that game. Too bad he can't play it no more with his twisted foot.

With all the oil dripping off the machines, bare feet slide around easy. The boys draw a line at the end of one alley, between the frames where French Johnny can't see us, and we run and set our legs into a long slide. I'm skinny for my age and I've got big feet, but I can go the farthest ‘cause I know how to keep myself low to the floor. Sometimes you slip and fall. That's a chance you take.

But now I'm here to work, not play.

The air in the mill is stuffy and linty and sweaty at the same time ‘cause all day long water sprays down on the frames from little hoses in the ceiling. Wet keeps the threads from breaking. The windows are shut tight even in the summer. You don't breathe too deep for fear of what you might be sucking down your throat.

People complain about the noise, but it's not so bad in the spinning room. The belts up above our heads slap and the big roll drives turn and the bobbins spin like a thousand bees buzzing. You get used to it so you almost miss it when you step outside. The world seems too quiet all of a sudden.

The weaving room is the worst. In there you get a pounding sound every time a beam slaps into place. And there are a hundred beams slapping at once and the whole floor shakes and jumps. Most of the people who work in weaving go deaf early on. That's why I say Delia should stay in the spinning room even if she won't make as much money.

You're not supposed to work in the mill until you're fourteen, but visiting is fine. French Johnny likes us kids going in and out all the time. He says, that way we get used to the work.

The only people you worry about are the state inspectors. When French Johnny blows the whistle, all the kids in the mill, even the ones just visiting, know to run as fast as we can so he can hide us in the elevator that carries the cotton between the floors. The inspector always stops in at the front office and dawdles around there for a while so us kids have time to hide. Seems to me he don't really want to find us. We skitter across the room like those big
cockroaches that come up through the floorboards in the summertime. Our mothers make a wall out of themselves to hide us.

It gets hot in that old elevator and the inspector can take hours to look through the mill, top to bottom. A couple of kids fainted last August and French Johnny had to throw cold water on them when he slid open the metal doors.

I didn't feel so good myself, but I didn't say a word.

“You look kind of green,” Pierre Gagnon said to me when we filed out.

“Green Grace, green Grace,” Felix shouted, and everybody called me that for a while. When nobody was looking, I smacked Felix hard on the top of his head. By the time he turned around I was gone. I've got fast feet, fast hands and fast fingers.

Now I'm really going to need them.

French Johnny is the first Franco second hand we ever had in the mill. Mr. Wilson, the overseer, is an English man from England and he wrinkles up his nose whenever French Johnny is near like he might catch something bad from him. Mamère says Mr. Wilson wanted another one of his sons to get the job as second hand, but the boy hated the mill so much, he run off and joined the army. Nobody else around who could do the job so the superintendent told Mr. Wilson he had to hire the Frenchman.

French Johnny don't have an office, but he has a corner
of the spinning room and even though it's got no walls, we all know not to go near there unless we're invited.

When he sees Mamère waiting with me, he finishes fastening on his white apron and straightens that bow tie. It looks kind of puny flopping around next to French Johnny's big thick neck, but he's proud to wear it ‘cause then everybody knows he's second hand, even strangers coming into the mill. When he's done making us wait, he nods for us to take two steps into his area.

“My girl is here to doff,” Mamère says.

“Got her papers?”

“Of course,” says my mother, and hands him a piece of paper with some kind of seal on it. I stand on my tiptoes to look. It must have been hidden at the very bottom of the trunk.

French Johnny takes a long time. He reads pretty slow. “Says her name is Claire.”

“Grace is her middle name. Claire after her grandmother.”

Claire, I'm wondering. “Mamère, I never—”

My mother steps on my foot and goes on smiling up at French Johnny. He grins.

“Your girl is a talker. Just ask Arthur,” he says with a nod over his shoulder at Mrs. Trottier's frame.

“Don't I know,” says my mother. She lifts her boot to test if I'm going to keep quiet now. My bare toes are throbbing.

“I didn't tell you where Arthur was hiding,” I blurt out, and down comes the boot. I yelp.

“Hope she's as quick with her fingers as she is with her mouth,” says French Johnny. He's looking right at my mother.

“Look how Delia's done,” says Mamère. “Forcier women are born to spin.”

“And sing?” he asks.

Mamère shrugs, but her eyes sparkle.

In the space between them, I can see Arthur piecing up ends as fast as he can. But he's too late. A scavenger roll's already clattered to the floor, which means his threads are breaking all up and down the frame. They're going to have to shut down the machine to clean up the mess.

Even before he turns around, French Johnny knows what's happened. His ears are always cocked to the frames. When one of them goes down, it might as well be one of his children crying out for something.

“Two weeks’ learner's pay starting today,” he calls back over his shoulder as he goes to check Mrs. Trottier's frame.

I'm going to work. Right now.

“Arthur's got slow fingers,” says Mamère. “Must run in the family. No wonder they only cover the two frames.”

She is walking me toward her own six. Delia's already starting them up.

“Mamère, who's Claire?” I shout.

Mamère knows how to tilt her head and pitch her voice so I can hear her above the hum and buzz of the spindles. “The baby girl that died.”

I feel a jolt in my stomach.

“When?”

“Fourteen years ago.”

“You never told me.”

She shrugs. “You don't count on keeping your children till they turn ten. No point. My mother lost four.”

“What did the baby die from?”

“Fever. Never knew the cause. Little poorly thing right from the beginning. No use crying about that.”

She says all this while marching across the spinning floor, waving at one person, then speaking in another's ear as we pass, making her hoot with laughter. All the spinners lift their heads when Mamère goes by except for Arthur's mother. She don't dare lift her head for nothing now that French Johnny has gotten that machine of hers up and running again. Won't be long before her other one goes down.

I trot along behind thinking about all those years when Mamère wasn't counting on me living past the age of ten. It's too big and strange an idea to take in. I decide it can't be true. She must have known I was tougher than that sickly older sister of mine.

Then I have no time to think about anything but bobbins.

“Stand still, Grace.”

Delia sounds like Miss Lesley. Why is everybody always telling me the same thing?

“I'm not doing nothing wrong.”

“Keep your smock away from that frame. You need to mind so you do this right.”

“I already know what to do. You don't have to show me.”

We are shouting at each other even louder than you need to in the spinning room. She won't let me touch nothing.

“How am I supposed to know how to do it if you keep pushing me aside?”

“By watching,” she says, smacking my fingers when they get close. “Listen to me. Mamère runs six frames. Twelve sides. One hundred and thirty-six bobbins per side. That will keep your feet dancing, girl. We start them up one after
another and each frame needs to be doffed at least once a shift.” She nods up at a board posted on the far wall. “That's the schedule but Mamère pays it no mind. She doffs when she's ready.”

I knew the frames were big. If you could take one of those frames home, it would stretch from our front door right through the kitchen over the garden to the outhouse in the back corner of the yard. Twelve times one hundred and thirty-six bobbins. I can't even count that high, but my hands are going to touch every one of them wooden babies I don't know how many times in a day. First when they've got fat cotton bellies and second when they're skinny and naked. The thought of my little bobbin babies gets me to giggling, which makes Delia cuff my head.

“Why'd you do that?”

“Grace, are you watching?”

I'm trying.

All the time she's talking and the frame is still running, Delia is unhooking a long wooden roll and guiding it out from between the spinning yarns. “Right now I'm clearing the scavenger rolls of lint, but you won't be doing this, you hear, Grace? This is Mamère's work and you better not mess with it. She's only now making me do it ‘cause I'm practicing for my own frames.”

“You better not mess with it,” I repeat in that Delia voice that thinks it knows everything. I burst out laughing at the prissy pinched look on her face.

“Grace,” she spits, her face up close to mine. “Stop with your fooling. Right now.”

I stop.

Delia feeds that wooden scavenger roll back in between the running ends. Everything is moving so fast that I can't make my eyes stay on the part they need to look at. All I know is if Delia moves that roll one little inch out of line, she'll slice through a bunch of ends and we'll have a mess on our hands.