Counting on Grace: Chapters 1–4

The youth was in a little trance of astonishment.

"‘He could not accept with asshur—’“
“Assurance,” Miss Lesley says. “That means he could not believe. Henry, sit up and listen. Your sister's reading a story.”

He's come up the hill in his white apron to get a mill rat. That's what they call the kids who work in the mill. We all end up as mill rats.

He's the only man left in the house now, and his mother needs him to doff her frames.

“You say that every time. I do believe lying is still considered a sin in your religion and in mine, monsieur.” The way she says mister in French makes it sound dirty and French Johnny flinches almost like he's been smacked with the ruler.

Every time the overseer sends him up the hill to collect another child, Miss Lesley acts as if one of her arms is getting chopped off.

All eyes turn to my brother in the front row and his bare feet swinging back and forth. He makes them go quiet and glares at me.

She grabs the back of my pinafore with her right hand and pulls it up all into a bunch so's I'm practically choking.

She grabs the back of my pinafore with her right hand and pulls it up all into a bunch so's I'm practically choking.

Then she steers me out the door of the schoolroom with my feet barely skimming the ground.

For a scrawny woman, Miss Lesley is strong when she wants to be.

If I'm not in school or at home tending to my grandfather, then I'm at Sunday Mass in the room above the store we use for a church or I'm stopping in at the mill to bring something to my mother or father.

She has airs and calls herself portly. That's just a fake word for fat, especially when your belly swells from the money you make off your own people.

You need to push hard to get the door through the brambles and briars growing round it.

“Just the river going over the rocks. Papa says the water's high even for May.”
He winces. Maybe at the word Papa ‘cause he don't have a father no more to tell him things.

Every night we kneel in a circle around him so that he can lead the family rosary and bless us before we sleep.

It took two of the men coming up the hill from the mill to coax him home again.

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.

Pépé got work that first year in the mill, unloading the bales of cotton.

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.

There is a Snake Hill. Mamère says that one must be named for the mill owners or the landlords or the superintendents.

“Grace in the mill, money in the till,” I call, patting first Henry on the head, then Delia, then Papa.

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 face is flushed red and she pats a thread of her brown hair back into place.

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

“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.”

“You will regret this. The girl could do so much more with her life.”

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

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.

“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.”

“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.

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

Delia's telling me mill secrets. Her voice is low and solemn.

You'll make mistakes. Bound to happen.

She drops her old mill smock over my head.