Counting on Grace Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    “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