Counting on Grace Read Online Free PDF

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.”

5
MY PAPERS
    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 bigcockroaches 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