Counting on Grace Read Free Page B

before any of us kids was born, the town still talks about it. Strange thing is that boy's little brother, Mr. René Dupree,is the stationmaster now. He also sorts the mail and runs the mill store, where we all buy our supplies.

    That afternoon whistle always gets Pépé going and he tells me the same story over and over. I don't mind. I want to block out the sound of Arthur screaming that ugly word at me.
    Pépé is already talking when I set up the board that holds his tea bowl on his lap. He knocks his pipe against his other hand even though nothing comes out.
    “I'll tell you about the time we come down on the train, Grace.”
    I nod like I never did hear that story before. I watch the whole time he's drinking so the hot tea don't tip over and burn him.
    “It was January of 1892, your grandmother, your mother, your father and me.”
    I lift a spoon of the tea. He sips a little, then waves it away.
    “The train carrying us four pulled in next to the mill. It didn't stop but a minute so we barely had time to tumble off onto the platform with all our bundles. Your
grand-mère
wasn't feeling well. I pushed her up the hill in a cart that somebody brought and then I went back down for all our belongings. Nobody took nothing, because there weren't much worth stealing. 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.”
    The Donahue uncles must have been part of that gang. And Dougie and Thomas's father. Dougie is the kind of kid who would have done the same if he'd been born then.
    Pépé picks up the bowl of tea and slurps from it. A dribble makes its way down his chin, but I let him be. He don't like me fussing at him when he's telling a story.
    “This is no way to start life in a new country is what I told your father when I stumbled in again. I was bone tired from my second trip up that miserable hill and from leaving my farm at such a mighty age and from the blood streaming down out of the cut in the back of my head. ‘The Irish don't want us taking away their jobs,’ your father told me.” Pépé snorts at the idea of that the way he does every time at this point in the story.
    But my father was right. The Irish got here before us, but when they started wanting more money, then the mill sent agents up to Quebec looking for big Franco-Catholic families to hire.
    It was Mamère's idea that she and Papa come down to work in the mills and my father agreed. But they knew they couldn't leave her parents behind.
    I never met my
grand-mère
‘cause she died two years after they got here. “Back in Canada, she would have lived,” Pépé is always reminding my father. And what can my father say to that?

    Pépé got work that first year in the mill, unloading the bales of cotton. It's the hardest job of all, but he had astrong back and it meant he could be outside. Then when Delia got old enough to go in, he quit for good and took to fishing the river in the summer and keeping the garden. 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. He was happy ‘cause the growing season was longer in Vermont than back home in Canada. First frost sometimes holds off until October and you can plant by the end of May. After school, me and Henry weeded with him. Henry has the patience of a farmer, Pépé says. Not me. I'm always yanking the carrots out of the dirt before they're ready.
    He's nodded off again. I catch the bowl just before his fingers let it go.
    The mill bell is ringing. I can hear the workers starting to make their way up French Hill, where we live. There's no Irish Hill or Polish Hill. We're the only ones got a hill named for us, maybe ‘cause there's so many of us.
    There is a Snake Hill. Mamère says that one must be named for the mill owners or the landlords or the superintendents. My father don't laugh like the rest of us when she says things like that. He sits