Free Counting on Grace by Elizabeth Winthrop Page B

it interested me, I could pay attention better. I don't say nothing to that, but I do know when I'm at the frame, it's easy for my mind to fly off just like an end that ain't piecing up proper. But Arthur is smart and he can think and doff at the same time. I can only do one or the other.
    And no matter what, I cannot please Mamère. There's always an end I haven't caught or a bobbin I've dropped. Things people say get stuck in my head and I waste time fussing over them so I try to close my ears against her voice. She sees that and yells even louder. She don't care no more what the other women in the spinning room think of me ‘cause she's given up on me herself. She's got one good daughter and one bad doffer.
    “I told you she can be that way,” Delia says to me at night when I'm lying stiff in the bed. “Don't pay no mind to it, Grace. It's her way of worrying.”
    “I don't care,” I tell Delia, but the words don't come easy. It's always hard for me to tell a lie.

13
ROPES
    We're trying to keep it a secret, but we're tying Pépé to the bed now. In the beginning, he batted Papa's hands away and spat at the ropes, but Mamère give him some mixture of herbs those first few days that made him quiet. Then he seemed to get used to it. Now he sleeps most of the time. Papa comes home at the dinner break to get him up and feed him something. If the weather is good, Papa sets him in the chair outside our front door for a while so Pépé can turn his face up to the sun.
    We told Madame Boucher that Pépé is much better and we don't need her to look in no more. But Henry knows to lock the door when he leaves for school so the portly Madame don't poke her nose into our business anyway.
    It ain't right for Pépé to be tied down like that. I remember him telling me how much he hated the work inside the mill ‘cause he felt so cooped up.
    One time the circus come through our town on its way south. It didn't stop ‘cause there's no money to be made in a little postage stamp of a town where the mill workers put all their extra pennies in the church basket. But I remember seeing the lion curled up on his side, staring through the bars of his cage as it bumped along the main street of the town behind a wagon. His fur was matted and in some places, the bare skin showed through in patches. He didn't even move or lift his head when Dougie and Thomas threw pebbles at him.
    Pépé used to be as strong as that lion and now he lies still and stares at the wall as if he can see right through it. I want the old Pépé to come back to us. When his eyes are open, they never blink. I still read
La Justice
to him Wednesday nights and I talk to him all the time when I'm home.
    For once, Mamère don't hush me up. Maybe she's glad someone is talking to him. Ever since the night she slapped his face, it's hard for her to look at him.
    I can't tell if he hears me. Sometimes he hums, sometimes he mumbles deep in his throat. But whenever I squeeze his hard bony hand, he squeezes back.

    Sunday morning I wake up choking.
    Delia shakes me. “What's wrong with you?”
    “My throat is swollen shut,” I croak. I was dreaming that all the lint I'd swallowed had come crawling back up from my stomach.
    “Don't be stupid,” says Delia. She puts a hand to my forehead and calls to Mamère that I have a fever.
    Mamère is late for Mass already when she comes in to have a look at me. “You can stay home, Grace. The good Lord understands that we need you doffing tomorrow more than praying today.” But she says this in a low voice so that my father don't hear. “You can let your Pépé up to sit in the sun. When he woke earlier, he was making sense. Just like his old self,” she adds, talking more to the air than to me.
    I nod and when she leaves, I let my pounding head fall back on the mattress. I sleep and wake again to a cry from Pépé.
    He is struggling up, fighting the ropes, but when he sees me, he calms down.
    “I'm here, Pépé,” I say, taking