Machine Dreams (4 page)

She thought funerals were barbaric. We had talked it all out. She wrote her own service and wanted to be cremated. The service? I really don’t remember. She didn’t pretend to be educated; it was only a poem she’d written, a list of quotations, two hymns. Very simple. We’d thought the cremation would be simple as well, but it was more difficult to arrange than you’d think. Not a usual practice then, not here. Some of her friends disapproved and tried to dissuade me. Maybe she’d made such a choice, they said, but she wasn’t herself. Legally, I had to get permission from the State and from each County whose lines we crossed in transporting the body. Then we took her ninety miles, my brother and sister and I, in a rented ambulance. The place was a plain one-story building with a cellar and no sign outside but
THOMPSON BROTHERS.
We arrived in the evening and were to come back for the ashes the next morning. The man who spoke with us was very kind. I wanted to know everything; he explained the whole process. He said the words “white heat” and showed me the crematorium, three long ovens built back into the wall. There was a strong steel mesh, very fine, with a sort of flat tray below, “so the ashes stay pure and are contained.” He seemed to want to reassure me about that.

I knew it was only her body, and I hadn’t let myself open the casket except once. Still, it was strange to leave her there. Walking out of the building was physically hard, as though I were moving against a wind. That night in the hotel I didn’t sleep. I
can’t describe my feeling. The others slept, or seemed to, but I sat up and kept a light on. If I lay down or closed my eyes, I felt so far away, as though the bed rested on air. When we could afford a stone, she’d said to put simply her name, the years, and
It is over.
That phrase ran in my mind all night until it lost its meaning.

We went for the ashes very early, seven
A.M.
When I saw them I felt a first easing, a release, handed me like a gift. They were more like sand than ashes. Irregular grains the color of ivory; soft and rough to the touch. So clean they smelled of nothing. I kept them all winter in a small brass box. One day in the spring, I scattered them in the garden at home. Must have been March. Jonquils had budded early and the wind moved across them in a swath.

I thought my marriage would work. Maybe you always think that, you have to. Times had been so hard for everyone. When the war was over and when the thing with Mother was finished, all I wanted was to have a family. Not just for something to do, but because I knew what family meant.

People had lost whatever was taken in those years and survived, and a lot of them married, had children, quickly. It was denying what had happened in a way, saying life had started again and you could trust it. For me that feeling was delayed, as if the war didn’t really stop until my mother died. She had first gotten sick in wartime; we had always struggled—with the sickness, with money, in the shadow of the war—and then suddenly the war was over and the men were home, but we were just starting the hardest part, that last six months. I married and Mitch moved in with us. His presence helped but he wasn’t directly involved; it wasn’t his job to be. Mother and I saw it through. Then I took a year, some time for myself, and I
wanted
my children; she had wanted them for me.

And family wasn’t just who you were married to, not here. Late forties, the end of that decade, people were relieved. There were jobs and money and no more catastrophes. People knew each other, they helped each other. A lot of people around town were good to me, good to us. Family was more than blood relation.

Your father and I lived with Gladys Curry while our own house was being built. We’d sold Mother’s place to get the money to buy land, and Gladys let us stay in her spare bedroom. What a pistol she was—still working at the dress shop then, hard as nails and took no truck from anyone. We weren’t paying rent and I did a lot of work around the house, or tried to: I could spend all morning scrubbing the kitchen floor; she’d come home, get down on her knees right in front of me, and do it over to suit herself.

But she was a lot of fun and said outrageous things—especially considering she’d known me since I was a little girl, and her daughter, Jewel—her one child—had married my older brother. They’d lived with Gladys awhile too, before moving to Ohio, and we filled the space they’d left. Gladys was a widow, one of those women three times stronger than the man she married. She’d tell me that every woman should have a husband and a lover; it took at least two men to stay this side of the desert; no one man had sense enough to take care of things and it was useless expecting him to. She’d had her daughter at seventeen, and her husband had died in a mine accident when she was thirty; she never did marry again but had a boyfriend for years. He kept a room downtown but spent most of his time with her—she cooked and cleaned for him and cajoled him and entertained him—she said she was no fool, she owned her house and her car and why on earth should she marry again.

We’d moved out to the other house by the time you were born, but Gladys was around a lot all those first few years. When you and Billy were toddlers, we’d dress you both up every summer afternoon and take you somewhere. You were like two dolls, done up in matching blue and white piqué sunsuits. We’d show you off to her neighbors in town. Mrs. Talbot, across the street from Gladys, would sit on her leafy porch and shake her head. She thought I took too many pains keeping my children so clean. Especially Billy. “You wash that child too much—you’re going to sap his strength. You’re washing his strength away.”

Gladys and I would take you both down to the train station. The trains were still running then. Patchen, the engineer, would hold Billy on his lap and drive the engine back and forth across
the yard. Then he’d hand him back to me covered with soot and crowing. Those engines were coal burners, dirty and loud. You were three. While Billy rode, you stood without a word and never took your eyes from that square of filthy window in the cab. I remember Patchen’s old striped hat and those yellow gauntlets he wore—elbow-length padded gloves covered with coal dust. He would say to me, “Best let that boy alone. A boy can raise himself.” Gladys said she’d never raised a boy, but she doubted they could fix their own meals or mend their own clothes any more than a man could.

She was there the night you almost died of pneumonia—you were five months old. Your father was out of town and there was a blizzard; the phone lines were down and the car was drifted in. You couldn’t seem to breathe if we laid you down, so we kept you awake all night, upright, to keep your lungs from filling—took turns walking the hall and holding you. You were so small but you’d open your mouth when you felt the spoon near your face; you wanted that bitter medicine. By dawn we were giving you whiskey with an eyedropper, a drop at a time. Gladys walked a mile through that deep snow to get to a working phone, and the doctor came by seven. Somehow you were better and he said just to keep you at home, it would only be worse to try to get you to town.

Stayed way below zero that whole December and January, one storm after another. If you hadn’t been breast-fed from the beginning, I don’t think you would have made it. Several people lost young babies that winter—influenza and pneumonia. Adults got sick and didn’t get well till spring.

I was always afraid when you were sick because you couldn’t take drugs—you never could—allergic to sulpha and penicillin, and almost anything affected you badly. You were always so strong, but if you really got sick it was a matter of luck that you didn’t get worse and worse.

You couldn’t even take motion-sickness pills. Once in summer Gladys and I took her old Plymouth up to Ohio to visit Jewel and my brother—you were a little over a year old and Billy would be born in two months. Gladys did all the driving because I was too
pregnant. We weren’t on the road an hour before you went crazy on those pills—thrashing and screaming, throwing yourself against the dash. “We’ve got to stop,” Gladys said. “She’s going to bounce that baby right out of you.” So Gladys walked up and down the road with you while I sat and sweated on those prickly car seats; they were wooly and as full of springs as an overstuffed chair. When she brought you back, you had quieted and your eyes were glazed; you went into such a sound sleep that I was worried to death.

You were always too sensitive. Everything that passed through you showed. That’s why I don’t know how you can take the kind of life you have, always moving around. You’ve got too much guts for your own good, and one of these days you’ll come to a dead halt. Sometimes I’m afraid for you; I feel responsible. I stayed married all those years until you and Billy were grown—I only kept going to make you safe. It turned out I couldn’t keep anyone safe. Not you. Not Billy.

Still, you and I will go on and on, despite whatever differences, whatever quarrels. For me, we are what’s left. How are we different? Body and soul, I know—but some things don’t change.

You were late getting born. I drank a bottle of castor oil to start my labor. I remember leaning out the door, still holding the bottle, yelling to the neighbor woman across the road that I’d drunk it all. August, ten in the morning, already hot as Hades. Then there were twenty hours, on and off the delivery table three times that night while other women had their babies and got on with it. I thought you were a boy for sure; no girl would cause such trouble. But when I knew I had a daughter, I was so thankful—like my own mother had come back to me.

I
was born on the farm in Randolph County, 1910, lived there until I was six. Then went to Raynell with my aunt and her husband. He was a conductor on the railroad—big business then, everything went by rail. It was a new job for him and not traditional in the family; they had all been household farmers and worked the mines. Mines weren’t like they are now. Then, there was no automation, mostly crawlspace, and the coal hauled out by mule. Three of the brothers died in the mines, including my father, but I never really knew him, never even remember seeing him. I know he was there sometimes in the summer, because there are photographs.

My mother lived at the farm during her confinement and left right after I was born. The birth certificate gives her name as Icie Younger, but no one ever told me anything about her. Her people were from down around Grafton and she went back to them. When I was selling road equipment for the State I used to travel
through there. Asked after the family several times but no one had ever heard of them.

I grew up living always with one or another of the sisters. In the beginning there were twelve kids in that family, seven boys and five girls; and the farm was five hundred acres. Bess was the youngest, twenty when I was born, and she took care of me. The boys, my uncles, worked all over the county once they were grown, but the sisters stayed home until they married. Even after, they came home in the summers—the sisters and the wives of the brothers, with all the children. The men came for a few weeks and made repairs, helped the old man. They grew their own food but didn’t farm much on the rest of the land—too mountainous and rocky—but all those hills were rich-timbered. The family had already started selling timber to the Eastern businessmen, who came in and clear-cut and paid a fraction of what the trees were worth. Later the mineral rights were sold as well. Hampsons had been in that valley a hundred years with just their neighbors, and didn’t understand much about business.

The farm was beautiful, two big white frame houses cross-pasture from each other, the smaller a guest house, and a plank sidewalk built up off the ground so the women wouldn’t dirty the hems of their dresses on Sundays. The houses had full circular porches with fancy trim, and a black iron fence to keep the barn animals out of the yard. The women held church socials and picnics. They picked berries near the barn and used their big hats for baskets, then were all day making pies.

Church was the only social life, and Coalton Church was a half hour’s wagon ride away; in warm months there was something going on nearly every night. Don’t ask me what. But my uncles had built that little church for the town, and the family gave the land for the graveyard. It’s still called Hampson Cemetery, and most of them are buried there: the grandparents, the parents, all the brothers but Calvin, who left home at seventeen and disappeared out West, and all the sisters but Bess, who is ninety now and the only one left living after Ava died.

Ava died at a hundred, think of that. You remember her funeral. That was the old family plot. Snowing so hard no one could drive past the gate and they had to walk the casket up. Bess
took the death hard. The old house was just down that road, out the Punkin Town turn-off. Foundation still standing, but that trail is steep mud in bad weather.

All those winters the family stayed put, just ate food they’d dried or put up in pantries, and venison the old man shot. They kept one path shoveled through the snow to the barn, and the walls of the path were as high as a man’s shoulders.