Mary Coin (12 page)

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

She could tell by his reaction that although he was curious about the particulars of her past, he would not be interested in her future.

18.

Bakersfield, California, 1935

E
arl said “These kids of yours” when they were making too much noise in the back of the car or when a virus of giggles ran from one to the other inside the tent when they should have been bedding down for the night. Still, he smiled when Della put her head on his shoulder during a long car ride, and he loved to make a penny disappear in his sleeve just to elicit Ray’s awed surprise.

“You don’t have to tell me they’re mine,” Mary said, to let him know that she had no expectations of him.

She met him in December, a month after the baby was born. Driving as far from the Dodge groves as her gas would allow, she found day work picking beans and cabbage. The jobs were scarce. The roads were filled with trucks and cars. Families with no cars walked on foot. Some people simply sat by the side of the road as if they’d finally decided to remain in one place and see if the hard times would pass by like bad weather. In Bakersfield, she left Ellie in charge of the others and joined a hiring line. When she reached the front, the foreman looked her over, judged her wizened frame and her bone-thin arms, then pushed the air with his hand as if the wind he created would be enough to blow her away.

The car was nearly out of gas. Her kids hadn’t eaten anything to speak of in two days. “Sign me up,” she said.

“We need to get this harvest pulled before the cold weather comes in.”

“I know what the work is.”

“Move on, ma’am.”

“You’re paying thirty-five cents an hour and you’re turning me down? Bet you won’t let me work for free, neither.”

A man behind her laughed.

“We don’t need troublemakers,” the foreman said. “I’m telling you to move on.”

Two goons stood behind the foreman, cradling rifles. She wasn’t surprised. She’d seen a man leap across a table and try to strangle a bursar on payday because he didn’t think he was getting his due. Armed men patrolled the fields now, watching who was talking to whom.

“Move on where?” Mary said. “To the not-hiring farm down the road? Or the one after that?”

“Lady . . .”

“I’ve got seven kids and no gas in my car.”

“You know how many times I hear that story every day?”

“Well, it’s no story. It’s my life. If I say I’ll do a job, I’ll do it just as good as anyone.”

The goons shifted their guns, but she would not back down. She couldn’t. Finally, the man held out his pen and she signed. When she walked away she did not sense her victory. Since giving birth, something had weakened in her, and not only in her body. It was a faltering of her spirit. Each day it was harder for her to pretend that somehow life would turn out all right despite illness and hardly any food, and the grinding noise that came from underneath the car hood, and the sores on Trevor’s lips, and the baby’s angry diaper rash, and having to camp in ditch banks where the water was too dirty to drink. Even Della and June, those two silly girls who could sit in a half-broke Hudson and pretend they were Cinderellas going to the ball to meet their Prince Charmings, had lately grown somber. Mary hid the fact that she didn’t eat most nights, claiming that she needed to wait until the heat of the day wore off to find her appetite. Her tongue would grow thick with longing as she watched her children chew and swallow. They hadn’t seen the inside of a schoolroom in months. Ellie and Trevor worked in the fields with her now. June brought the baby when he needed feeding, which left Della in charge of James and Ray. Mary might as well have poured gasoline on a fire.

“He’s right, you know,” a man said to her as she headed back to the car. He was tall and broad-shouldered and he would have filled out his clothes in another time. He had a wide face, and when he smiled, his cheeks creased in dimples, and lines spoked out from the corners of his eyes.

“Right about what?”

“You look like you could break in two.”

“Think what you want. I don’t have time for conversation.”

“Can I at least thank you for giving me a good laugh back there?”

“You can thank me for whatever you want as long as it doesn’t cost me.”

“Saying you’re welcome don’t cost.”

“You’d be surprised,” she said.

She reached the car. Ellie and June were changing the baby on the front seat.

“He stinks, Mama!” Ray shouted.

Mary studied the thin yellow liquid in the diaper.

“He’s got the runs,” Ellie said. “I already changed him twice since you been gone.”

Mary finished pinning the fresh diaper. “He needs to drink more.” She sat down on the runner and opened her shirt.

“You want me to fill the water bottle, Mama?” Trevor said.

“That’s ditch water,” Mary said. “He’ll have to make due with what I’ve got for now.”

The man was still lingering nearby.

“This is not a peep show, mister,” Mary called out to him. She took her breast in her hand and squeezed.

“I’ve got some good water,” the man said.

“I don’t have any money,” she said. The baby cried. She looked at his eyes. He was too dried out for tears.

“Water’s free,” the man said. “One free thing there is.”

“And air,” June said. “Air is free.”

The man smiled. “You’re right about that.”

“And dirt!” Trevor said.

“And stars!” Della said.

“But you can’t own stars, anyway,” June said. “So that don’t count.”

“Doesn’t,” Mary corrected distractedly.

“It counts. It counts!” Della said.

“She don’t know anything,” June said.

“I know you’re a dummy,” Della said.

“Enough!” Mary said.

The children stood by their mother, studying the stranger.

“Words are free,” Ellie said quietly.

The man looked at her appraisingly. “That’s a smart thing to say.”

Ellie beamed. She was nearly fifteen now and had turned inward in a way Mary remembered from her own girlhood, when her dreams were more compelling than the reality of helping her mother keep house. As they traveled from farm to farm, Ellie sat in silence, holding the baby, lost in thoughts about a boy she saw at a filling station or about the movie stars she read about in the magazines that sometimes circulated through the camps, their pages nearly transparent from so many eager hands. More than once, Mary had caught Ellie twisting her limp hair around her fingers, trying to force a curl so that she would look like those glamorous women. Mary told her to quit it or her hair would fall out. Even if Mary had money for indulgences, she would not have let Ellie waste it at a beauty parlor. It made a girl weak to imagine that things would be given to her simply because she had the advantage of a popular hairdo. Mary often told her kids stories about her childhood in Tahlequah—the way Doris tied strips of cloth soaked in kerosene around her children’s legs in order to do battle with the endless barrage of flies and caterpillars and spiders that shared the house with them, about the long winter when they had eaten squirrel. Mary didn’t want her children to think they were singled out for hardship.

“So, what do you think?” the man said to Mary. “How about some free water?”

•   •   •

E
arl had been working the fields, traveling from one to the next by foot. Before that, he’d spent time unloading the ships in the port of San Diego and had worked in a slaughterhouse in Los Angeles. He told the boys stories about getting into scuffles with rough sailors and he told the girls that he had seen Clark Gable walking down a street called Sunset Boulevard. Although Mary was sure that most of what Earl said was at least half a lie, she couldn’t help but feel grateful when the children begged him for another story. Earl knew to let James be by himself and he didn’t remark the way other people often did when the boy did not respond to questions. “I like a boy who keeps his thoughts private,” he said.

“I never know what he’s thinking,” Mary said.

“One day he’ll start talking and there will be no stopping him.”

“You don’t know that,” she said.

“I don’t know that the sun is going to come up tomorrow, either. But I believe it will.”

She was unaccustomed to talking freely about her children. Her relationships at the camps were cautious. She kept her family close, sometimes not letting the children play with strangers. Every week it was harder to keep up, and she didn’t need a nosy neighbor making judgments. She turned socks inside out one day and then right side out the next, washed hands and faces before each meal but bodies only once a week. She went through the motions of housekeeping in her tent, but her effort was so futile that sometimes she felt like a fool for hanging on to the habits her mother had taught her.

Despite circumstances, Earl always had an air of bemused calm, and his playful manner gave her a little unreasonable hope. Sometimes he would come by the tent, tell a joke to one or another of the children, and then leave without so much as saying hello to her. Other times, if she had to stop work in the fields to nurse, he might walk by and casually drop a few heads of cauliflower into her bushel basket to make up for her lost time. Earl shared everything he had with her and the children and said nothing about it. If they were in town on a Sunday and passed a soda shop, he’d start patting his pants and jumping up and down, claiming that something was burning a hole in his pocket. The younger children would laugh and say they knew how to save him if only he would take out his money and buy them a Nehi. Even Ellie was not immune to his charm though she would often roll her eyes if one of his jokes was particularly bad. Trevor openly idolized him after Earl revealed that he had once witnessed Babe Ruth score a home run.

His lighthearted nature was only dimmed by the growing unrest among the pickers. People gathered in the evenings outside the camps to listen to young men from San Francisco talk about strikes and unions. Earl joined these meetings, but Mary refused. She had seen what happened to agitators in other camps, how they had barely enough time to gather their children and their belongings before the goons chased them out. Most harvests were out of the ground by now, and she could not risk even a pitiful wage for whatever work she could find. She kept working while others shook their fists and shouted above the roar of the grower’s trucks about a sick child or dirty water. One afternoon, as a truck drove from the field to the road, pickers ran alongside it, shouting,
“Thief! Slave driver! Murderer!”
Men picked up sticks from the ground and began waving them in the air. A rock hit the side of the truck, and then another, and then it seemed like every picker had a rock in his or her hand and was denting metal and breaking windows. Someone torched the grower’s sign at the entrance to the camp. Ellie was among a group of older children throwing dry leaves and grasses onto the blaze to egg it on.

Mary grabbed Ellie by the arm and pulled her from the crowd. “You keep out of this or I’ll lose my job,” she said.

“You already lost your job,” Ellie said. “Didn’t you hear? They fired everyone.” She was crying now. “They fired
everyone,
Mama. They don’t care about us. They don’t care about anybody.”

“Who are they going to get to work?” Mary said, but the answer was obvious. There were always more people. Mary and Ellie ran back to the tent. She shouted orders for the kids to pack up. Every single person in the camp was going to be on the road soon and looking for a job. She was determined that her family would be the first to find one.

Just as she settled into the driver’s seat, Earl appeared with his rucksack and a cardboard traveling case.

“Thought I’d come with you,” he said.

“You have a particular interest in a widow with seven children?”

“I have a particular interest in your car. And I don’t mind who’s in it, either.”

19.

Nipomo, California, 1936

T
hey had been traveling together for two months. During that time, they had worked only fourteen days between them. After a spate of unemployment, something would turn inside Earl and he would grow restless and disappear, sometimes for a few days. When the children asked after him, she would make up excuses that he had gone looking for work or that he had a sick relative living nearby he needed to visit. The relief she felt when he returned scared her. One of these times he would be gone for good, and she needed to remain strong in the belief that she could do this thing on her own. For the first time in her life, she was careful at night, making sure that he was outside her before he let go. She wanted no possibility between them.

The Hudson had broken down the night before outside Nipomo, near a pea field. The baby had a chesty cough. It would not do to have him sleep out-of-doors in the tent, so everyone slept cramped inside the car. When Mary woke, the windows were fogged, and she wiped her sleeve on the windshield. The hood of the car was up, and Earl was bent over the engine. She put her lips to the baby’s forehead. He was warm. His eyes were glassy. She opened the car door and stepped outside, tucking him beneath her coat. Her shoes broke through a thin layer of frost. A cold wind carried voices from the clutter of shacks in the pickers’ camp. She would find out if someone there had medicine they were willing to give her. She could ask about jobs, too. There was no hiring sign, but it was cold and people could be sick. There might be at least a day or two of work for Earl.

“The radiator is busted,” he said.

“You wouldn’t happen to know how to fix it?” she said.

His look was his answer. Ellie came out of the car, pulling on her coat.

“Come with me,” Mary said to her daughter. “Let’s see the new people.”

Ellie shrugged and followed slowly, her eyes scanning the ground. Mary had taught Trevor and Ellie how to judge the smell of dead birds to determine their freshness. The birds were keeping them going now. Birds and whatever winter produce fell off trucks. Ellie was listless; all of Mary’s children were. They were down to one hot meal a day, but she knew the dullness signified a worse kind of vacancy.

At the camp, people dismantled tents and roped mattresses to the tops of cars. Others hoisted their bundles and suitcases and walked toward the road.

“That’s not right,” Mary said.

“What’s not right?” Ellie said.

The fields were empty. Mary spoke to a woman and learned that an overnight frost had killed off the peas. All of the workers had been let go.

The baby coughed and then moaned. His cheeks were splotchy and red, and Mary could feel the heat coming off him. No one she asked had medicine, or if they did they were not willing to give it to a stranger. She and Ellie returned to the car.

“He’s burning up,” Mary said to Earl. “We’ve got to get somewhere warm.”

“I guess I’ll go, then,” he said.

And there it was: what she had been waiting for. Even though she had steeled herself to the eventuality of his permanent departure, she could sense that it would undo her.

“Trevor, how’s your energy holding up?” Earl said.

“Don’t you dare do that,” she said sharply.

“Do what?”

“He’s just thirteen years old. He can’t take the load of this family himself. I always have and I always will. With or without you. Go if you’re going and leave my boy alone.”

He stared at her. She wished he would just gather his rucksack and his suitcase and leave. She was tired of pretending that she could make a family for her kids. She was tired of sex, tired of need.

“I thought he could help me take this radiator into town so we could get it fixed,” Earl said quietly.

She knew she had hurt him. But she could not ignore that it felt good to release all her exhaustion and worry on him, to stab him with his weakness. She said nothing as he and Trevor lifted the radiator and started down the road. Ray and June ran after them, but Mary was too tired to call them back.

She figured it would take Earl and the kids a good hour to walk to Nipomo. Once in town, there was no telling how long it would be before they found someone to fix the radiator for the little money Earl had on him. Ellie wanted to hunt for dead birds, but Mary told her to stay close. There were still people in the camp—unhappy, hungry people who had no work. It was not a place for a girl to go wandering off by herself. And Mary wanted Ellie near. She felt exposed by the side of the road with no means of leaving if that collective misery should turn into anger. Della held the baby in the front seat of the car while Ellie and Mary staked the two knobby poles into the ground and set up the tent. Ellie untied the rocking chair and the stool from the roof of the car. Mary pulled the stool underneath the tarp to get out of the cold, then called for Della to bring her the baby. His fever had risen. James and Della had both started coughing, too. Mary thought about making a fire and setting water to boil. The children could sip hot water. But she’d have to send Ellie to look for ditch water and she didn’t know if Della and James would be able to find wood dry enough to hold a flame. A car passed, moving up the highway from the south at a speed that suggested the driver was so eager to get someplace that he didn’t care that driving fast used up more gas than driving slowly. Mary tried to think back to a time when she’d been eager to reach a place. Those first few trips to new mill towns had been filled with anticipation, knowing she’d have a company cabin to make into a home, that there’d be a school for the kids, that Toby’s brothers and their wives would be with her. But the last time she could really recall pure, uncompromised excitement about getting somewhere was when she ran across her mother’s farm and through the gum trees to meet Toby, already imagining his hands on her, his greedy, sloppy enthusiasm, his stunned pleasure.

She knew the baby needed to drink if his fever was going to go down, but he refused her breast. She held the back of his head and pushed her nipple at his lips. He started crying and she snapped at him and then she regretted those words. She knew Toby was right, and that a child understood no matter how small he was. James and Della played with the swag of rope tied around the tent pole. Ellie sat in the rocker, braiding her hair. The baby was so hot. Mary loosened the blanket around him but then worried that he would catch a chill.

A car passed from the north. Mary recognized it as the same one that had driven by not five minutes before. This time she saw that it was a woman at the wheel. She wore a funny hat that tilted on her head like a Necco Wafer, the candy June was so fond of even though the other children said it tasted like dust. The car slowed as the woman steered it off the road, pulling up and parking right alongside the Hudson. She stepped out of the driver’s seat adjusting the hat on her head. She went around to the trunk, opened it, and took out a camera. She limped when she walked. A little woman with a funny hat and a limp. Mary would tell the story to the others when they returned.

“My name is Vera Dare,” she said.

“All right,” Mary said.

“Do you mind if I take your picture?”

“What for?”

“I work for the government—”

“I’m not with any strikers, if that’s what you think. I don’t want problems.”

“No, that’s not it. I take pictures to show the government how things are so that they will help people like you.”

People like you.
Mary did not have the energy to speak. Della and James stood near her, wary of the stranger. Ellie stayed in the rocker, playing with her hair.

“Would it be all right, then?” the woman asked.

The baby let out a cry. Mary shifted him around in her lap. Maybe he’d take the other nipple. “I guess,” she said, hardly paying attention. All she could think about was her baby and getting liquid into him so that he didn’t dry up. “I’ve got to feed this baby.”

“Go ahead,” the woman said.

Mary was coaxing her nipple into his mouth when she heard the click of the camera. She looked up, surprised. What was it about some things happening that made it seem almost unbelievable that they had happened at all? It was like when she watched Ray tearing off at such a speed that she knew he would trip and fall. And then when he did fall, she would have to convince herself that this small accident had, in fact, occurred and that she had not invented it. She wanted to tell the lady to stop what she was doing, but it was already done. And what was the difference, anyway? Mary felt the baby’s lips go flaccid around her skin. She shook him a little bit to try to get him to focus, but she knew it would do no good. The woman stepped forward and took another picture.

“How old are you, if I may ask?” she said.

“Thirty-two,” Mary said. She licked her finger and rubbed it over the baby’s dry lips.

The woman moved forward and took another picture. “How many children do you have?” she said.

You never knew what a stranger’s questions really meant. “How many kids do you have?” could mean “How much food do you have with you, and if I send my kids by at suppertime, will you feed them?” “Where is your man?” might mean “Is there anybody to protect you, or would you be easy to rob?”

“Seven,” Mary said. Why had she answered?

The woman squinted at Mary as if she was trying to see something particular, the way Mary did when she searched for a nit in her children’s hair. The woman held the camera at her chest and peered down into the eyepiece. She seemed dissatisfied. She moved to the right. Mary felt self-conscious, as if she was failing at something she hadn’t even known she was trying to achieve.
She doesn’t have an authentic look.
Wasn’t that what the photographer had said so long ago when Mary had stood shivering in the town square in that shred of doeskin?

“Where are the others?” the woman said as she focused her camera.

Don’t answer.
“Radiator’s busted. They went into town to get it fixed.” What was it about this woman and her camera that made it seem like she had the right to know everything about Mary’s life? As the woman repositioned herself one foot, then two feet closer, Mary felt trapped. So dug in there was no way out.

“Food is scarce?” the woman said.

“That’s right.”

“What do you live on?”

“Killed birds and frozen vegetables.”

“You have much work lately?”

“Not lately.”

“That’s the story I hear everywhere I go,” the woman said, distracted by some mechanical problem with her camera.

The story,
Mary thought. A poor woman holding a sick baby. Two sniveling children and a girl wishing she had movie-star hair. What story should she tell this woman?
I have a man who will leave one day. I have a girl who likes Necco Wafers.
The baby let out a miserable cry. She wished she’d asked Earl to pick up some medicine in town. But she’d been flustered when she’d wrongly accused him of wanting to abandon her and she hadn’t thought clearly. And how would he have enough money to pay for the car and the medicine? She should have told him to forget about the radiator, that the baby was more important. But without a car there was no chance of work, and with no work there was no way to pay for the fever-reducing syrup this baby needed. There was all this useless thinking
what if
, as if there were some other choice to make when there were no more choices. There was only whatever was going to happen.

“Maybe I can get the little ones to turn around,” the lady said. “That’s right. Just turn right around so you’re not looking at me. One of you on each side of your mama. Just like that.”

Della and James did as they were told and faced away from the camera. James leaned into Mary’s shoulder to let her know he was there. Her protector. Her silent guardian. The baby made small mewling sounds. Mary put her hand to her chin and worried the tiny scar that remained from when her mother had held four quarters in her hand and cut her across the jaw. She looked away.

The woman took a photograph. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ve got what I need.” She turned and limped back to her car.