Mary Coin (17 page)

“This is why I am
tan pequeña,
” Beatriz says, using the English-and-Spanish blend that she and Walker have communicated in since he was a child. “Your daddy, he steals all
la leche
!” She lets out a great, mirthful laugh.

“He was your first playmate,” Walker says.

She waves a warning finger.
“Señora Naomi no permita que se
.
”

Walker shakes his head at his family’s entrenched caste system, but Beatriz does not acknowledge the hypocrisy. A childhood of living among housekeepers and gardeners has made Walker familiar with the protective deflection of people who are privy to a family’s intimacies but must play dumb as part of the contract of their employ.

As the days pass, Walker becomes weighed down by all the trivialities that make up a life—a dish filled with paper clips, a half-used tin of shoeshine, the bathroom drawer jammed with crusted tubes of ointments and the medicine-cabinet shelves imprinted with rust from cans of shaving cream. There are moments of poignancy—the worn-down toothbrush, the shot glass on his father’s desk that contains a black Super Ball Walker remembers from his childhood, a special high bouncer that he played with incessantly, driving his father crazy with the arrhythmic noise. He wonders if his father felt sentimental about the ball. But Walker is projecting. The ball might have landed in that glass randomly and spent years untouched except by a maid’s dutiful feather duster. George probably never noticed it.

There are other discoveries. The top shelf of a hallway closet holds a cache of broken mousetraps. Finding them, Walker is seized by frustration. What possible purpose could his father have had in keeping these things? What churlish parsimony would cause him to think that he could find some use for forty rectangular pieces of wood and coils of unsprung wire? In these moments Walker feels as he did when he was a boy and the sound of his father’s drawling, slightly nasal voice or the sight of him cleaning the wax from his ear with the earpiece of his glasses would drive him wild with repulsion and shame.

“¿Qué pasa con el só
tano?”
Beatriz says when they have managed to pack up most of the first and second floors of the house.

“The basement,” Angela says, translating the unfamiliar word. “She wants to know what you want to do about everything down there.”

Walker remembers the basement as a cold, unfinished space that housed a clanking furnace and two industrial-sized and water-stained sinks. He was terrified by the mangle that lived there, and on laundry days, he would watch, mesmerized, as the wrinkled sheets were fed between the lips of the rollers only to come out the other side perfectly pressed. He lived in fear of Beatriz’s warning that if he stood too close, the monster would grab his shirttail or a wisp of his hair and he would be sucked in and flattened.

“The appliances will be sold with the house,” Walker says.

“No, no,” Beatriz says, marching over to the basement door.

He helps her down the steps, and Angela follows. The temperature drops by at least ten degrees. He waves his hand in the air until he makes contact with the piece of string that hangs from the bare fixture. The yellow light illuminates a room filled with boxes.

“What is all this?” Walker says unhappily. He opens a box and pulls out a back issue of
California Farmer
from 1955. Once again, his anger wells up and he allows himself a petulant thought: perhaps his father saved all this useless junk simply to burden Walker with the problem of dealing with it, turning history into insult. He explains to Beatriz and Angela that he has to get back to his teaching and that he will return another time to deal with the contents of the basement.

“Mrs. Rosalie and Mrs. Evelyn,” Beatriz says, insinuating that Walker’s sisters will not be happy with the delay.

“I can’t do this anymore,” he says with more passion than he intended.

Beatriz puts a sympathetic hand on his cheek.
“Tranquilizate,”
she says as she did when he was young and he would retreat to the kitchen after a fight with his father. She would give him a glass of milk and a slice of cake and continue her work. Her calm would go a long way toward convincing him that the rage he felt would not ultimately destroy him.

•   •   •

A
ngela’s husband arrives in his pickup and makes trips to and from the house, taking various items to the dump, the local thrift shop, and the homes of relatives. Walker rents a U-Haul to hitch to the back of his car so he can bring the boxes of books he’s saved to San Francisco as well as the wicker settee, which is the one piece of furniture he has decided to keep. On Friday afternoon, the women hug him gently and then leave. He sits on the railing of the wraparound porch and drinks a beer, watching trucks and cars drive away from the groves carrying the last of the day’s workers. The irrigation system goes to work now, and as the sun makes its final descent, the last glinting rays pick up the sprays of water for a brief moment before the trees become indistinct shapes against the dusk. When he was a boy, Walker imagined that the house
was
the Dodge farm and that the land was somehow ancillary to the beating heart where he lived and played and studied and fought. Now that the house is empty he cannot quite convince himself that these acres have a purpose without the anchor of the home. The land seems as weightless as a cloud that will float away on the next strong wind.

Back inside, he walks the empty rooms. He knows his father would not have been emotional about the house. He might even have been happy to know that it was finally being released from its oppressive familial duty. George had been ambivalent about carrying on the Dodge traditions. He insisted his children live up to this ambiguous set of values called “the Dodge name,” which mostly had to do with never using their status to advantage. But he would not allow his shirts to be monogrammed in the family style and he refused to have his portrait painted so that it could stand in the town hall alongside the images of Charles and Theodore. Walker and his siblings spent their summers in the groves along with the migrants, picking oranges or driving the water truck. They were never paid. When Walker complained about working for free, George made him a deal: he would give Walker the wage his pickers earned, and in return Walker would pay for all the food he ate at the house, rent for his bedroom at fair market value, and a prorated portion of the gas and electricity. After a month, Walker was happy to relinquish his paycheck in favor of unlimited access to the refrigerator. But when Walker discovered
The Communist Manifesto
and
The Other America
, he regularly accused his father of everything from labor exploitation to noblesse oblige. “Why don’t you just sleep with his daughter while you’re at it?” Walker snarled one year, as his father left the house for his ritual day-after-Christmas meal with the family of his Mexican foreman. George did not respond but simply left Walker alone in the front hall, nursing his Pyrrhic victory: Walker’s desire to disappoint his father had produced exactly that, and he spent the night ashamed not of his father but of his ineffectual self.

He should head back north before it is late, but he is too exhausted to make the drive. He takes out his computer, settles onto the floor of the empty living room and searches for information about the famous photograph. A number of related links appear. As he quickly peruses them, he recognizes the usual mix of the scholarly and amateur he finds whenever he searches the Web. Most teachers will warn their students away from the perils of unqualified sources. But Walker is always drawn to lay accounts. They can be wildly subjective and unreliable, but looked at another way, they are windows into eccentric curiosities that have their own value. He cross-references the links as best he can and discovers this: The woman’s name was Mary Coin. She was born in 1904 or, according to some articles, 1905. She was either full Cherokee or mixed blood. She had six children or seven. An article compares the photograph to the
Pietà
both in its composition and in the way it serves as a ritual image. Someone has written about how the absent father in the photograph allows the viewer to take on the role of patriarchal savior. A feminist academic has written a dissertation about the photograph in terms of cultural theories and prejudices surrounding twentieth-century ideals of motherhood.

Walker finds a link to an article from a 1982 edition of the
San Jose Mercury News.
The headline reads: “An Appeal for a Face from the Depression.” It is a direct request for money on the part of Mary Coin’s family. The article describes how she is in a weakened condition after an ill-advised trip to San Francisco. Her children have vowed to give her the best care possible, but the cost of nursing and medication is prohibitive. “That picture’s done a lot of good for a lot of people,” a daughter, Ellie Velasquez, says. “And she never got anything from it. Not one dime. As far as I’m concerned, she’s owed.” A son, James Coin, remarks, “She never wanted anybody to know she was the one in the picture. I hope we’re doing the right thing.”

26.

T
he basement is not insulated. It is so cold at night that Walker has to wear his jacket, and even then, his hands stiffen as he tries to figure out the best way to proceed. He knows it is foolish to start this job now when he is so tired and when he has to get back to the city, but he can’t sleep, and the basement tantalizes. Mismatched file cabinets with rusted corners are lined up against one wall. Cardboard boxes are stacked five or six high. Some are so collapsed that the towers lean precariously and threaten to spill their contents over the concrete floor. A quick perusal of one of the most accessible boxes reveals years of tax statements. Another is filled with random brochures advertising agricultural products. In the far corner of the basement sit crates filled with plaques: 1960 Central Valley Businessman of the Year, 1962 Orange Growers Award, commendations from the YMCA and the Elks Club. Walker cannot deny the familiar tightening in his chest, the adrenaline he feels when he walks into a newspaper archive or someone’s dusty junk-filled barn or when he finds a shoebox overflowing with photographs.

He is suddenly overcome by the feeling he gets each time he begins one of his projects, when he encounters an immediate sense of failure and questions why he has driven all the way to a town in Nebraska or Idaho to investigate some notion that any of his colleagues would find jejune. At these times, he feels certain that he will not discover a way to penetrate beneath the charm of a stiffly posed marriage portrait to find the particular character of a place and its people, to unearth the human experience of history. He reminds himself of what he always does in these moments of doubt: that what he seeks exists because everything does. The Dead Sea Scrolls, black holes, pharaonic tombs—all these things existed before men understood how to find them. It is the human fallacy to believe that we discover any single thing. It is only that we are slow to learn how to see what is in front of us.

After two hours, he feels that he has a sense of the general chronology of the boxes and he begins to dig in, starting with the earliest papers. He finds a land deed dating from 1902:
The State of California. Kern County. Know all Men by these Present that for and in consideration of Five Hundred Dollars in hand paid by Theodore Harris Dodge to the Southern Pacific Improvement Company the following described real estate, to wit: The South West Fourth of Section Five T 14 (south)—Range 12 west containing one hundred and sixty acres more or less.

More or less. More now. Thousands of acres more.

He finds purchase orders for seed, for plows and horses. There is a bill from a farrier. A familiar ease settles over Walker. This is what he loves, this slow, careful excavation through time. He studies the elegantly slanted handwriting and carefully crafted signatures on the documents, takes pleasure in the arcane formality of the transactions. He discovers a roll of architect’s drawings: the original schematics for the Queen Anne. A room marked “Child’s Room” was his father’s boyhood bedroom, then his own. His life, laid out before him here as a plan, an imagined future made manifest by the determination and luck of his forebears, moves him. He finds a notebook filled with arithmetic so faded that he can only make out that the numbers have to do with costs and profit. He imagines his great-grandfather Theodore’s hand making these markings. He finds a payroll ledger that lists the farmworkers and their weekly take. In 1910, only twenty men were listed. Even adjusting for inflation, the pay is negligible. As Walker makes his way from box to box, from year to year, he finds many such ledgers. He studies the names and the human geography they represent. At first the surnames are mostly Chinese. But in ten years the rolls are filled with Japanese names, and ten years after that, with the signatures of East Indians. Soon, the workers are almost all Mexican or Filipino. By the 1930s, the farmworkers are predominantly white, the huge wave of Dust Bowl migrants having descended. He reads down the rolls.
Hubert Mills, Robert Worth, Renata Coleman . . .
The names are so evocative to him that he begins to recite them out loud, his voice echoing off the walls of the basement. Each represents a constellation of hope, wives and husbands and children relying on the dollar and twenty-eight cents that Mabel Fox made that week or the dollar and ninety-five cents William Streeter collected. These people are all dead now. But here are their names written by each of their hands, the same hands that pulled citrus off ornery branches. Each worker and each family so intimately connected with Walker’s own, their meager earnings a stark reminder of the exploitation and moral ambiguity that lie at the heart of the Dodge fortune.
Victor Emerson, Willie Frank . . .

It quickly becomes obvious to him that his great-grandfather and his grandfather, and even George, despite condemning Walker’s chosen path, were inadvertent historians. Why else does someone save items that have no immediate use except that he recognizes the commemorative value of the moment even as it is lived? He knows that a simple bill for baling wire is as resonant an artifact as an ancient potsherd, and that within the transaction—money for wire—lies the story of a particular person and the time in which he lived. Walker used to think his father hid his identity behind his work. Now he sees that he had it backward, and that work itself might be the key to understanding George. He looks around for the boxes containing information from the year his father took over the farm. But then he decides to back up and start with the year of George’s birth. He finds the box from 1935 and studies the contents. Despite the economy, the company bought two new Ford trucks . . . electric bills . . . water bills . . . He scans the payroll ledger for that year, reads the names of the workers.
Robert Mills, Eulalia Murphy, Curtis Sharp, Mary Coin.

Walker feels an unnerving displacement, as if he has missed a tread on a stairway. It is the same sensation he felt many years ago, when he lost Isaac in the grocery-store aisles. He’d turned around, and in the space where Isaac was standing only seconds before there was emptiness. In that moment, Walker knew that life was a set of extravagantly enacted delusions to mask the fact that all the relied-upon verities were meaningless.
Mary Coin.
Her face comes to him immediately. He studies the ledger. Oddly, she has been paid more than anyone else on that particular payday—twice as much, in fact. It is hard to believe that the frail woman in the photograph could pick twice as many oranges as Robert Mills or Curtis Sharp, but there it is. He skips ahead in the ledger. Her name appears week after week. And then it is gone.