Mary Coin (6 page)

“Hope that baby don’t come in the car,” she said.

“It won’t,” Mary said.

“Because you say so?”

“My baby minds me. Just like I minded you.”

Doris let out a small grunt of disbelief. She took down the photograph of Mary’s grandfather from its place on the wall. “Nobody else ever took notice of this but you,” she said, putting it in Mary’s hand.

“We’ll come back, Mama.”

“No, you won’t,” Doris said. “But there’s nothing I can do about that, either.”

As they drove away from the farms and lost sight of the familiar land, Mary closed her eyes. She was seventeen. Her husband was twenty-three. Living under the thumb of Carlotta Coin, she had felt too old, as if she had already lived through any newness her life might offer and the years would only present repetition. Now, trying to find a comfortable position on the barely cushioned seat, the few belongings of her life rattling against the walls of the trunk, she felt in possession of nothing and everything at the same time.

•   •   •

T
hree and a half weeks later, Mary stood up from the pallet where she and Toby slept, her body instantly alert as if she sensed an intruder. She looked for her mother sleeping behind the muslin curtain, and then for her sister, Louise, but they weren’t there. Slowly, her confusion cleared and she remembered that she was in the cabin that Toby’s brother Robert leased in a place called Millwood, in the state of California. She was living in a makeshift town as unfamiliar to her as those cities and countries she read about on the newspaper covering the walls of her mother’s house. Mary realized there was no one breaking into the tiny home. The intruder was inside her. She stood and knocked her huge stomach against a wall as she felt her way through the dark, tiptoeing past Robert and Sarah and their little daughter and out the door.

The collection of buildings that made up the sawmill stood out against the dark night, shapes lit vaguely by a cloud-covered moon. During the day, the mill was an excitement of sound and energy—the grunts and squeals of the saws, the thick plumes of exhaust from the boiler, the heavy thunk of wood planks being stacked on top of one another, and above that din, the shouts of men. But she preferred the town as it was now—still and silent and expectant. She felt the edges of herself against the air, the weight pressing down on her crotch. She sensed the lumbering trees crawling up the Sierran foothills in the distance and the dark river that flowed nearby. She wanted to set this moment in amber so that she would remember it forever: she was living at the farthest edge of the country, surrounded by trees with trunks nearly as big as houses. Imagine, Mary thought, as if she were talking to her child—a land of storybook trees, and the rumor of an ocean after which there was a million miles of nothing and then the rest of the world.

A rush of warm liquid ran down between her legs. She reacted as if she were jumping out of the way of a glass of spilled milk. But there was no
out of the way.
She was in the way of what was happening to her. She
was
what was happening to her. She had not been able to envision this event when her mother described it, couldn’t think how water that could slip through your fingers could also break as if it were a solid thing. Her organs knotted and seized with a force that made her whimper. She knew her body was beyond her now, and she could only stand by helplessly while it did what it would do. Carlotta Coin had taken a powerful dose of castor oil before she’d had her baby so that she would not soil herself in front of the midwife. This fussiness seemed laughable to Mary now. The contraction subsided, leaving only a backache, the dull throb she felt at the beginning of her monthly bleeding. She walked to the edge of the river where logs floated, indolently knocking against one another. Her feet slid over the lichen-covered rocks until her toes touched the cold water. A heron flew down and settled itself elegantly on the opposite bank. A second contraction gathered in her pelvis. She knew she ought to go back to the cottage and wake Sarah, who had birthed other babies in the camp. But she was not ready yet. She walked along the edge of the river until she found a place where the logs drifted apart from one another and she could see her dark form reflected in the water. Shedding her nightdress, she turned to the side and marveled at the incredible shape of her body.

“Mary?”

Toby was behind her, holding out a blanket. “What are you doing?”

“Look at me!” she said. It was the way she used to call her mother to watch her while she did a headstand or balanced on a fence, needing Doris’s gaze to make the moment real, to stamp it into history. “You’d like it if I spent my days watching you breathe,” Doris used to say in exasperation whenever she was called, but she always came, her hands covered in flour or stained with pig guts, sanctioning these small victories with a terse nod.

“Are you dreaming, Mary?” Toby said.

“Yes!” she said. “No!” She laughed.

And at that moment, she felt as if a hand had reached up into her in order to turn her inside out. “Mama!” she cried.

9.

B
y 1925, there were three pulling at Mary’s skirts, prancing circles around her, beating on her with their fists, and letting loose their pinched and plaintive whines because they wanted her attention while she was kneading dough for bread, silently reciting her mother’s lesson:
Three, not two.
She stopped what she was doing for a moment and watched the torrent of Ellie, Trevor and June, mystified that she could have released so much sheer energy into the world. She and Toby had their own cabin now in exchange for a healthy cut of Toby’s wages. The mill buildings sat down by the river, but the family cabins and the bunkhouse for the single men were tucked into the foot of the forested hills. To have a home of her own, to not be living under the gaze and judgment of another woman, was something Mary took pleasure in each day, no matter that the cabin’s single window was cracked or that the walls were so haphazardly joined that the house was filled with flies during the day and with cold mountain air at night. She looked out of the window toward the mill. The men were too distant to make out, but every once in a while, she might see a lean, taut figure walking from one building to another with a board slung across one shoulder, and she would know that it was Toby. She did not see him now, but she noticed a crowd beginning to gather around the tracks that ran down from the mountain. A train whistled in the distance.

“Mama! Mama!” Trevor grabbed her hand and pulled. Ellie was already out the door, even though Mary had warned her not to leave the house without asking for permission. Aside from foreign men coming and going, there were other dangers at the mill. Children had been injured playing on unstable piles of wood. A boy had drowned trying to balance on a floating log. Trevor slipped his hand from hers and raced after his sister. June sat on the floor stacking the wooden blocks Toby had made, and Mary quickly picked her up, knowing that cunning Ellie would draw her trusting brother into some kind of trouble. Sure enough, as soon as Mary reached the tracks, she saw that Ellie had dared Trevor to see if he was brave enough to stand on an iron rail as the train pounded closer. Mary pulled him to safety and gave Ellie a smack on her arm.

The children fell into a reverent silence as the big Shay engine appeared trailing flatcars loaded with freshly cut logs. The train slowed to a stop, exhaling its vaporous breath. Then came the hurly-burly of activity as the men sprang into action, shouting orders as the long arm of the unloader began to sweep the logs off the train. The sugar pine and white fir and giant sequoia logs came out of the forest like newly injured soldiers, their sheared ends exposed and raw-looking. The wounds touched Mary in a way she knew was foolish, but she could not stop thinking of the trees as amputations. She imagined the stumps standing alone, filled with longing for their missing parts. She touched her stomach. Of course this was the next baby talking. Pregnancy made her wide open. She might be unaccountably moved by the sight of a dog crouched to do its business, the pathetic wobble of its hind legs, the still vacancy of its watery eyes. A month earlier, a crazed hummingbird had spent four days tapping on the window of the cabin. Ellie, an easily enraged girl of four, was furious with the bird and pounded her fist against the window, but Toby grabbed her hands and explained that something had gone wrong with the bird’s mind and that it was mistaking the glass window for a tree. To Mary, the misperception seemed not crazy, only human, and she had wept.

The children did not want to go indoors. Mary took them to see the planer where their uncle Levi smoothed the newly cut planks so that running your hand along an edge you could mistake the wood for silk. The air was tangy with the wet, warm scent of cut logs combined with the acrid smell of the steam boiler that Uncle Robert tended. Four men carried a pale, debarked log to the long timber mill where Toby worked the spinning blade of the circular saw. Trevor begged Mary to let him see his father run the giant machine, but Toby had forbidden the family to watch him work. “I forget myself at the sight of you,” he told Mary one night when they were in bed. He lay behind her, his mouth moving against her damp neck, his hand draped over her stomach, massaging the tight drum of her stretched skin. “You don’t want a one-armed husband, do you?”

Mary coaxed the children back to the cabin with a promise to round up the cousins for a game of Run, Sheep, Run. While Ellie took charge, designating herself as fox king, Mary thought back to when she was a girl and she and Betsy had traced the attributes of their imagined husbands in the dust outside the chicken coop, erasing the words with their shoes as quickly as they wrote them so that Doris would not witness their silliness. Betsy had been practical: no farting, no burping, no false teeth. Now, as Mary sat outside the cabin on a three-legged stool trying to occupy June, she remembered her list: good singer, small ears, doesn’t kick dogs. She realized that in some ways she had never been without Toby. She had conjured him, and then he had appeared as if her writing had released a messenger into the wind who had gone looking for those words as they existed in a single man. And here he was: handsome, kind, enough of a singer to soothe a miserable baby or make them all laugh when he struggled for the high notes of the birthday song, which he insisted on singing at top voice, holding the special boy or girl in his arms and waltzing them into their next year.

She wondered what Betsy’s life would have been like if she had lived. She would probably not be spitting out children like watermelon pits. There were ways to avoid it. Mary’s sisters-in-law swore by Lysol douches and had only two children each. Mary knew that Toby could arrange things so that he was outside of her. But when it got to that point, she could not bear the feeling of his withdrawal and she would hold him tightly. And these children—she could not imagine them before they came into being and now she could not imagine them not existing. Ellie, with her bossiness and her discontent; Trevor, with his wide eyes, who took everything his sister and his cousins told him on faith, a sweet gullibility that had landed him a quarter-mile away from the mill one day, searching for hidden treasure; June, who, though still a baby, would pitch a fit if Mary tried to get her into a dress. It was true Mary had cried when she fell pregnant for the fourth time. And there had been the undisguised fear in Toby’s eyes the night she admitted it to him. But when she looked at her children playing their game of chase, she thought of them as a fist held up to fate. She’d met women at the mill who spoke longingly about the places they had come from—Arkansas, Kentucky, or Oklahoma. But Mary knew these women were reveling not so much in memories of a place as in recollections of their girlhoods, when there had been few demands upon their time and none on their bodies. She listened to their complaints, knowing that for her, each new child settling onto her breast for the first time was a confirmation, another puzzle piece locking into place.

Each afternoon, when Toby came home from his shift, he would hold June in his arms while Trevor and Ellie tried to claim his attention. For the first hour, his face assumed a gentle, uncomprehending smile because his ears were numbed deaf by the clang and roar of the mill’s machinery. But once he got his hearing back, and the older children had gone off to their games or chores, he’d talk to June about what he’d seen during the day, about how it had taken twenty Chinese men to roll a huge section of red fir to the head saw, or how a sawyer had to be sent home because he was drunk on the job. He’d ask the little girl’s opinion about whether their mother was the prettiest woman in the town or only the most beautiful.

“You’re a fool for talking sense to a baby,” Mary said two months later, after Della was born and he was regaling the infant with tales of his day.

“A baby understands everything right from the start,” he told her, staring down at the bundle of blanket that was his newest daughter.

Each year found him holding on to the seat of a borrowed bicycle while Ellie, then Trevor, then each child in turn veered and fell, scraped and cried. Intimate with shame, Toby whispered instructions into their ears so as not to humiliate them in front of the neighbor children who had come out of their homes to watch. When June took off without a hitch as if she had been born to ride a bicycle, Toby stood back and watched her disappear down the road.

“There she goes,” he said.

Mary heard the tremble in his voice and saw his jaw working against his feelings. “She’s free now,” she said, linking her arm through his.

“No such thing,” he said.

•   •   •

B
y the time their fifth child, Ray, was born, there were rumors from the east of men jumping out of the windows of tall buildings. Orders were down at the mill, and there was not enough demand for the foreman to run double shifts. Toby was one of the first to be let go, then Robert. Levi could get more cuts out of a log than any other man on the crew, and the boss offered to keep him. The brothers knew it would be harder for three men arriving at a new place looking for work than it would be for one, or even two, but having survived their father, they had a notion of their collective endurance, and they determined to stay together.

They moved from one mill to the next for as long as the work held out, and each new job was of a shorter duration than the one that preceded it. Mary learned how to quickly make a home. Familiarity had less to do with knowing your neighbors than it did with the unchanging seating arrangement at the dinner table and not letting up on chores out of sympathy for a tired or displaced child. Ellie and Trevor went to school the first day they arrived at a new town whether or not they were frightened by strange children and a stern teacher. June and Della did the small chores even if their efforts to carry laundry in from the line resulted in clean sheets being dragged through the mud. Ray was wakeful and demanded Mary’s constant attention, which made her days all the more exhausting, having to hold him and charm him while she worked.

When James came three years later, they were living in Wilseyville. Luckily, he was a sleepy baby who was content to rest in his basket and stare up at the passing shadows on the ceiling. Each year brought fewer jobs and lower wages for the jobs Toby did manage to get, but Mary kept up her system, believing that order would see them through. She made sure her children knew the alphabet and how to write their names before they entered school so that they would not be held up to ridicule. There was a limit to what she could teach them, and when Ellie wanted to know what was in the Milky Way that made it milky, or how to spell the word
determination,
Mary silently cursed her mother even as she threw ash into pond water and watched the dirt sink to the bottom of the washtub, a trick Doris had taught her when the laundry had to get done and the well was dry.

“Mama, look! Mama, look!” Della cried out. “Look what we did!”

Watch me breathe,
Mary thought, standing at the open door of the cabin, watching June and Della dress empty soda bottles in paper outfits.
Well, of course.

After work dried up in Wilseyville, they moved to Calpine, and one town was not unlike the other: a company store, a post office, a schoolhouse—which was often nothing more than a room attached to the back of the store—a few churches, more saloons. The sharp, medicinal scent of the hillsides in the morning and then again at night. The particular damp cold that existed summer and winter because of the nearby forests. The feeling Mary had of being small. She had grown up accustomed to seeing great distances, so that if she ever needed to find a wandering cow, all she had to do was stand outside and turn in a circle and there it would be, set against the wide, white sky as if she had drawn a cow on a piece of paper. Now the cloak of the forest made her feel as hidden as the animals that haunted the undergrowth.

There was a movie theater in Jerseydale, and although they hardly had the money for it, Mary insisted that the children go to a show. When she was a girl, a movie had been projected on a sheet hung on the wall of the bank building in Tahlequah. A storm was brewing and the sheet was not secured properly, and when the wind kicked up, the images rolled and dipped over the billowing material until the screen became hopelessly tangled. Now, sitting in the dark theater, Mary watched how her children’s initial awe was overtaken by helpless laughter. She remembered that long-ago night when the storm finally overtook the town and the projector was shut down, when everything that went wrong was a heart-quickening reminder that the world was not always what you expected it to be. Outside the theater, Trevor took to walking like the funnyman, toppling down the street with duck’s feet and twirling a stick as if it were the actor’s cane until he swacked Ellie in the face and opened a cut across her cheek.

“Will I have a scar forever?” Ellie wailed.

“Probably,” Mary said, as she stanched the blood with the hem of her dress.

“I’ll never be pretty,” Ellie said, tears and snot clogging her words.

“Why do you need to be pretty when beautiful will do?”

“But I’m not beautiful, Mama! You’re the beautiful one.”

That night, music coming out of a saloon wound its way through the town and into the open window of the Coin house. Toby pulled Mary to him. The children sat on the beds and watched their parents dance in slow circles. Mary closed her eyes and let herself be carried away until she forgot where she was. When she opened them, she saw the small, grave faces of her children as they studied this performance of love, and she felt the immensity of her responsibility.

•   •   •

A
sound exploded the stillness of the night. In her broken sleep, Mary thought the moon had fallen out of the sky and landed on her house. She screamed herself into consciousness to find that Toby was already up and dressed and pushing her shoes toward her. The windows glowed orange.

Outside was a confusion of flames and the crack and thunder of collapsing buildings. The steam boiler was a fountain of sparks. She and the children ran away from the mill while Toby rushed down to the river where men filled washbasins and buckets and even empty suitcases with water to throw on the fire. But one building caught and then another until the whole mill was engulfed. The smoke rolled through the town in great, eye-stinging billows. Mary pulled James’s nightshirt off him and bit into the material, tearing off strips, which she fastened around the children’s heads. Ellie refused her blindfold. Mary wished Ellie was like the others, content not to have to look at the destruction, but she knew the girl was too sharp to be tricked into ignorance by a simple eyeshade. She and Ellie watched as the bunkhouses caught, one after another, the final one igniting the cabins, which went down like dominoes. The walls of their house collapsed in what seemed an almost gentle curtsy.