7.
Betsy’s cough began with the first November frost as a minor irritation that embarrassed her during church sermons. By January, it had grown worse. Doris administered wormwood tea, but even that did not assure Betsy or anyone else a night of rest. Betsy’s lips stayed dry no matter how much Mary swabbed them with a wet cloth, and she began to stoop all the time to try to lessen the effect of her spasms on the aching muscles of her chest. The girl’s uppity expression became vague. Her eyes conveyed a rheumy abstraction uncharacteristic of the sister whom Mary had spent so much time despising for the fact that she never made their mother angry.
Doris did not credit illness. She had never paid much attention to the sniffles and small fevers of her children. She told them that they weren’t sick when they complained that they were, as if disease were something you could decide about one way or another. She stood by the curative effects of disbelief. Doris made Betsy get out of bed each day along with the other children, put on her dress, her shoes, and her stockings, even though she was not allowed at school until her cough subsided. When Mary was not at the Coin farm helping with an increasingly pregnant and despondent Carlotta, and if the cold was not biting, Doris insisted she take Betsy with her when she did her chores. With each passing day, Betsy’s ability to hold herself upright weakened in direct proportion to her mother’s denial. If the girls were outside, Mary would put her arm around Betsy’s shoulders and jostle her forward with her hip in case their mother happened to look out the window, so that she would not accuse them of lingering and avoiding work. Each evening, when Betsy sat at the table staring into her soup, Mary would wait until their mother’s back was turned and dump some liquid onto the dirt floor where it would be quickly absorbed. The collusion brought the sisters closer, and every so often Mary was able to get a rise of laughter out of Betsy. Taking down the clothes from the line one morning, Mary wiggled a finger that had inadvertently poked through the flap at the front of her brother’s drawers. Betsy covered her eyes in shock but she could not hide her broad grin.
During the third week of Betsy’s illness, she took a turn. Her cheeks pinked and her sputum lost its greenish color. She managed to eat more of her food. Doris did not mention this recovery in the same way that she had not given words to the illness. One day, she simply stripped the girls’ bed and washed the sheets, signaling that she was done with Betsy’s illness and that everyone in the house ought to be as well. By this time, Mary’s services were required each afternoon at the Coin farm to care for the younger children while Carlotta, hugely pregnant and full of associated miseries, rested. Carlotta was so impatient with the demands of being a farm wife that Mary imagined that her life in Tulsa must have consisted primarily of sitting in her once fancy chairs and drinking tea out of china cups while other people cooked her dinner or told her when to take her next breath. Carlotta insisted that her children dress in frilly white outfits meant for church even on regular days, and she alternately demanded that Mary take the children outside so that she could have some “time to think my own thoughts, for heaven’s sake” and scolded Mary for letting them get dirty. She was quick to remind Mary that it was only due to her father’s business misfortunes (gambling misfortunes, Mr. Coin was happy to clarify) that she had been passed over by more suitable men and was forced to marry a farmer. “I am not made for this” was her constant refrain as she stood in her fashionable dresses, which fell to her ankles in a hobble that made it impossible for her to take long strides and which, as the months passed, strained against her pregnancy. She kept a subscription to Modern Priscilla, and while Mary jostled and hushed the little ones and tried to content them with games of peekaboo, Carlotta studied the needlecraft magazine fiercely, as if she thought she could somehow enter the pictures and become a lady who had nothing better to do than stand around in a fancy gown while her fingers played with the lace veil of her hat. Whenever William Coin was in the house, an air of anxiety permeated, as if the rooms were holding their breath waiting for the inevitable explosion. That the children were too noisy and underfoot was his usual complaint. If he’d been in town drinking that day, the objection might become a sloppy, arm-swatting rage that often landed on Carlotta and occasionally on Mary if she was nearby. Mary knew the work she was really being paid for was to serve as a buffer between Mr. Coin’s discontent and Carlotta’s despair.
When Carlotta’s labor finally commenced it was loud and angry. Like all things in her life, the pain was the fault of others—of her terrified and mewling children, of Mary, and of Mr. Coin, who fled the house as soon as the midwife arrived. The hours passed slowly, punctuated by Carlotta’s violent moans. Mary played with the little girl and boy, and when night fell, she tried to put them to sleep by reciting the stories about Baba Yaga her father had told her, leaving out the part where the old witch ate the children. But each time they began to drop off, Carlotta would let loose with another howl, and they would startle and cry. Mary assured them that their mother didn’t scream because she was sad but because she was happy, which was enough of a fairy tale to lure them back to sleep.
The baby was born long after midnight. Mr. Coin had returned by then, drunk but chastened by the birth and the officious midwife. He joined his wife in the bedroom and closed the door behind him. Mary heard laughter from within, a sound that made her feel embarrassed, the way it was humiliating to watch one person lie to another. After the midwife drove away in her car, Mary walked outside to the barn and pounded on the door. A few moments later, Toby appeared. His hair was tangled, and his face was imprinted with the crisscrossed pattern of loose hay.
“The baby came,” she said.
“Is it alive?”
“So far.”
“All right, then.” He began to shut the barn door.
“Don’t you people have manners?” she said.
“What’s that?”
“It’s the middle of the night. Somebody better take me home.”
She was wrong about the hour. It was nearing dawn as Toby drove the wagon across the windbreak. The house seemed lifeless in the gray light. Her mother would be up soon to fix breakfast.
“It’s a boy,” Mary said as the cart bumped over the dirt clods. “In case you’re interested.”
“One more for him to knock around, I guess,” he said.
“One more for her to dress up like a doll.”
He laughed quietly. She had never heard his laugh, which was lower than his voice and smooth. She studied his hands as they gripped the leather reins and imagined them on her. The air tightened around them, and even though there was nothing strange about two people sharing a bench on a horse cart, she was conscious of every time her coat sleeve brushed against his. The arc of the sun surfaced above the fields, throwing the crop into momentary shadow before the light rose high enough to touch the braided tips of the new wheat, making them look like matches just catching fire. It was later than she thought, and yet there was no smoke from the chimney. Louise was not in the coop gathering eggs. Her brothers were not hitching the horse outside the barn.
“Oh!” She gasped, finally understanding the message hidden in all these clues.
• • •
As the family hovered around Betsy’s grave listening to the preacher, Mary thought her mother looked like a tree that had been struck by lightning. She seemed bent in some imperceptible way, as if she were blackened from the inside, her bones nothing more than char and deadness that would soon disintegrate into ash. Mary was aware that the rest of life was a feint, and that what people considered happiness was simply an avoidance of this grief.
Toby arrived one afternoon soon after the funeral to pay the Coin family’s respects. He sat uncomfortably on a wooden chair that was too small for his lanky frame, eating the sympathy cake he had brought with him, the same one Carlotta had ordered Mary to bake a day earlier. Knowing that Carlotta would take credit, Mary had left out half the sugar and the but
ter, and the cake tasted like apple-flavored dirt. Still, Toby ate dutifully, moving his fork to his mouth in an unbroken rhythm. Doris’s silence made any thought of small talk ridiculous, and the sound of Toby’s fork on the plate and his swallowing noises were loud and uncomfortably intimate. When he was finished, he stood and set the plate on the table where it clattered awkwardly.
“They make you come here?” Mary said when she followed him outside.
“They didn’t make me do anything.”
The admission created a silence between them.
“I saw you that night,” he said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said weakly.
“You could be arrested, sneaking around a person’s house in the night like a common thief,” he said.
“You’re the one who should be thrown in jail. Doing what you did out there for God and everyone to see.”
“Not everyone.”
She could feel heat rise in her face. “Did you come here just to shame me?”
“Not really,” he said.
8.
Tahlequah, Oklahoma, 1921
Not much of a day for marrying,” Doris said, staring out at the low March sky, which threatened and then delivered heavy snow. “Too bad you couldn’t wait for summer.”
It was said without rancor. The bite had been taken out of her with Betsy’s death the previous year. Sometimes Mary found her mother staring at the photo of the Cherokee Murderer, and Doris seemed to gaze beyond the plane of her father’s picture, as if that dead man were just the start of a line of mistakes that all added up to her life. Doris continued to care for the house, to feed her remaining children and the hired man, to check on the health of the livestock and make sure that she got nothing less than top dollar for the crops. But every so often, Mary would catch her mother unawares, when Doris’s obsidian eyes would shift about in a panic, as if she suddenly could not make sense of the people and animals who surrounded her.
Now she eyed the swell of Mary’s stomach. From the back no one would have guessed Mary’s condition—she was still as narrow as a teenage boy—but from head-on the situation was unmistakable: her belly sat in front of her like a balloon. One day Doris would give Mary lanolin and instruct her to rub it on her skin to avoid the pale pleats that scored Doris’s stomach and breasts. The next, she would look balefully at her daughter, shaking her head at the redundancy of life; Doris had held her firstborn in her arms and was already pregnant with the second when she wed Mary’s father.
Mary had spent the last weeks collecting tins from neighbors and cutting them into thin strips. Now rollers hung off her head at uneven lengths so that she looked like a sadly decorated Christmas tree. She stepped into the dress she would be married in. It belonged to a cousin, a big girl with man-sized shoulders, but Doris figured correctly that with ten cents’ worth of satin sash purchased from the Jew in town and tied high under Mary’s bosom, the dress would do just fine, and the excess material would take care of her round middle. Mother-of-pearl buttons ran down the front of the dress from the neck to the waist, and when Mary finished fastening them, she looked at herself in the small mirror that hung above the dresser, leaning down to catch her image where the glass was pure.
“You look like a child in that thing,” Doris said. “You are a child.”
“What’s the difference what age I’m at?” Mary said. “Whether it happens now or next year or five years from now. Making babies is what you raised me for.”
“You’re not a cow,” Doris said.
“I sure look like one in this dress,” Mary said. She thought she saw a trace of her mother’s smile, but it vanished before Mary could draw it out. “What else am I raised for, then?” she said. “What am I supposed to be?”
“You’ll know who you are when you start losing things,” Doris said.
• • •
Later that morning, Mary stood before the preacher and watched as a bead of sweat made its way down Toby’s neck and stained the collar of his shirt. She remembered when they had lain at the edge of a field, surrounded by the tall grasses, the pink flowers from a dogwood drifting down onto their heads and arms. Toby had parted the two halves of her unbuttoned blouse and had traced spirals on her small breasts. He told her stories of his illnesses, which seemed to Mary to behave like impulsive little boys flinging rocks through windows, unaware of the havoc they produced. There were middle-of-the-night spiking temperatures and emergency trips into town to wake Dr. Pallet who had nothing to offer Toby’s parents other than the advice to wait it out, meaning that Toby would either live or die and there wasn’t much anybody could do about it either way. He suffered bouts of asthma where he could not get his breath. When his mother had been alive, she made him stay inside the house on the worst days. She would sit him over a pan of hot water and drape a towel over his head to open up his lungs. His father complained that she was turning him into a weakling and a shirker. After she died and Toby was pulled from school, he worked harder than his older brothers to prove his father wrong. To deal with the breathing problems, his father gave him a pack of Dr. Batty’s Asthma Cigarettes, and when those expensive smokes ran out, he gave him Chesterfields. Mary thought Toby’s childhood sickness accounted for the way he could seem like a ghost. He did not so much enter a room as appear in it, and she always had the unnerving sensation that he had been watching her for longer than she realized. When Toby slipped the band around her finger and put his lips to hers, his fevered breath went into her throat like liquor. She felt faint and sagged against him. He drew her close so that they were suddenly in an embrace that was much more private than either had intended, and the preacher reminded them that they were in God’s house.
They stayed in the hotel in town that night, an extravagance that Toby insisted on. She was relieved since she was not ready to occupy the windowless larder that Carlotta Coin had finally agreed to set aside for the new couple. At first, Carlotta complained about Toby and Mary taking over the room, but when she realized that she could insist that Mr. Coin buy the four-door icebox with the nickel-plated hasps she’d had her eye on in the Sears catalog, she calmed down. Mary watched as Toby laid the dollar bills on the hotel registry desk one by one as if he had never handled money before. Watching the way he moved his lips as he carefully counted made her feel that she and Toby were too young and foolish to be paying for the hotel room and marrying and having a child. She waited for the clerk to laugh at them and tell them to get on home and stop playing dress-up games, but all he did was take the money and hand Toby a room key attached to a ball weight. It was this heavy object, more than any vow she had spoken that day, that caused Mary to fully understand what she had done.
The hotel room had a provisional quality meant for grain salesmen and the occasional traveling lawyer, not for anybody looking to have an experience to be remembered down through the years, one that might be called into service when a reinforced binding was required to hold a marriage together. The bed sagged. There was no rug to warm bare feet. Mary realized that far from feeling as though she and Toby were now joined as one, she felt more separate from him than ever. She was struck by the oddness of him, of any single human being, and all the ways he differed from her. She realized that she would now spend years noticing or deciding not to notice the strangeness of him, the way he held his head at a slight angle as if he were hard of hearing, or the way his teeth scraped against his fork when he ate, or how he cleared his nose in the morning. She didn’t know if she could stand a lifetime of this kind of attention. It was an intimacy that would have the opposite effect: it would demand that she acknowledge her isolation and then somehow overcome it each day, every minute of every single day.
She clutched the small bag that held her nightdress and a change of clothes and watched while Toby closed and locked the door, then laid the heavy key on the night table. She panicked and tried to imagine how long it would take her
to get that key in her hand, fit it into the lock, and run away. She could tell by the high color of his cheeks that his fever was still up, but when she asked him if he wanted to lie down or if she ought to get him a glass of water from the sink at the end of the hall, he only smiled in the sober way she had become familiar with that suggested he had long ago come to terms with the difficulties of his life.
“Take off your dress,” he said, removing his coat and his jacket and hanging them over the bedpost. “I want to see you.”
“You’ve seen me,” she said. “I’ve got the belly to prove it.” But this was not the truth. All the times they had been together there was always a slip hiked over a hip, underwear strangling her ankles, his belt buckle digging into her stomach. It had been easy in barns or fields or up in the hills, hidden by brambles so a stranger passing by would think the rustling was only a woodchuck or a vole. It had been easy with clothes on.
Mary Coin Page 5