Mary Coin

by Marisa Silver

  “Come on, honey,” he said gently. He began to unbutton his shirt.

  “If you want a show you can go down the street,” she said, holding her coat closed around her. “I’m sure those ladies can take care of you just fine.”

  He said nothing and continued to undress. The muscles of his chest and arms moved smoothly against one another as he folded his shirt and placed it on the foot of the bed. He took off his pants and his socks and his drawers until he was naked. A train sounded in the distance. She looked out the window.

  “What are you thinking about?” he said.

  “I’m thinking about that train.”

  “What about it?”

  “About what it would be like to be on that train going far, far away.”

  “Am I on it with you?”

  “No,” she said. She began to cry. “Aw, shit.”

  “Take off your clothes, Mary.”

  She took off her coat and laid it on the bed. Then she reached around and loosened the sash of her dress and watched it fall to the floor. She undid the button at her throat and then moved to the next, her hands working awkwardly. The dress was so big that the material slipped easily off her hips.

  “And that,” he said, motioning to her slip.

  She reached down and picked up the hem and drew the material over her belly, her shoulders, and finally her head. She was embarrassed by her sagging and discolored undergarments. She crossed her arms over her bare breasts. “They’ll do for milking,” she said.

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Make a joke out of us.”

  When she was finally naked, his body reacted to hers. He was her husband. She repeated the word to herself, trying to give it sense.

  “Mary Coin,” he said.

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “It’s who you are.”

  She felt his gaze go right through her as if she were transparent. She was nobody yet. How could he not see that?

  • • •

  They lived in the larder as man and wife, but Carlotta still expected Mary to clean and sew and help with the three children. The only difference was that now that Mary was part of the family, there was no reason for Carlotta to pay her. One morning, lifting an armful of sodden clothing from the washing bucket, Mary felt something tear at her gut. She dropped the clothes. She was only in her seventh month.

  “You move around and that baby will fall right out of you,” her mother told her when she entered the house and took one look at her daughter’s pale complexion. Carlotta had sent for Doris, not wanting to be part of early or dead babies. Doris, having taken stock of the silly furnishings in the Coin house, knew the woman would be useless. She instructed Mary to lie in bed or stretch out on Carlotta’s love seat for the remaining two months of her term. Mary saw Carlotta begin to protest the loss of her maid and the ill use of her sofa, but a sharp look from Doris quieted her. The crisis of Mary’s early labor and the useless frippery of the house where her daughter now lived resurrected some aspect of Doris’s character, and Mary was relieved to see her mother grow mean and resourceful. Doris handed a pouch of herbs to Carlotta, ordering the dumbstruck woman to boil them and dose Mary morning and night.

  Mary kept to her bed for much of the day. When she needed to get away from the house and breathe air that was not scented with the rancid smell of the cow chips Carlotta used to heat the stove, she would take a chair outside. On an unseasonably hot day, she sat on the porch and stared at the field, shielding her eyes from the sun’s glare. Toby’s brothers had both married and started families in the last year. Fed up with their father’s penury and enticed by the newspaper advertisements promising jobs for men with grit and a sense of adventure, they had left for the sawmills of California. Toby worked the field alone now, a speck in the distance. The wheat had just begun to come in but it was stunted and patchy, and there was talk among the farmers of a dry season. But Toby refused to walk away from all the years of his hard labor and prove his father right. That night, he returned from the field, his skin so dry that it hurt him to chew his food. He lay in bed while Mary rubbed chicken fat into his chapped hands. She could sense by the way he flexed his fingers when she was done that he was proud of his body’s ability to withstand such daily torment. He told her about things he’d seen that day—a red-tailed hawk soaring high, a pair of sand vipers twisting together in a mating dance. The light from a candle threw a shadow on the wall, and as he talked he interlaced his hands to show her the sinuous love duet of the deadly snakes.

  • • •

  When Mary began her eighth month, William Coin sold the farm.

  “And the house, too?”she asked stupidly when Toby told her, but the news had made her instantly think of her coming child.

  “Everything.” He explained that his father had found an ignorant buyer just off a train from the East who knew nothing about patterns of drought. William Coin got the man drunk on whiskey and made the sale.

  That night, Mary woke from an uncomfortable sleep. She reached for Toby, but he was not beside her.

  “You’re not supposed to be on your feet,” he said when she found him at the edge of the field. Her feet were swollen in her shoes, and even the short distance she’d walked made her belly twinge. They stood side by side, facing the distant hills.

  “I couldn’t make it work,” he said finally, his voice thick. He squatted down and scooped up a handful of dry dirt. “This land needed more than I knew how to do for it.”

  “You act like it’s a person,” she said.

  “It’s a person to me. I was here every day of my life. I talked to it.” He laughed at himself, shaking his head. “Like the way you do a cow. I used to tell it what I wanted it to do.”

  “I married a crazy man.”

  “You married a farmer.”

  A week later, Mary watched as Toby packed everything they owned into the trunk of the old Hudson his father had grudgingly agreed to give him. Before heading west, they stopped off to see Doris.

  “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.

  • • •

  Three 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 th
e 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.

  By 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 rel
eased 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.