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.
• • •
By 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.
A spark landed ten feet in front of Mary. She stared, unable to move, as it ignited a tuft of grass. The flame caught a bush and burned through the dry leaves in seconds, until what remained was only a skeleton of branches, which was then engulfed
as well. She was entranced by the sudden beauty of the thing turned back on itself; time reversed. She thought about her grandfather who had walked calmly out of his double-walled bunker toward the guns that killed him. She thought, too, of her father in his coffin, Betsy in hers. All those deaths. It seemed only right that hers would be added to the list. What had her mother said? A person couldn’t be dumb and lucky twice.
“Mama!” Ellie screamed.
A low-lying snake of fire slithered toward Mary and her children. She handed the baby to Ellie and pitched herself front-first on top of the flames until she suffocated them. And then all the women nearby began to do the same, racing to wherever they saw trouble begin and throwing themselves on top of that trouble before it did them and their children in.
The next day, Mary walked through the rubble of their destroyed house. They had never had anything but now they had nothing. Mary realized how different those two conditions were. A wind stirred the ashes on the ground. The air smelled of the turned-fruit odor of burned things. She searched for salvage while Toby packed what little there was—a few pots, a fork and spoon, the clawed end of a rake—in the Hudson, which had survived the blaze. A cough had settled into his chest from inhaling the smoke, a hard, dry sound that cut through the churchlike quiet that pervaded the town as people moved about, dazed by the quick violence that had been done to them. Toby lit cigarette after cigarette to open his lungs.
Mary thought she ought to cry, but crying seemed too general a reaction for the specific disaster that had occurred and the set of ramifications that unfurled from it. When she had gone to the Jew’s store in Tahlequah before the wedding, she’d watched as he flicked the spool and the grosgrain ribbon fell to the floor in lazy figure eights. This was her future now, she thought. A flick of the wrist, a wayward spark, and the spool unwound.
10.
Corcoran, California, 1931
Mary had never thought much about her hands, but sometimes, when she needed to take a moment to ease out her back or to stare down the row of cotton to judge how long it would take her to work her way to the water wagon, she would catch sight of her ripped and ragged cuticles. She felt great sadness for them, as if they were not part of her but were some children she’d seen by the side of the road, waiting on parents who were, in turn, waiting on luck. She and Toby had each bought a pair of gloves, but it was impossible to pick the cotton off the stalks quickly enough with the thick material making their fingers clumsy. It was harder still to crack open the bolls to get at the late yield. She took a scissors to the gloves’ fingertips. But even with this adjustment, the bulky protection was a hindrance.
They had driven down from the lumber mills where even in the heat of summer you had only to walk into a nearby grove to find some shade and where newly fallen pine needles provided a cool carpet for your feet. They’d worked wherever there was work, picking peaches, drying grapes for raisins, packing tomatoes. Now they were in a flat, inland town where there were few trees to break up the relentless glare of the sun. When they’d first arrived, Mary’s eyes feasted on the even rows of white cotton, which seemed as soft and inviting as new snowfall and reminded her so much of home. But that siren loveliness revealed itself to be nothing more than a ruse, a pretty girl whose looks rope you in to a life of demand and perpetual inadequacy. Mary hated the cotton.
They lived at the pickers’ camp in a tent Toby had bought with the last of his mill wages. Ellie, Trevor, June, and Della attended a school held in a shed where there were few books and pencils. The teacher was a picker’s wife who said she’d been a schoolmistress in Arkansas, although Ellie complained her spelling was worse than half the kids’. While Mary worked the rows, James and Ray played alongside her. She told them to stay close, but inevitably Ray would run off, embroiled in some imaginary battle, slashing the air with a stick, and Mary would have to chase after him, losing valuable minutes and the pennies those minutes represented. Toby worked two rows over so that he would not have to mind the children and at least one of them would make a full day’s wage. Mary tried to ignore his constant coughing, willing herself not to look up every time she heard his wet heaves and the sound of him hawking phlegm out of his lungs. But when he had a fit so powerful that it brought him to his knees, she went to him. She looked for the water truck, but there was at least a quarter mile of picking before they would reach the end of the row and Toby could get a drink. On particularly hot days, there were pickers who fainted, but the foreman would sooner replace a dehydrated worker than drive the water truck into the field and remove a crew’s incentive to make it from one end of a row to the other. Toby recovered and told Mary she should get back to work. If she was caught dawdling, the foreman would yank her off the line. They had to work as fast and as hard as they could if they were to make enough that week to barely feed everyone. Mary returned to her row and adjusted her long white sack around her chest. A shout went out, and she heard the buzzing of a duster. She told James and Ray to put their heads down just as the plane flew low over the field, but James, entranced, stared up at the plane while Ray whooped and twirled in the falling powder. Mary bent over to fill her bag once more.
• • •
There was blood on Toby’s pillow each morning. He could no longer hold his body upright much less haul a sack of cotton down a line or climb up the ladder onto the truck bed to weigh his take. Mary went to the fields each day and tried to increase her pace, but the sun and the heat and the problem of the little boys made that impossible. At night, she began to look away when Toby undressed because the sickness had ruined his body. His back was a rutted map of disks and bone. His skin was sallow and loose.
When a doctor finally visited the camp, he held a handkerchief over his nose and mouth and diagnosed tuberculosis. Mary spent the nights awake, holding Toby while he coughed, laying water-soaked rags over his forehead, cleaning the blood off his lips and chin. When the fever gripped him, she pressed her body on top of his to stop the shaking.
“What do I do? Tell me what I should do?” she said to him toward the end of the second week of fevers, when Trevor begged her to let him quit school and work in the fields to make up for his father’s lost pay. Toby’s eyes fluttered open. She wanted not just an answer for the present crisis but for every problem that might arise in a lifetime. When should Ellie be allowed to walk out with a boy? If June refused to put on a dress, should they just let her wear her brother’s overalls? For the rest of her life? But how would she get a husband? She knew the questions were unimportant, and yet she realized that if she could manage to ask them all, the answers would amount to her and Toby’s life together. If they could make every future decision ahead of time then it would be as if she had gotten all of him.
“James will be fine, don’t you think?” she said one night as she knelt by his side, trying to cool his fever with a moist cloth. “I know he doesn’t talk and people think he’s not right. But there’s a light in his eyes.” Toby’s breathing was so shallow that she had to put her ear to his mouth to know he was still with her.
“Fine,” he mumbled, barely moving his cracked lips.
“He might be the smartest of them all. You don’t have to be a loudmouth to have a brain inside your head.” She was babbling now, but she feared that if she stopped talking, he would forget to take his next breath. “Once James starts in school, we won’t let him stop. Don’t you think that’s right? But if he wants to work like his brothers, then . . .”
“Fine,” Toby exhaled.
“Which is it?” she said desperately. “Fine, he stays in school, or fine, he works? You have to tell me, Toby. You have to tell me right now.”
His eyes drifted to the right. She turned to see what had caught his attention. When she looked back at his face, he was gone.
• • •
He’s been taken away,” she said to her children, who were waiting outside the tent. And then she changed what she’d said, because righ
t at that moment she stopped believing in God. “He’s left us,” she said. And that was not right, either, because it suggested that he had made a decision to abandon them. She sat down on the ground and let the children come to her. “We’re alone,” she told them. This is what it all amounted to in the end. Toby’s brothers and their wives had been generous through the worst of the illness, making up for Toby’s lost earnings by giving Mary extra potatoes or carrots, a bone for her soup. But they could not continue to cut into their own supplies to keep her and her kids going. And she couldn’t bear to stay with them. It was too difficult to watch Robert’s and Levi’s children run to greet their fathers when the day was done. It made her angry to see gestures of affection pass between the couples or to lie in bed and hear the low murmurs and laughter coming from their nearby tents. And although they would never say as much, Mary’s sisters-in-law counted Toby’s death as her failure just as they thought her six children were her folly. Mary knew it was the meanness of the times that made them think this way. Each day, the camps were flooded with families, and there was not enough work to go around. People became competitive in all sorts of ways, as if a better dress or a laughing child or a living husband was proof that a person would make it.
Mary sustained the weight of sorrow that would descend on her freshly each morning when she woke up and had to remind herself all over again that her husband was gone. But what terrified her most was that she knew that what had happened to her had not really happened yet. Right now there was only waking and feeding and sending the big children to school and taking the little ones into the field and wiping sweat and filling a bag and standing on lines. A larger grief was still out there, waiting to overtake her when she was not looking. She had to be careful.
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