Mary Coin
Authors: Marisa Silver
ALSO BY MARISA SILVER
Alone With You
The God of War
No Direction Home
Babe in Paradise
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Copyright © 2013 by Marisa Silver
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Silver, Marisa.
Mary Coin / Marisa Silver.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-101-61107-4
1. Women migrant labor—Fiction. 2. Women photographers—Fiction. 3. Depressions—1929—Fiction. 4. Photojournalism—United States—History—20th century—Fiction. 5. Rural poor—United States—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.I55M37 2013 2012039861
813'.6—dc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
For Henry and Oliver
Contents
If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walker
1.
Porter, California, 2010
T
here is something gripping to Walker about a town in decline. As he drives down the streets of his youth, he feels as if he were looking at faded and brittle photographs of a place lost to time. The gap between what exists and what once was creates a sensation of yearning that feels nearly like love. The old residential section of town with its stripped and weathered homes and the buckled remnants of what were once tree-lined sidewalks is like a dead star, history and time lost in its collapse. All newness, all brightness, has moved to the outskirts, where there is a Taco Bell and a Kmart housed in an ersatz Spanish Colonial mall. Still, Porter cannot escape its past. It is surrounded by the fields of California’s Central Valley, which are as old as Walker’s family, who have owned them for a hundred and thirty years, as old as the Yokut tribes who roamed them long before that, paying spiritual tribute to a land that sustained them. Which is all Walker’s ancestors ever wanted from this place to begin with: the assurance of a future.
Walker drives past his old high school. A marquee posts the results of the state proficiency exams, which are apparently good enough to merit four exclamation points. He passes the football field, its green dulled and yellowed by the late-summer sun. He remembers his string of desultory athletic failures—the dropped relay baton, the single basket scored after the final buzzer—high school shames he buried with a biting and sarcastic intelligence and a studied apathy that enraged his father. Walker makes a point of telling his children all his foundational stories, no matter how humiliating. He wants to front-load Isaac and Alice with a sense of their history so that they will not feel as unmoored as he does now, driving toward his father’s house, toward his father, who is dying.
Walker is astonished by how little he knows about his father’s childhood. The few stories he was told have had to pull duty as the narrative of an entire life and have taken on outsized and probably erroneous metaphorical significance. He knows that George let his brother convince him to climb to the roof, only to have Edward pull out the ladder from under him, leaving George dangling from the rain gutter until the groundskeeper rescued him. He knows that his grandmother died giving birth to his father and that Edward is not really George’s brother at all but his half brother. Walker knows that his father lettered in archery, that he had a dog who grew drunk off a grape arbor and staggered home reeking like a town derelict, that he shined his shoes with an electric shoeshine, had his nails manicured once a week at the barbershop downtown, and that he smoked one cigar a year after all the crops had yielded. He knows that his father ate a baloney sandwich and tomato soup for lunch every day of his life. Walker knows these things not from his father’s having told him but from gleaning information from family acquaintances and household staff or by observing the man whose translucence created in Walker an obsessive if wary curiosity. As Walker drives, he shuffles these random bits of information around, trying to work out an arrangement that completes the picture of his father. But there are too many missing pieces. George Dodge was uninterested in sharing his past when there was so much future to exploit. He turned the century-old fruit groves into a successful family-owned corporation, shipping oranges from Porter—as well as melon and lettuce from his farms on the west side of the valley—all over the country. And if there is one truism about farming it is that the business is one of futures, of growth and harvest and planting and growth and on and relentlessly on. A person who gets mired in the past sees his crops grow brown and useless, and other growers swoop in to capture market share. “You’re missing your future, boy,” George pronounced, when Walker was eighteen and told his father that he wanted no part of farming but that he preferred to study history.
“History?” George said, his mouth twisting into an expression of disbelief.
“Understanding the mistakes of the past so we don’t repeat them,” Walker answered in a tone that, twenty-three years later, he cringes to recall. Such arrogance. A right of youth, he supposes, a necessity. How else is it possible to face the terrifying void of your unformed self except by claiming absolute intelligence?
“History will get you nowhere,” George said.
Well, it has gotten him somewhere, Walker thinks. He is a social historian. He teaches university classes during the school year and takes the summer months to perform his field research in towns just like Porter, where he is continually drawn to the buried and forgotten stories, to the molecules of the past that are overlooked by most traditional academics. He trolls through newspaper morgues and attics filled with dusty and forgotten photo albums. He studies the ephemera: the grocery lists and obscure diaries, the death notices and high school honor rolls, looking for the clues hidden within these random pieces of information that might tell how history actually happened to people. He leaves it to others to interpret treaties and battles. Walker wants to know what people wore, how they dried their clothes, what they served at their weddings, how they buried their dead. He needs to answer these small, seemingly insignificant questions in order to answer the larger ones. How did the unusual uptick in suicides in a rural midwestern town give the lie to the romantic notions of pastoral bliss touted during the Industrial Revolution, when cities were soot-filled and disease-ridden factories of human attrition? Walker spent three years traveling to a town in Minnesota to answer that question. At his best, his work achieves a psychological portrait of a place and a time. At his worst—well, his work has been accused of being beside the point and subjective.
History will get you nowhere.
• • •
W
alker turns into the driveway of his childhood home. The once venerable Queen Anne that has been the Dodge family seat for one hundred years has grown saggy with age, its white coat dingy as old teeth. The wraparound porch is pocked with wood rot. He had hoped to arrive early enough to spend time with his father, but the situation must have worsened in the last few hours; the ambulance has already arrived. Angela, George’s home nurse and the daughter of Beatriz, who was once Walker’s childhood
niñera,
stands at the door as the EMTs wrestle the gurney down the porch steps. Walker’s mother has been dead for ten years, and he misses her often and especially at times like this. She was a wife of the old school, a Mills College graduate who used a refined intellect to manage all the contrapuntal temperaments in the household as if she were conducting an unruly elementary school orchestra. If she were still here, Walker imagines, somehow she would find a way to make the situation feel normal, the situation of a once tenacious and unyielding man being helplessly borne toward his end.