Mary Coin (4 page)

The noise of the crowd shifted up an octave as nearly all the men, women, and children put themselves forward, the women patting their hair and pinching color into their cheeks, the men drawing themselves up tall and hitching their pants above their waists. Mary watched the photographer take his time scanning the willing, making a show of indecision. Finally, he chose a short, pillowy Indian woman lacking most of her teeth who wore her hair in two long braids that framed heavy jowls and a grim expression. He held out a hand as if asking the old woman to dance. As if in a daze, she allowed him to lead her into the clearing at the center of the crowd. He then reached into the trunk and pulled out a clutch of garments, including a shell-and-bone headdress. The whites in the crowd, seeing what the man was after, began to drift away to the business of the day while the Indians closed in around the trunk.

“We don’t wear them clothes no more, mister,” someone said.

“It’s just for the photograph,” the man said, handing an embroidered blouse to the old woman.

“This here’s Choctaw,” she said. “I ain’t no Choctaw.” She nodded once as if agreeing with herself and walked away. There was general grumbling, and people began to disperse.

“One dollar for a picture!” the photographer called out. “Now, that’s a fair deal no matter where you come from.”

Titus, Doris’s hired man, came forward. He was a six-foot-tall full-blooded Cherokee with a chest strong enough to drag a hoe through root-clotted dirt faster than a mule. The photographer pulled a breastplate from the trunk, and Titus hung it over his dirty work shirt.

“Perhaps without the shirt,” the photographer said.

“Show me your dollar,” Titus said.

The photographer took four quarters from his pocket but held on to them. “Without the shirt,” he said.

Titus pulled off his shirt. His bare breasts rose up in small hillocks of muscle stained with the dark ink of his nipples.

“We have a warrior here, Elvin,” the photographer said to his assistant. “A bona fide Indian chief.” He took a position behind the tripod, drawing the dark cloth over his head. “Don’t look at the camera,” he called from underneath his tent. “Pretend I’m not even here.”

“You better be here, or who’s giving me my money?” Titus said, and the crowd laughed.

“You are absolutely right, sir,” the photographer said. “Now, if you’ll just look off there.” He pointed, his head still shrouded by the cloth.

“What am I looking at?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why am I looking?”

“You’re a warrior just back from battle. You’re thinking of recent victory.”

“I ain’t no fool,” Titus said, and began to lift the breastplate over his head.

The photographer came out from behind his camera. “Look here. I’m sure I can find someone else to take this money off my hands.”

Titus stared at the photographer for a long while. Mary could tell by the expectant quality of the silence that people were hoping for a fight. Finally, Titus straightened the breastplate, looked off to the left, and didn’t move an inch or even blink an eye.

A general squealing of girls erupted just as Toby Coin emerged from the hardware store carrying a wrinkled sack, but the excitement was not on his account. The photographer’s assistant held up a doeskin dress, a slight piece of fawn-colored material barely larger than a dishrag.

“We don’t raise our girls to parade around in their knickers,” a woman scolded.

Mary hoped Toby would look her way, but he hitched his bag higher in his arms and headed toward his horse and wagon.

“I’ll do it,” she said. She snatched the piece of cloth from the man’s hand and pulled it on underneath her dress the way she did when it was winter and too cold to strip off her nightgown before her day clothes were in place. She shimmied out of her sleeves and snaked her hand through the single armhole of the doeskin, leaving her dress in a puddle on the ground. The crowd fell silent as though it had been mystified by a magician’s trick. Mary noticed a familiar slack-jawed expression in the faces of the men as they took in her bare shoulders. She felt the queer nature of her power, the way it made her feel both strong and diminished at the same time.

“I’m gonna tell Mama.” Betsy hissed, pushing Louise behind her as if to protect her from their sister’s degeneracy.

Well, Betsy was a rule-following prig, Mary thought, and her lifelong derision of her sister and the fact that Toby was now studying her from his seat high up on his wagon wiped away more subtle confusions of the moment.

The photographer’s assistant positioned her so that she stood sideways to the camera. “Stiff like a statue,” he said.

The photographer studied Mary. “She does not have an authentic look,” he said.

“You are awfully light-skinned,” the assistant said to her. “Are you sure you’re Indian?”

“My grandfather was the Cherokee Murderer,” she said. A few people in the crowd laughed.

“Young lady,” the photographer said. “Please do not waste my time.”

“Think of something Indian,” the assistant said.

But all she could think of was Toby’s eyes on her naked shoulder.

“Think of rain dances,” the young man continued.

But where was he? He had turned the cart around and, along with Titus, who now sat in the seat next to him, was driving out of town. Uninterested. Or disgusted. She had made herself ridiculous in front of him, her sisters, in front of the entire town.

“Or papooses,” the young man said. “Or—”

She spun around to face the camera. “Or scalping?”

“Don’t move!” the photographer said, and she stood, frozen by her mortification. The wait seemed interminable. She wanted to flee, to run into the hills and disappear until everyone who had witnessed her humiliation was dead and gone. Finally, the man emerged from beneath the black cloth. “Perfect!” he said. “Pack up, Elvin,” he instructed his assistant. “I’ve got what I need.”

“What do I do now?” Mary asked the assistant.

“You give us back that costume.”

“What about the picture?”

“Some rich man back East is going to put it on his mantel and tell all his friends he saw a real Indian princess on a trip he never even took.”

“But I’m not a princess.”

“Now you are.”

By the time Mary arrived home, Betsy had already told Doris the entire story. Doris held out her hand, and when Mary put the quarters in it, that same hand caught Mary by surprise and she cried out as the money clattered to the floor. For days afterward there was a mark on Mary’s chin from where her mother had slapped her with the rough edges of the coins.

6.

A
cricket was buried in the wall next to her bed. Mary heard the trilling as if the bug were inside her ear. The sod walls of the house were alive with worms and centipedes and colonies of ants, and after the sun went down and the world beyond the windows became black, it was sometimes possible for Mary to imagine that her family lived underground, and that the house was nothing but a cave dug into dirt. Her mother had left the door open to bring in the night air, and the locusts sang and bugs flew into the screen where they died. It was late October, but the summer heat had still not let up. Mary’s senses flattened out during the day, numbing themselves to withstand the onslaught of sun and the squalls of hot wind that moved the dry dirt off the ground into busy whorls that just as quickly settled. She would discover grit in the most unlikely places—between the pages of a book or underneath the lid of a jar of tomatoes. But at night, her eyes and ears came alive, and distinct noises seemed menacing to her, as if they were warnings of some kind.

The cricket chirped, and she put her hand over the place on the wall where she thought it might be, as if the weight of her palm would comfort it. But the noise continued, and she realized the insect had probably become stuck and that it would stop its desperate song only when it died. She felt sorrow for the witless thing that was trying to attract a mate where no mate could ever find it. Doris would laugh at that, as she laughed about Mary’s attachments to a particular chicken or a young tree. Doris warned her children of the dangers of lazy sentiments. She believed such softness would weaken them and make it impossible to survive in a place whose terms were not negotiable. Mary considered trying to dig the cricket out of its entrapment. But the wall was covered with insulating newsprint, and her mother would notice.

A candlestick sat on the floor by Mary’s side of the bed. The wax had melted down to a nub, but the wick sustained a desultory flame. She held the candle close to the wall. She’d read nearly every inch of newsprint covering the house. Stories a decade old or more were glued next to pieces about the war in Europe, so that it seemed to Mary that time did not so much progress as circle back on itself, the past and present forming a different kind of relationship than
before
and
after.
She read about a famous tenor who performed Verdi in New York City in 1912. Mary’s father had been alive then. He’d put her to sleep to the songs his Russian mother had sung to him,
Bayu-bayushki-bayu, ne lozhisya na krayu,
his breath pickled by drink. His voice, low and graveled like distant thunder, was comforting the way a storm could be before it arrived, making the world feel small, its boundaries defined by anticipation. She stared at the faded newspaper photograph of the portly singer, his fur coat barely closing around his gut, the flesh of his face forming a bloated cushion on which his features rested. She did not know who or what Verdi was, and the fact that there was no explanation made her aware that there were words and ideas meant only for people who already knew them. Lifting her candle higher, she scanned the advertisements directed toward fashionable city women who wore fox stoles with glass beads set into the eye sockets and claws still intact. She read news of the war dead, who were never named, as if one body were like any other. She wondered what happened to their names now that they were only labels for memories that would fade and disappear. Where her mother had recently patched a corner, Mary read local news about wheat prices and articles about the new tractors that could cut and thresh in a third of the time it took a man and a mule to do the job. Her mother claimed these machines were no better than your own two hands, but Mary knew that her mother decided something old was better than something new only to bury want. The newsprint was a savior on days when Mary had nothing to look forward to but hours of helping her mother with cooking or sewing or killing a chicken, or on nights like this when she could not sleep. But the news was a rebuke, too. She was as trapped as that cricket, stuck in this house filled with the sweet smell of rotting earth.

The bug’s incessant bleating drilled into her head. She felt every cell of her body helplessly drawn into the compulsive task of paying attention, trying to find a rhythm and a meaning to every scritch and trill until her nerves were on fire. She stood up, careful not to jostle the bed and wake her sisters. She slipped on her boots then crossed the hardpack of the floor, holding her candle low so that the light would not rouse her brothers, who slept on the other side of the room, and so that it would not create shadows on the screen her mother placed around her own bed each night for privacy. Mary thought she could remember hearing that iron bed creak as the panels of muslin shifted, but she could not be sure what was true memory and what was just a story she’d invented to remind her that Doris had once had softness in her and might still, although she was loath to show it. Mary could no longer recall her father’s face and could reconstruct it only by looking at her brothers and finding what was common to them, the way the corners of their mouths stretched downward, the shared cleft in the chin—features that were not her mother’s but could not be random, showing up on both boys as they did.

A swarm of mosquitoes fluttered around the screen, attracted to the flame. Mary blew out the candle, waited for the bugs to fly away, and walked outside, careful not to let the door slam behind her. Her skin grew alert beneath her nightdress, her nipples hardening in the cooler temperature. The tops of her thighs rubbed smoothly against each other as she walked. It was awful, this wanting body of hers, horrible to always feel this urge to open, to unpeel, to expose hidden parts to light. She walked past the vegetable plot; past the shed, where the white leghorns shifted in their coop; past the barn, where Titus slept with the mules. The three cows stood in the corral near the hog pen, swaying gently against one another, their bells chiming lightly. She headed toward the dark line of red gum trees, the windbreak between her family’s land and the Coins’. The trees’ widespread branches overlapped, making them look like men with their arms around one another’s shoulders, hunching drunkenly toward home.

The Coin house was dark; everyone would be sleeping, especially the two little children who were given a thimbleful of whiskey each night. The house was of a better grade than Mary’s, built not of sod bricks but of cedarwood. It extended to four rooms and an attached mudroom, which they used as a larder. The floor was laid with raw planks of Ozark pine. The utilitarian furniture that suited a widower and his three motherless sons had been replaced with pieces Carlotta had brought to her marriage—a velvet love seat and a delicate rocking chair made of polished burled wood. The furniture was no match for the rough uses of a farmer. In three years the pieces had become gaunt and dulled like their owner.

Toby and his brothers worked the field for their father in exchange for room and board and the promise of inheriting the farm when the time came, but Carlotta wanted no part of another woman’s family and demanded that the brothers live in the barn. They slept in the hayloft and took their meals outside when it was fair and with the horses and mules when it was not. When Mary worked for Mrs. Coin, she hardly saw Toby, who left for the fields before the first light and did not return until dark. But she searched him out in the bits and pieces of him that were left in the house. Dusting behind the beds, she found an old school ledger with his name marked on the cover in the careful, lip-bit print of a boy just learning to hold a pencil. There were half-empty medicine bottles stored in a box below the kitchen sink, which Mary imagined had been used to cure Toby’s innumerable childhood illnesses. The amber-colored bottles bore the signature of Dr. Pallet, a man Doris considered a fool for the cathode-ray treatment he foisted on ignorant white women, telling them that a glowing tube inserted in private places would ease their monthly troubles when every Cherokee woman knew that black cohosh would do the trick.

Mary stood outside the barn, inhaling the sweet, overpowering scent of grass and manure and hide coming from the mucky stalls. She concentrated on Toby the way she concentrated on Carlotta’s babies when she was called to take care of them, calming their tetchy cries by breathing slowly near their faces so they would catch her rhythm.
Come to me,
she thought, so hard that she could feel the words rise up in her throat and push at her lips. When she heard a cough and then movement, she tucked herself into the shadows of the roof’s overhang, amazed by the power of her longing. Toby appeared at the door wearing nothing but long underwear bottoms. His chest was muscular but so thin as to look concave. Walking out into the open, he ran his hand through his hair, then reached into his long johns. A hard stream of piss arced into the air, followed by a mournful wheeze of gas. When he was done with his business, he continued to hold himself, moving his hand slowly and then faster. Mary no longer had the sensation that she was spying on him, and that he alone was the victim of the moment. Something more complicated was happening now. As Toby stroked himself, he leaned back and tilted his face to the night sky. With a strangled grunt, he was done. He tucked himself in and wiped his hand on his hip. He turned as if he was going to head back into the barn but stopped, facing her. She wanted to cry out, wave her arms, do anything to make the inevitable come more quickly. She would lose her job with Mrs. Coin; that was certain. She would have to explain everything to her mother, and her humiliation would be doubled. But Toby said nothing. Maybe he couldn’t see her. Maybe he was walking in his sleep. Or perhaps she had been stupid and lucky at the same time, a combination her mother told her happened only once in a poor person’s life, which was when they died. An abundance of dumb luck was for other people, Doris said, people whose paths had been smoothed before them by generations of dumb and lucky ancestors. Finally, Toby walked back into the barn. Mary ran home, across the line of gum trees, past the chicken coop and the pump, propelled by the withering knowledge of her cowardice: when the moment had come to claim what she wanted, she had only prayed to disappear.