Machine Dreams (5 page)

I know all this because I heard about it, growing up—I was too small to remember, really. Just a few things.

I was lying in the grass and watching my uncles hammer slate on the barn roof. They were all big men dressed in broadcloth shirts. They swung the hammers full circle, from the shoulder, as they drove the nails. Tall pine ladders lay against the barn walls and thick yellow ropes hung down. The slates were shining like mirrors.

And once I looked out a window at snow. Snow as far as you could see, pasture fences covered and trees gone, so their top limbs fanned out of the snow like spikes. Nothing but snow. Snow like an ocean.

In the winter, I was the only child.

I was with Bess at first. We were in the big house by ourselves, except for the old parents, and at times the brothers stayed a few days. The wagon was hitched on Sundays, and not even then in January, February. Snow too deep for the wheels. When Bess was a girl, she’d gone to finishing school for a year in Lynchburg, so she’d been farther from home than any of the other women. She was the youngest, and pampered. The older sisters would tell a lot later how she’d been sent away to learn to ride a horse like something other than a savage.

Bess had been married once before; she was young and it was kept secret in the family. Divorce was rare then. The first husband? He wasn’t from around here. Seems to me his name was Thorn. She probably came back from finishing school and had big ideas at eighteen, nineteen. Left with this Thorn and went out West; I don’t think she knew him very well. Just within a month or so, she wired home from St. Louis—he’d taken off and left her
out there. It was my father, Warwick, went to get her. He was closest to Bess in age and had warned her against leaving in the first place. They booked passage back on the train, but it was near Christmas and a winter of bad blizzards; they were weeks getting home.

Afterward Warwick was very protective of her. All this was before I was born and no one ever talked about it. Why would they? What’s the difference, it don’t matter.

Bess stayed there on the farm for seven years then, and helped—putting up food, companion to her mother. Maybe she felt chastised, but the family would not have said a word to her. She was like a mother to me.

The brothers all had parcels of the land but were twenty, fifty miles distant. They farmed or mined and drifted by the homeplace every few weeks, on horseback, alone; women and children didn’t travel in the winter. My father, Warwick, was the only brother worked in towns a while and wore a suit. Later he went back to the mines, but then he was a wholesaler for a dry goods company. Just a few weeks after he brought Bess home from St. Louis, Warwick brought this bride of his to the farm and moved her in. Then he left, as Bess tells it, and was only back twice the months the girl was there. She was a girl he’d met in his work, a working girl. She never gave any facts about herself, Bess says, and went away after I was born. Went away as soon as she could travel, and sent no word to anyone again.
Warwick paid for a wet nurse half the winter, but there is more to a baby than feeding it
I never saw my father, not really.
You did see him, you don’t remember, He had the new wife, but by then you were accustomed to us. Then he died when you were still in skirts.
…

They gave the impression it was his new wife didn’t want me, but I knew it was him. I don’t remember what he looked like, except from pictures. I just remember him yelling at me once or twice. He never did a damn thing for me, never noticed me. One summer—I was real young, at the farm—I had a baby coon. My father had his rifle and was standing over me. It was out at the edge of the fields, away from the house, where the grass was tall. He said go into the field and let that coon go, you can’t keep a wild creature. I held the coon and walked in. The grass was over my
head, deep and high. He started shooting. The gun made two sounds, a big crack from behind, like thunder, and a high zing close by, like a stinging fly close your face. The grass was moving and he was shooting where the grass moved. I stayed still for a long time. I don’t know what I thought. Years later I asked Bess about it and she said wasn’t Warwick did that at all, was a neighbor man, because it was a danger to have coons when there was rabies in the county.

I don’t know. He was well liked. There is an old homemade album Bess must have pasted together. The pictures are taken outside the old house, and everyone is dressed in their best. My father is wearing a woman’s big hat and posing like Napoleon.

They had his funeral there at the house. The brothers made the casket out of pine board, and the lid was kept shut. That was the practice in that country; if a man died in the mines, his coffin was closed for services, nailed shut, even if the man was unmarked. They would have put Warwick’s coffin on the long table in the parlor, the best room. The window shades in that room were sewn with gold tassels. Silk tassels, and children weren’t to touch them. The parlor was seldom used, but it was dusted everyday, spotless, and the floor was polished once a week with linseed rags fastened onto a broom.

It was soon after Warwick’s funeral Bess left the farm.

She came to Bellington because it was the closest good-size town, and started working as secretary to Dr. Bond. Bess would have been in her late twenties, an old maid. She met Clayton because he was Doc Bond’s younger brother.

Doc Bond and Doc Jonas were the only two doctors here besides the veterinarian. Clayton was in the construction business, always was, so the three men started the hospital. Bought two houses; Bess and Clayton lived in the smaller and built onto the bigger one. Knocked down walls inside, built wards. The modern addition that stretches out from the back now wasn’t there then; the place was much smaller. Didn’t need to be so big; most people birthed and died at home. And Bess has lived here, in this house across the alley, for sixty years. She sold the hospital twenty years ago, but they still get mail addressed to her. She learned a lot about nursing by working for Doc Bond, keeping the
office, helping with examinations. Doc Bond died a few years after the hospital got going, and Clayton was building roads, so Bess ended up doing most of it herself—ran the hospital, the kitchen, hired nurses, did the books. Katie Sue and Chuck grew up running back and forth between the house and the hospital.

There was so much talk about Doc Jonas in the later years that Bess didn’t like to let him use the hospital, but for a long time hers was the only one in town and she couldn’t turn his patients away.

Some swore by Jonas, others said he was a scoundrel. I grew up with his son, Reb, who we always called Doc after his father. Doctors’ sons then became doctors as well, inherited their fathers’ patients same as another boy would inherit a farm or a storefront. Reb never cared much for doctoring, but he liked being called Doc and he liked not having to go to war when the time came. He and I had some scrapes, all through high school while I was living with Bess and Clayton.

But that was later. Right after Warwick died, I was sent to live with Ava, my aunt ten years older than Bess, and her husband, the train man.

I lived with Ava and Eban eight years but was gone every summer, to the farm, to one cousin or another. Eban was a railroad porter, then a conductor. We lived at Raynell, down near the Kentucky border. That town has nearly disappeared now, but when the trains still moved goods and passengers, Raynell was a big junction for Southern Rail. There was a pride about the railroad then—a railroad uniform in the ’20s had almost as much respect as military dress. Eban wore blue trousers, suitcoat and vest, and a visored hat trimmed in braid. He wore white shirts with cuffs that Ava was always ironing. She would stand at the ironing board, a broad wooden one, while the iron heated on the stove.

If Bess was the youngest and prettiest of those Hampsons, Ava was the most stubborn. She was spirited and tall, a handsome woman even if her face was plain. Knew her mind and fought plenty with Eban. They had two little girls, just babies when I went there. Ava kept me out of school all she could, to watch them
and help her do the garden. Train ran right back of the house, right the length of the town. Houses shook when the train passed. Kids always played on the tracks, tag and roughhousing. Ava had a fear about her kids getting too close to the trains. The younger girl was slow, never said a word till she was three or four, and collected things the way blackbirds will, shiny things. That was my cousin Emily. She would always be going down to the tracks to pick up pebbles or bits of glass. She never really learned to talk but would sit and stare at anything bright, a gas light or a coal fire. That child died young. Just took sick and died suddenly. They stood her coffin up against the wall; the box wasn’t very big, about as high as a man’s waist, and it was narrow at the foot the way homemade coffins were. The church at Raynell gave a velvet altar cloth, deep red, to put inside.

Ava arranged the flowers all around. Seems to me she asked the children who lived near to come to the service and sing a hymn. Yes, she did, and the shortest ones were in the front, closer to the coffin; I was nearly ten years old by then and stood in back.

Ava was distracted for weeks. A neighbor woman came in to look after the other daughter and me.

Near that time the B&O Railroad discovered they had employed a leper and, for want of any other plan, deposited the man on forest land by the tracks near Raynell. Townspeople were alarmed. It was said this man was a Chinese known as Li Sung, banished by his own government because of his disease. He had a brother in Washington, D. C., who was a tailor, and he traveled to that city to work in his brother’s shop. He wore gloves to cover the lesions on his hands, but somehow his brother discovered the secret. Or maybe Li Sung confessed. Anyway, he was turned out and wandered for a time, then finally got a job maintaining track for the B&O. The railroad often hired laborers who didn’t speak English, and paid them very low. Li Sung never removed his gloves and co-workers became suspicious, so the rail superintendent sent him to a doctor well-known in that area. The leprosy was confirmed. B&O had no policy for such a case, so they isolated Li Sung in a boxcar at the rear of the train and transported him all over the state, asking privately after hospitals. No hospital would accept him, and passengers began avoiding the railroad. B&O lost
workers on all lines, since no one knew which train pulled the car where the leper was kept. Finally it was decided to put Li Sung in some isolated place with supplies and make him stay there. The railroad sent the B&O surgeon and a caretaker out to prepare a site near Raynell. They found a grassy knoll near the river and put up a World War I army tent with a stout pole in the middle, then camped to await the leper’s arrival. The B&O brought him in by night. Employees stood aside as Li Sung was ordered to the tent, then they burned the boxcar and left on the train.

The surgeon stayed behind in the town to arrange for Li Sung’s meals, and offered a small subsidy to any widow willing to prepare his food. The food was to be delivered once a day in disposable wooden trays provided by the County, and Li Sung himself was to burn the trays at his campfire.

Ava had done nothing for weeks but mend and starch all the dead child’s clothes, smoothing each piece and packing them away in clean boxes. She’d ironed even the handkerchiefs and undergarments, but it was all done and now she volunteered to cook for the leper. Eban tried to talk her out of it, but for the first time she seemed more herself, so he signed a paper saying he allowed the endangerment of his wife and family and would not hold the railroad accountable.

In just a day, the County delivered six months’ supply of wooden trays and stacked them like firewood on the south wall of the porch.

The appearance of the trays got the town talking. There were fears Li Sung would bathe in the river and contaminate the water. The railroad surgeon walked with Ava and me to show us the route to the tent, ten minutes’ walk along Ransom’s Ridge. We put the tray (bread and cow cheese and cold grits, as it was a warm day) on a stump fifteen feet from the site. And the surgeon yelled for Li Sung to come out.

He did, and stood by the tent pole, barefoot, dressed in a white button-collar shirt, suspenders, and the wool trousers of a winter rail uniform. The trousers were too large for him and he wore bulky work gloves, tied to his wrists with twine. He was slight and looked younger than Ava, who must have been in her late thirties then. Not many people in those parts had seen an
Oriental. His black hair was long like a woman’s and hung in one thin braid down his back. His eyes were slanted, almost like slits, and hid any expression. He stood politely and waited for us to talk. The surgeon yelled—as though the leper was deaf—not to go into the river or touch the water, to fill his bucket by holding to the handle and dipping the bucket in, and to burn all his trays and the paper used to wrap his food. He was told to eat with his fingers, as no one could solve the problem of utensils. To each instruction, the leper called back, “Yes, yes,” in an accent. Anytime I heard him talk, he had a tone of question in his voice. He understood some English. The surgeon said, “Do you see the bucket?” and the leper pointed to it.

The first month, Ava put up his food every morning and carried it out herself. She would be gone about an hour and watched to see that the leper ate. She spoke to him a bit and he talked back, though sometimes only repeating what she’d said to him. He was cheerful and often waiting outside the tent when she arrived. She took him a tin coffeepot, a supply of tea and coffee, a mirror, scissors, needle and thread, and a comb. She gave him some of Eban’s old clothes, but Li Sung never wore them; he wore only his railroad uniforms, which he laundered himself with soap provided by the railroad. After Li Sung’s death, it was discovered he’d saved Eban’s shirts and trousers and sewn them layered onto his blankets during the cold. But that was later.

Early on, Ava tried to give him a dog for companionship, but he chased the animal back to her as though afraid he would infect it.