Machine Dreams (7 page)

After Marthella began to shadow Reb, the older girls were a little cruel to her. She wore white nurses’ stockings because Shackner’s got them in at the store. The girls asked her where her bedpan was, when would she get her cap and make an honest living.

I was courting Dot Coyner, and the four of us went to the river once that spring. Dot thought Marthella was odd, the way she would say things that had no bearing on the conversation and do anything Reb told her. Reb told her to climb to the top of the rocks in two minutes, in her shoes, and started counting out loud. Marthella jumped up and ran, held her dress up and climbed like a boy. Only reason she didn’t fall was because she moved so fast. Then Marthella was standing on top, and Reb said take off your dress and jump, jump in. That water was cold, freezing in early April. Dot stood up and said we were leaving, that Reb was disgusting and made anyone ashamed. Okay, all right, Reb told her, and yelled at Marthella to come down. But before anyone could do anything Marthella did jump, holding her arms out like a circus tightrope walker. She was lucky she hit in deep water, dropped and sank like a stone.
One night I was looped and got so twisted, for a second I really did think she was my mother. Then she was Marthella again and I hit her, I told her she smelled like something burst open, too sweet and dirty, not my mother, not my mother, and she cried and begged me to forgive her.
She came walking out of the water, embarrassed at the looks on our faces,
and we had to wrap her up and get her back to town before she caught pneumonia.

Wasn’t so rare then for girls to marry at fifteen, especially country girls, but everyone knew Reb Jonas wasn’t about to marry a Barnett. There was just no one to stop them; Doc Jonas let Reb do as he pleased and no one supervised Marthella. She didn’t really even have many friends; she was a strange girl. Reb was truant a lot and barely graduated in May; word was he and Marthella had been to Pittsburgh to the Carlyle Hotel and to the ocean, the beach down at Newport News.

It wasn’t till July that everything blew up. Dot and I pulled into the parking lot out in front of the dance hall. The Pierce was already there, Reb and Marthella sitting in the front seat arguing. Dot and I went in. After a few minutes I went out to have a cigarette and they were still there. Reb was yelling at her and rammed the Pierce into reverse, like to back out of the lot. Then he stopped the car, leaned across, and opened her door, told her to get out. She pulled her door shut; he revved the car and drove fast into the street, going out toward the river. Something was going to happen. I left Dot and drove out the river road after them. I drove way out past the shanty houses, where nobody much lived and the river was deepest, but there was no sign of the Pierce. On the way back to town I saw a glimmer through the trees on the river side, and the rutted soft grass where Reb had pulled off and driven toward the water.

I parked and walked a short distance through the trees. The Pierce was there, lights on and motor running, maybe a hundred feet back from the drop-off.

I yelled at Reb, and damned if he didn’t put the car in gear. I thought he was going to back up, but he floored the gas. The Pierce lunged up, tires spraying dirt, then rolled fast over the harder sand. I saw Marthella twisted round, looking at me as the Pierce rolled forward, but she made no move to stop Reb or get out of the car. It was like something in a dream. The Pierce was shining in the moonlight and they hit the drop-off and sailed out. Seemed like they stayed in the air a long time, but I remember too well how it looked. There was still light in the sky and the car’s headlights looked like candle glow playing across the river. Then
they hit, as water came up all around. The car sat a second and went under.
I didn’t know I wanted to hurt her. How bad did I want to hurt her? If I had wanted to, I would have had the windows rolled up, wouldn’t I?
I couldn’t move, it happened so fast. But I jumped in after them pretty quick—the water was still moving on top and I came back up and swam toward the ripples.

Don’t know what the hell I thought I was going to do. I couldn’t have gotten them out. The water was deep. I dove down and saw the Pierce, big and black, still sinking way below me. It looked huge in the water, a big block, and the headlights were still on. Then I saw Reb swimming up like in slow motion, drifting up through the water, and he had Marthella by the arm. She looked like a rag doll in the gray water, not moving or helping him. I thought she was dead. I swam toward them and surfaced right after. They were gasping and coughing water. I held them both up and then we swam back, Reb and me holding Marthella. We got to the rocks—that rock ledge under the drop-off.
Mitch, get her out of here for me. Take her to my father.
We were all shivering and spitting water. I took her, pulled her up over the rocks, and Reb lay down where he was, didn’t move, didn’t watch us go.

I took her to Doc Jonas. He and Caroline were standing at the back door, looking at us through the screen. Doc was behind Caroline and he had his hands on her shoulders. Caroline came forward and let us in. All three of them went up the stairs.

I went to Reb’s room and put on some of his clothes and went home; I didn’t see Marthella after that. She was gone in about two weeks, to a beautician school that boarded girls. Maybe it didn’t turn out so badly for her—she probably ended up better than she would have otherwise. I did see her a few times years later, after the war. She was dressed too stylish for around here and had her hair cut short, managed a milliner’s shop in Toledo. She liked Ohio and she liked the work. She only came back to visit her mother and didn’t ask about Reb, though I guess she knew he was a doctor long since, living in the old Jonas house with his own family. Old Doc had retired and gone to Florida soon after Reb’s mother passed away.
I couldn’t marry her and I couldn’t let my father touch her. She’d gone to his office and told him that afternoon
in front of Caroline; it was all arranged, Marthella said. I just wanted her to disappear, all of it, disappear with her face the way it was when we got out of the Pierce and walked into the ocean. She had never seen ocean.

Fourteen years between high school and the war. Time passed like lightning.

Why didn’t I ever get married? Having too much fun, I guess, wasn’t ready to settle. And it was the ’30s too. A peculiar time. You worked for nothing. Everyone did.

I went to college a year and dropped out, then worked in construction with Clayton. He got me on at Huttonsville. Maximum-security prison there used to work chain gangs and they needed foremen. I worked crews awhile. Those were rough men, but I never had trouble, never held a gun on them. Worked all but a few without leg irons and never had a man run. Prison labor was an accepted thing in this state for many years. But I did better working on my own—lived in Morgantown, Winfield, working for various companies. Clayton and I didn’t start the cement plant until after the war. Earlier I traveled a lot and stayed in boarding houses, moving with the work crews on the road jobs. Between times, I stayed at Bess and Clayton’s in Bellington, in my old room. It was good to have a man there: Bess was busy at the hospital and Clayton was gone a lot; I helped with the kids in his absence.

Every spring we went out to the cemetery at Coalton. Even after the land was sold and deeded to the mining companies, Bess insisted on taking the kids every year.
Our people are there and as long as I’m breathing those graves will be tended. It’s anyone’s duty. One day we’ll be lying there ourselves, miles from anything.
Clayton was away, working at Huttonsville most likely. Bess had Katie Sue and Chuck ready. We were in a hurry, wanted to get there before the heat of the day came up, and Katie cut a fit. She got sick in cars when she was little and dreaded riding any distance. Seven or eight and high-strung as an old lady. She hid in the house and wouldn’t answer us. I got damn mad and switched her with a birch switch. Don’t you know I regretted it for years. Only hit her a couple of times across the legs but she
hollered like she was killed. I guess it bothered me too that these kids didn’t care anything about the farm—to them it was just a deserted old place. I still liked to go there. House and land were empty, but otherwise it was all the same—mining companies didn’t work that property till after the war.

I went to the farm before enlisting, one of the last things I did. Took a good look. Went out with Reb. We sat on the porch of the old house and drank a few beers. I wasn’t real happy about the army, but they were going to draft me. Reb had a wife and children, but they wouldn’t have helped if he hadn’t been a doctor. He said if all the docs in town hadn’t signed up on their own, he’d have paid them to enlist so he could stay home and deliver babies.

The farm looked pretty, wintry and frosted and quiet. I enlisted in March—March 2, ’42—so must have been late February. Grass in the fields didn’t sway, didn’t move in the wind. Everything was chill and clear. Reb finally said it was time to leave and not sit any longer in the cold like fools.

The war swallowed everyone like a death or a birth will, except it went on and on. I was gone three years. They dropped the atom bomb on Japan as our troop ship steamed into Oakland harbor. No one really understood what had happened at first; soldiers got on the trains and went home.

I had my thirty-fifth birthday on the train—cake with candles, and ice cream. Red Cross girls kept all that information on us, must have been their idea to celebrate. They were nice girls. The men got a kick out of it and joined in with the singing. The train was hitting rough track about then, and one of the girls (she was from Ohio, I believe) came walking down the aisle carrying a big square cake, lurching from side to side and trying to keep the candles lit. The way the car was jolting and shaking made me think of the boat crossing to the Philippines … April of ’45, how bad that night storm was. Raining and blowing, gusts of wind till you couldn’t stay on deck. Not a star in the pitch black and the boat tilting so you couldn’t keep food in a bowl. I looked out the train window as they were singing; we were crossing the Southwest. Flat, yellow land, and the sky was sharp blue, blue as it was
in Randolph County the summers on the farm. I thought I would go back there even though the farm was gone—just to see it. Go back to look at the fields.

But I didn’t go back for a long time, even though I wasn’t far away. When I was married and had my own kids I was down that country—selling cranes and bulldozers for Euclid to a strip-mine outfit. The land was all changed, moved around. There were a few buildings left from the Main Street of Coalton, used as equipment shacks and an office. But out where the farm was—almost nothing. Heaps of dirt, cut-away ledges where they’d stripped. Looking at it made me think I’d been asleep a long time and had wakened up in the wrong place, a hundred miles from where I lay down. Like I’d lost my memory and might be anyone. Only thing they left alone was the wooden church, all falling in on itself, and the cemetery.

I walked up by the stones, between the rows of names. Warwick. Eban. Ava.

Icie. What kind of name is that for a woman. You always asked why I didn’t try harder to find her. Why should I? She left me.

The cemetery was still and clean, though the grass was ragged. You know I thought of the leper; hadn’t thought of him in years.

I never saw the inside of that shack. What did he do all day. No country, no family, no job. No one. Maybe he wasn’t sure anymore who he was. He was a secret. I was the only one ever saw him. He could have stopped talking because I didn’t seem real either, only another sound he heard in the woods. A sound in his head. During the war I used to dream of him, walking toward me on one of the tarmac landing strips we laid in New Guinea. I’d wake up in a sweat.

I was a secret myself. I used to lie awake nights when I was a kid, before I slept. I grew up in different places: with Bess, with Ava, with cousins at the farm. I’d fall asleep and hear a voice I’d never heard. I was called Mitch, or nicknames like Cowboy. But this voice said, “Mitchell … Mitchell … Mitchell …” with no question, till the sound didn’t seem like a name or a word.

FORT WARREN, WYOMING

March 31, 1942

Dear Aunt Bess. Was glad to hear from you, got all five letters at once. So far I have not been able to see much here because we have been under quarantine ever since we arrived, measles and scarlet fever, some fun. We have classes and daily drill anyway but we are not allowed out at night. Maybe it is just as well. They keep us on the jump and by the time night arrives I am ready for bed. The sun comes up every day but there is always a strong, steady cold wind and it carries a lot of dust. I am 2 miles south of Cheyenne and about 500 miles from Yellow Stone Park, don’t know how far from Sun Valley. On the train out I didn’t see much—we traveled at night a lot—but what I did see was just level flat land and once in awhile I could see a house. The boys were looking for Cowboys & Indians but we didn’t see any. Guess that has all passed. Everyone says they will never go to another Western Picture. People live here just like you do at home. Give Clayton my best and I wish I could come East before I leave this country. I look to be sent to the West Coast and then on across, where I don’t know. However I have at least six weeks more here. Well Bess, hope you are taking care of yourself. Tell Katie Sue and Chuck the Twister hello from Old Man Mitch.