Mary Coin (3 page)

4.

W
hen Walker and Lisette split, they sold their house in the Sunset District, and he now lives in an apartment in the Mission, which he has not decorated with much more personality than the motel rooms he occupies during his fieldwork. He knows he ought to pay more attention to his place and try to make it a proper second home for Alice and Isaac. But their weekends are filled with activities, and they want to be close to their friends, so they rarely visit him in the city. During the school year, Walker drives to Petaluma to see them—sometimes twice a week—taking the kids out to dinner, or Isaac to his soccer practice or to an orthodontist appointment. Alice recently got her license, so it is a challenge to invent her need for him unless Lisette has impounded her car keys for one reason or another. Walker’s visits have the quality of courtship. He takes great pleasure in dressing, in planning the activities, in the nervousness he feels as he nears the highway exit, the adrenaline kick when he pulls to the curb outside Lisette and Harry’s yellow cottage. He honks and waits for the door to open and for his kids to appear. They are shy and petulant as they ford the turbulent distance between the house and his car. There is something sweet and tentative about the way the awkwardness of the encounters makes it impossible for any of them to take the time for granted, even though the kids complain to their mother about “having” to see Dad and sit heavily into the car and do not speak for a few minutes, or even fifteen minutes. Once Alice managed to go a whole night without saying a word. Her reticence is sometimes physically painful for Walker, who can still feel the sensation of her warm body against his chest when he lifted her from her crib each morning. Still, the discomfort is worthwhile for the pleasure he feels when Isaac inadvertently hums a song or when Alice delivers the first of her thrusts, which Isaac does not have the requisite aggression to parry—when they cannot help but be themselves.

He is taking them on a fishing trip to Humboldt County for a long weekend. Isaac says he is excited to go, but Walker suspects the only reason Alice has agreed is that hanging around the pot capital of California will give her bragging rights with her friends. The kids are particularly sluggish when he picks them up. Alice drags her unrolled sleeping bag down the front walkway, a nasty, lolling tongue of girlish purple and pink meant to reassure him of her absolute disinterest in this vacation. Upon seeing his contrary, difficult girl, Walker realizes how much he has missed her and her dedication to her misery, as well as her intelligence, which shines despite her valiant attempts to hide it. He loves her tangled blond hair and her wide face. The small mole on her cheek is probably a point of intense scrutiny and the locus of a vague unhappiness, but he thinks it distinguishes her, and that, in time, some boy or man will tell her that it is something he loves about her. She dresses in a combination of clothes that Walker recognizes as the province of hip kids everywhere: thrift-shop finds jumbled together in mismatch, a kind of assertive ugliness, as if she is daring others to locate the beauty she cannot yet find in herself.

Isaac comes out of the house in his usual state of akimbo—shoelaces undone, his cartoonish bubble of blond hair flattened from sleep, bright pimples sprayed across his forehead. He wears the fishing vest Walker bought for him the previous Christmas and carries his fishing pole. Walker feels grateful to his son for willingly entering into the possible charade of this trip. Alice turns back to Isaac and says something Walker can’t hear, but he can tell by the way Isaac’s shoulders drop that she has nailed him for his enthusiasm or his outfit or both. Her brother’s lack of cynicism enrages her. Isaac continues to the car, struggling underneath the double burden of his camping equipment and his sister’s judgment. Walker reminds himself that despite the divorce and the move and a sister whose emotional vicissitudes dominate, Isaac is still a boy who bends toward happiness. And Alice, if he wants to relieve himself of the burden of guilt for a split second, is no different from who she was at two, when she seemed less child than highly reactive substance that Walker and Lisette handled gingerly, fearing unexpected explosions. He imagines that she has learned to playact apathy as a way of protecting against the crisis of feelings that attend her barely hidden anxieties.

“Are we gonna stop for lunch?” Alice says when they have been driving for barely an hour.

“I made sandwiches,” Walker says. “In the cooler.”

He watches in the rearview as the kids find the food. Isaac takes a huge, trusting bite while Alice checks between the bread.

“Nutella and bacon!” Isaac exclaims. It is a favorite combination that health-minded Lisette refuses to indulge.

“On white bread!” Walker adds, and to his relief Alice gives him an ironic thumbs-up.

He pulls off the road at Fortuna.

“Why are we going here?” Isaac says.

“Redwoods.”

“Jesus. We’ve seen redwoods, Dad,” Alice says.

“The coast redwood towers over all other trees in the world,”
Isaac intones as if he is quoting a science video from school.
“Exceptional trees can reach a height of three hundred and fifty feet or more.”

“Oh, my God!” Alice groans. “The fucking redwood report!”

In the mirror Walker sees her glance his way, wondering how he will react to her language. When he says nothing, he can’t tell if she is triumphant or disappointed. He remembers when each of his kids was in the fifth grade. Along with the report on the California missions, which required that he and Lisette spend weekends with saws and glue guns and boxes of sugar cubes, the redwood report was a rite of passage. Lisette, a Bostonian, objected to the entire curriculum. She could not understand why the children were learning about Father Junípero Serra and the Chumash Indians and redwoods instead of the Pilgrims and the Iroquois and the sorts of trees that might grow outside Emily Dickinson’s door.

“California kids learn California history,” Walker told her.

“If I’d known my kids were going to be Californians, I would never have married a bum like you,” she answered flirtatiously. “I guess I didn’t think it through.”

No one thinks it through,
he muses now, as he drives into the state park. He imagines there must be some genetic predisposition to do the opposite, to be impulsive and unreasonable. Otherwise how would the race survive?

•   •   •

I
t does not take them long to hike past the glut of visitors who cluster near the trailhead and to wander deep into the forest. The temperature drops. Modern noises cut out and are replaced by the sounds of birds and the crunch of leaves underfoot and the gentle sawing of branches scraping against one another. Neither child complains. Alice stops at one point and leans back in order to stare at the canopy of trees. Walker refrains from offering banal narration—
Isn’t this fantastic?
or
Wow, how beautiful!
—the parental equivalent of a sideline cheer. If Alice is having any sort of transfiguring moment, the last thing she wants is her father sharing it.

Walker slides his pack off his back, unzips it, and pulls out a cardboard box. It was delivered two weeks after George died, and Walker has not yet had the heart to open it. He takes his apartment key from his pocket and uses the jagged edge to slice through the packing tape.

“What’s that?” Isaac says.

“It’s Grandpa,” Walker says.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Alice yells.

“No. Just my father.”

“Ha, ha,” she says wryly. She comes closer, her horror turning to a shy curiosity that he finds touching. Walker pulls a plastic baggie filled with his father’s ashes from the box.

None of his siblings seemed eager to participate in any kind of ritual, but Walker feels that his father’s final, unexpected wish to be cremated will not be completely honored until his ashes are spread. He can still bring to mind the furiously energized look in his father’s eyes when George made his last request. At the time, Walker wondered if there was some psychotic aspect to the drugs he was being given. George could hardly have been called a spiritual man, and he was too discreet to have visions of his body feeding the next round of orange trees. It occurs to Walker that George’s decision not to be buried in the Dodge plot at the edge of the original orchard was a choice against the family, that some part of his dying wish, for whatever reason, was to be finally released.

“It’s so little for a whole person,” Alice says, cupping her hands as if she were holding the bag.

“I thought we’d spread him here,” Walker says.

“Is that against the law?” Isaac says.

“Probably.” Alice’s eyes flash at the idea of subversion, and Walker looks around for dopey dramatic effect. “I don’t see anyone.”

“Me neither,” she says, forgetting to belittle him.

Both children are quiet as he unknots the closure and shakes some of the ashes onto the forest floor.

“We should do it around,” Alice says. “Like not dump it all in one place.”

Walker and Isaac and Alice roam the forest, sprinkling ashes in the spots each one feels are particularly beautiful or quiet, or where a bird trills or a butterfly has landed. It is a half hour of extravagant closeness that makes Walker feel his separation from his children more acutely.

When they are finished, he holds the empty baggie.

“It looks like a used condom,” Alice says, returning to form.

“Thank you for that enduring image,” he says.

They walk back through the woods toward the parking lot.

“We never really knew him,” Isaac says.

“Some people don’t want to be known,” Walker says.

“That’s stupid,” Alice says. “Everyone wants to be known. Otherwise it’s just fucking depressing.”

Of course she is right. Everyone wants to be known. Perhaps the ones who conceal themselves most of all. The question is: Who is foolhardy enough to go in search of them?

•   •   •

T
he following days are a struggle. There is intermittent rain and it is cold. The cabin Walker rented is small and damp. After an initial burst of excitement about fishing, Alice gives up and spends long hours sitting on rocks by the edge of the Trinity with a blanket wrapped around her or lying in the infrequently appearing splashes of sun. Isaac is a valiant fisherman, but Walker has the feeling his son is summoning interest for his sake. Walker gives in to an emergency trip to the nearest mall and movie theater and an unnecessarily expensive sweater purchase meant to endear him to Alice. When the weekend is finally over, he drives the children back to Petaluma. The rigors of so much concentrated time together sap all three of them, and the quiet in the car has the quality of surrender. Isaac gives Walker a tight hug before dragging his backpack and fishing gear to the house. Alice’s kiss is as frictionless as a bug’s wing. As he watches her walk away, Walker remembers when she was thirteen. He had casually tickled her back only to feel her unexpectedly stiffen. It turned out that she had been wearing her first bra. He supposes the complications of the moment—Alice taking on the habits of womanhood while he tried to drag her back to her childish, sexless self—were too much for her, but the removal stung him just as it does now. The screen door closes before she can get her sleeping bag inside. As she struggles, she sees that he is watching her. Her face forms into a mask of scorn, as if this were his fault, too.

Mary

5.

Tahlequah, Oklahoma, 1920

H
er mother told her that she looked at people too hard. “It’s like you’re a robber trying to break inside a person’s skin,” Doris said, as she threw a ball of dough against the table and attacked it with her big hands and the strength of her broad shoulders. “It makes you strange.”

“I’m not strange,” Mary said, although she liked the idea that she might come to possess Toby unawares simply by the power of her gaze. She watched him in the next field over, guiding the horse and plow through the rows, the dirt turning dark as he passed, as if he were pulling a blanket over the raw earth. She watched him hoist bales of hay, wondering how his rattlebone frame could counter the weight of the dried grasses. Toby Coin, “that sickly boy,” as all the mothers referred to him for years, shaking their heads sadly as if already committing him to a collective memory. He’d managed to outwit all expectation just by staying alive, beating back whooping cough and measles and scarlet fever so that he became a miracle boy as well. Mary saw how people looked at him in town, their eyes narrowing as if they didn’t trust that he was quite human. His cheeks were sunken below their bones, and Mary sat in church and thought about tracing those sharp ridges with her finger, and then her tongue. As the preacher exhorted the congregants sitting shoulder to shoulder on the hard wooden benches to believe against the odds of bad planting seasons and poorer harvests, telling them they should feel special for having been chosen by God to withstand his insults, she felt something reach down to the deepest part of her, as if a hand were touching her there, the way she sometimes touched herself at night, holding her breath, careful not to wake Betsy and Louise, who lay next to her, or her brothers, who slept on the other side of the house’s single room. All the land: acres of chocolate dirt and golden lashes of wheat, the blue Cookson Hills tangled with trees and networks of undergrowth, and the distant Ozarks, which seemed to Mary a mountain range big enough to cover the world. Yet, in their churches and houses, in their schools and even in their beds, people were always huddled in a bunch as if they had to mass together against the threat of too much freedom.

Doris gathered the flattened yellow disk into a ball and pounded it with the meat of her fist. “Do this three times,” she said. “Three. Not two.”

“Should I write that down?” Mary said.

“Don’t be smart.”

“That’s not likely.” Mary knew how to read and write, and Mrs. Petit told her she was the best at sums in the whole class. But when Mary turned sixteen, her mother pulled her out of school. As far as Doris was concerned, Mary knew nothing of any real use.

“Someone’ll shoot you for looking at them that hard. Or worse,” Doris muttered.

“What worse?” But Mary knew the answer. She could tell that her mother sensed something moist and wanting in Mary’s parted lips. “You trying to catch flies?” she’d say when the two of them walked through town. Mary was narrow-hipped, with barely a chest, but it was something else about her that caught men’s attention, a sultry drag to her gait, as if she were waiting for someone to step into her path and make her change direction.

Her mother was right: she looked hard at the men who walked into the Last House, which sat at the edge of town, far enough from the stores and saloon, the hotel and the two churches that it resembled a child excluded from a schoolyard game. Men entered through the doorway, their shoulders bent low as if they were expecting some unseen hand to yank them away from their sinful intention. She watched those same men when they came out again, too, their mouths as soft as bruised pears, their awareness adjusting to their sudden exposure. She watched the boys she’d known at school, too. They were nearly men now, a state of almost, which made what they had been and what they were becoming tantalizingly present at the very same time. The being of a thing was most powerful when it was seconds from extinction. A flower about to drop from its stem, a shot rabbit twitching its last
.
She studied the way these boys walked down the street, their inward-turning toes lending their movements the same lumbering intensity of a baby just learning to walk.

But it was Toby Coin who drew her eyes the most, as if he were one of the trick cartoons in the newspaper where a woman’s hat was actually a bird or a white man had one Chinaman eye. The fact of Toby’s survival in the face of lifelong weaknesses suggested a persistence she craved more than she desired the obvious strength of the other boys who would start wrestling with one another at a moment’s notice as if they couldn’t think what else to do with all that fire inside them. Toby was like a spindly tree that had miraculously outlasted a tornado, left stripped and bare of leaves but still standing while houses and barns lay in ruins.

She had touched him once. She was six years old, her father not yet dead of being so drunk he fell off a cart and let a horse crush his chest. A traveling carnival stopped in Tahlequah for a hot August week, and Mary was given enough money for two rides. She joined the line for the Maze of Mirrors, and an Indian with an empty eye sewn up in jagged stitches took her ticket. “Whatever you do, don’t take yer hand off the wall,” he instructed her, “or you might never come out the other side.” Mary stepped into a dark tunnel that was lined with mirrors. Candles had been placed in holders along the ground, and Mary saw herself reflected in their glow. It seemed as if the world contained hundreds of Marys, girls who looked exactly like she did, who had the same cut on their knee from where they’d tripped playing four square, and who wore her favorite blue smock, the one her mother told her she had better keep clean for church. Remembering the Indian’s warning, she dragged her right hand along the wall as she turned a corner. There she was again, only this time she was a hundred short fat girls whose necks had disappeared and whose legs were the size of the feed sack her brothers filled with hay and strung from the barn rafter to use as a punching bag. She didn’t like those girls at all, so she turned around. There she was again, only this time she was as long and stretched out as a string of spit and her head was so small she could not see her eyes. She tried to make her way back to the first room where she had been normal, but the crowd behind her was laughing and screaming and pushing her forward, and when she turned the next corner her hand broke free of the wall. Now there were mirrors on all sides and hanging on the tent ceiling, too, and she could no longer tell which way was forward or what was up or down. She turned around looking for a way out, but she became more confused and scared. Only moments before, she’d been a girl begging a penny ticket from her father, a girl who went to school and fed the chickens, who was a skinny half-breed the white boys called Pocahontas, patting their mouths with their hands, hopping twice on one foot, then the other,
hiya hiya
ho ho.
But now she was too many Marys and she was no one at all, lost and never to come out the other side, just like the ugly Indian had said. She started to cry for her mother, but people moved around her and paid no attention. She began to sink to the ground when she felt a hand grab hers and pull her through the maze. When she finally emerged into daylight, she shut her eyes against the sudden brightness as the hand slipped away from hers. When her eyes adjusted, she saw the sickly Toby Coin look back at her once before he disappeared into the crowd. The half-dead boy who missed more school than he attended had held her hand so tightly that his sweat was still on her palm.

William Coin’s first wife died when Toby and his older brothers were young, and he raised them as he did the livestock on his farm. He fed them and threw water on them every so often when they were dusty and put a switch to their hindquarters when they didn’t work fast enough. Three years ago he went to Tulsa and came back with a new wife, a woman he referred to as “the spinster,” although she was not yet thirty, and whom he quickly filled with babies. Now that Mary was no longer in school, she was sometimes called to help the newly pregnant Carlotta Coin with her housework. Doris was happy for the money, but Mary was more excited to be in close proximity to Toby.

“Did you hear me?” Doris said. She was holding a fresh ball of dough and wiping the sweat from her face with her forearm.

“Three times, not two,” Mary said.

Doris looked at her dolefully. “You must have left your brain in bed this morning. I said we’re out of sugar.”

“I’ll go,” Mary said. Anything to get away from the house and her mother’s critical gaze.

Doris put more corncobs into the fire beneath the iron stove then slid the loaves inside. The stove heated the sod house to an intolerable degree, but outside was worse, the Indian-summer air dry and cracking like Doris’s skin. Doris was thirty-nine, and her braid of jet hair was already laced with gray. Her face reminded Mary of the shape of a flower vase, the planes of her cheeks rising up at a gentle incline to her prominent cheekbones, features Mary had inherited, although not her mother’s nut-brown Cherokee coloring or her coal-black eyes. Mary wondered how long it would take to inherit her mother’s calloused hands and matching nature. Her brothers worked the field with Titus, the hired man, but, as her mother was quick to point out when the boys complained, she’d be happy to trade places with them and let them cook and try to clean a house made of dirt.

“Wash these up before you go,” Doris said, handing Mary the rolling pin and mixing bowl.

As Mary plunged the dishes into the wash bucket, she studied the house’s only decoration, a framed newspaper photograph nailed to the wall. The dirty glass fuzzed an already indistinct image of her grandfather, whom the accompanying headline proclaimed as “The Cherokee Murderer,” as if there were only one of them across all of history. Mary leaned in close to read the article she’d read a hundred times before. Her grandfather had been chased down and killed for the murder of a white man. He’d built a house within a house, one wall of sod protecting the other, where he’d hid with his family until the posse attacked with dynamite. Mary imagined lit sticks dropping down like shooting stars while women and children, her mother among them, ran out into the night, shrieking the stumbling syllables of Cherokee that the old people who shuffled along Main Street still spoke when they were drunk or telling secrets. She’d memorized the final sentence of the article.
The condemned man walked calmly into the night, the house in flames behind him, accepting his dastardly fate.
Mary wondered what it would be like to walk toward death. Would her mind leap forward to a place where the dying had already happened so that she could feel herself in heaven even before she got there? Or could she stop time with the power of her mind just like the photograph did? Her grandfather was already dead when the picture was taken, his body propped against a door. Someone had settled a rifle in his lifeless arms. Mary tried to figure out exactly what got subtracted from a man when he died so that even if he was made to pose like the living, there was nothing vital about him. She’d seen animals die—lame horses her brothers shot to be merciful, her old dog, Pete, lying down one day in a circle of sun and letting go. In each case, what struck her was how quickly life fled, as if it didn’t want to be collared and dragged back. And what was left? Just the shape of something that could not be called a horse or a dog, just as her grandfather in the photograph could not be called a man.

•   •   •

W
hen Mary arrived in town, she was surprised to see that the doors of the Indian school were already open and half the town was on the street in front of Crew Drugs, clustered together as if they were waiting for Mr. Anderson to call out the winner of one of his store’s prize drawings. Two years ago she had won a tin of mercolized wax complexion cream, which she had hidden from her sisters in the ring hole of a sawtooth walnut tree and used so sparingly she still had some left. But Mary did not see Mr. Anderson. Instead, a tall stranger stood at the center of the commotion. Despite the heat, he wore a full suit and a hat.

“What’s going on?” Mary said, when she found Betsy and Louise in the crowd.

“We better go home,” Betsy said.

“Something’s finally happening in this town and you want to leave?” Mary said.

“Mama will be mad.”

“Hang Mama.”

“I’m going to tell her you said that.”

Mary looked at her prissy sister with her neat braids and her pursed, disapproving expression. “Your mouth is going to get stuck that way if you don’t watch out,” she said.

The man held a purple scarf over his head. “Pure silk, ladies. And a color to offset even the darkest of complexions.”

A wave of excitement swelled as he tossed the scarf into the air. Women and girls lunged as if he’d thrown a handful of gold coins. Next he drew a feathered boa out of the trunk, waved it around in a circle, then released it to the crowd. Then came hats with brims the size of serving platters and elbow-length gloves. The man held up a soldier’s jacket.

“See this bullet hole, boys? Put your nose to it and inhale,” he said, bringing the material to his sunburned face. The man’s accent was precise and clipped, each word finished off completely, just the way Mrs. Petit instructed her students to speak, because she said good diction would prove their education. “That sweet odor,” the man said. “Does it smell a little bit like cinnamon? Does it remind you of your father’s cigar? That’s gunpowder, boys. Straight from Appomattox. Hand over my heart.” He held the jacket out to the children, who fell into a reverential hush. “Fifty cents to get your picture taken wearing this,” he said.

As the crowd groaned, and someone shouted that the man ought to take his business someplace where people had money to waste on a picture they could see by looking in the mirror, Mary noticed another, younger man in shirtsleeves made translucent by sweat who was busy setting a camera on a tripod.

“You’ve got it backwards, sir,” the older man said. “I’m offering to pay
you
good money if you’ll allow me the honor of taking your photograph.”