Machine Dreams (6 page)

He was grateful for the smallest kindness; the railroad men must have been very brusque to him. I took no liberties and addressed him as “Sir” or “Mister.” I would put the tray down and back up to the edge of the woods; he would nod and bow, pick up the food, and then sit cross-legged by the tent, eating. He seemed to feel he showed thanks by eating in silence with great concentration. I went closer again. Later we spoke briefly or sat without speaking. He knew some words but understood the ideas behind many more.

I hadn’t been outside my house in weeks. Early mornings in the woods were so quiet and green, all the wildflowers blooming
and the sounds of the river so cool The clearing was like a churchy the sky arched over and deeply blue. I think I talked aloud because I knew he didn’t understand all I said. I told him my little girl had died and showed him in motions. She was … this tall, etc. He knew someone had died and folded his hands, then pointed to his eyes and touched his cheeks. When I describe these simple gestures, I don’t mean to give the impression he was not smart. I believe he was quite intelligent, and wishing to comfort me. He gave me to understand that he also had children, two, in his homeland. He would not see them again. I explained he might send letters, messages, but he said, “No, no,” holding his finger to his lips.

I wanted him to see Emily so badly that I took him a photograph of her, knowing once he touched it I could not take it back. I put the picture on his tray. He understood at once and looked at the image carefully; then he bowed his head to me in gratitude and put the picture in his breast pocket. He placed his hand there and said, “Yes, safe. Safe.” “Yes,” I said to him, and knew she was, when before I’d felt only the injustice.

Safe. He knew that word because the railroad men had said it loudly, many times, about the woods and the tent, and where they were taking him.

By July Ava was much improved and began keeping house again. I was sent with the trays; Ava went with me on Sundays. She told me always to call out to the leper and make a remark or two that required answer. This was important, she said. The man could go crazy if he never spoke with anyone.

Some boys from the town tormented Li Sung that summer, but he didn’t know they were making fun. A few threw apples at him and he picked them up, nodding his head like the fruit was a present. If anyone came too close, he stood in the door of his tent, holding his arms over his head and calling out in his accent, “Unclean, unclean!”

Winters were hard in that country. A lumber company donated wood, and some rail workers arrived in September to build a shack. Li Sung sat at a distance and watched the work. The old tent was burned where it stood after the leper transferred his belongings, and a low fence was strung around the shack. The
people of Raynell donated a wood stove, feather tick, and ax, and allowed the leper to gather and chop his own wood from near the shack in early morning.

Snow was deep for five months. I walked out once or twice a week, pulling a sled of provisions. Ava sent a cache of preserved foods, canned vegetables, jams, and meat jerky. The leper constructed a rabbit trap and used it with some success.

He got through the cold weather but wouldn’t talk anymore in the spring. I came with the trays every day again; he would only look out and pull away. Ava was concerned and walked out with me. She had dressed as though on a social call and stood talking in front of the shack.
Mr. Li Sung? I know you are listening. Won’t you come out?
He never answered, so we hid in the woods to watch for him. He looked just the same, though shabbier, peering from the door. Then he walked out and stood beside the tray. He stood for a full five minutes, looking down the ridge like he was trying to see trace of us in the distance.

Ava insisted I keep talking to him even if he didn’t talk back. I felt damn stupid standing in front of that shack every day and yelling. I had nothing to say and was in a hurry to get to school, so I would call out whatever was on the tray, tell him the weather according to the almanac, and say the date. Since I never saw him, I started being afraid of seeing him.

In May he didn’t pick up the tray at all, and Ava sent word to the railroad doctor. He found Li Sung dead in his cot. Heart attack, the doctor said, but I doubt he examined the body very close. Some men from Raynell, Eban among them, went out to put an end to the whole thing. They wore kerchieves over their faces, dug a grave, filled a casket with quicklime, and raked the leper into it. They covered the casket with lime and dirt. The shack was doused with kerosene and burned, and the ashes covered with lime. The men camped out there the whole day to be sure no one stumbled onto the contaminated ground unawares. It was the first time Eban had seen the leper or the leper’s house. He wouldn’t say anything when he came back home, though some of the other men talked around the town. They said it gave Eban a start to see his long-worn clothes sewn on
those blankets, the sleeves of the shirts and the trouser legs spread out like one body on top of another and another.

Bess and Clayton let me come to Bellington when I was thirteen so I could go to high school there in the town. Bess seemed a lot older when I saw her again, and I called her Aunt. Clayton probably didn’t want me at first, but I became an older brother to their kids. Katie Sue was a pretty little girl and Chuck was moody like Clayton, thin as a rail—they were just tykes. The town looked like a big city to me. It was prosperous in 1924: several lumber mills were going, and the Methodists had started a college. Most people had automobiles, and the streets were paved with bricks.

That first day, Clayton took me for a ride in his Studebaker, up Quality Hill past the Jonas house, and he stopped to talk to the Doc. That old house is a wreck now, broken up into cheap apartments, but it was pretty then—a big white elephant on the hill back from the street. All those round cupolas in white shingle and a circular drive planted with boxwood. The drive went right up past the front porch under a latticed arch. There was Doc Jonas in his white rocker, and there was Reb, with green eyes like a snake’s. Fourteen, and drove his father’s car like a bat from hell. Brand-new Pierce Arrow coupe. You could see yourself in the running board. Reb tended that car like it was living, and thought of it every minute. His father said he was love-struck.

In those days most people didn’t bother to get a license, just bought a car and drove. Cars were like toys; nobody thought they were dangerous except people who couldn’t afford them. There had been a few wrecks in the town, but no one ever killed or hurt bad. Streets were wide. Seldom more than a few cars on any one at a time, and nobody went very fast by today’s standards. Reb and me would tow the mark in town anyway, because everyone was looking.

But after dusk you could get outside the city limits and go like the wind—not meet a soul. Road between here and Winfield wasn’t paved, but in the spring it was smooth dry dust that flew up behind like a cloud.

You went along, river on one side hidden by trees, and along
the other side were shanty houses where the white trash lived. Men and women would be out on their ramshackle porches, kerosene lamps lit on tables and bannister rails. The lamps were the old hand-held glass ones with reflectors—tin discs behind the globes that shone and made the light waver. The lights blinked and quivered like a long broken streak, and we could see them, see them all. A Pierce Arrow coupe was high off the ground, with windows all around like you were in a cockpit.

Aunt Bess liked Reb and felt sorry for him. She would lecture him about getting good grades and getting into a medical school out of state, where they wouldn’t pass him through because his father paid. Reb would slump in his chair, dejected, and say maybe he’d just join the army. You’re joking, Bess would say, all serious. Reb could get her going, pretending to want to do right.

She did dislike Doc Jonas and was only civil to him.
We got a few of those girls down here. How many times did I walk across the alley in the dead of night … then had to give them my own skirt because their clothes were ruined.
Jonas and Clayton were in a hunting club that rented a lodge at Blackwater every winter. The whole week Clayton was getting ready to go, Bess made noises. Clayton said her own thoughts had gone to her head and anyway, the whole business was complicated.
Of course he never gave them any anesthetic but a shot of whiskey, or they couldn’t have gotten up and walked out fast enough. We had one who walked from the Jonas house to the hospital, two o’clock in the morning.
Clayton cleaned his deer rifle and she mended by the light. Would she rather have those girls jump through the ice, like the one over at Milltown? They talked so low they were almost hissing. It was night.
There’s going to be a judgment on him, a trail of blood straight down the hill for everyone to see. And you know where that trail ends? Right here across the alley. He’s not so good at it that he doesn’t make a mistake about once a year, or let one beg him into it when she’s too far along.

Doc Jonas had a lot of stories told on him, and some of them were lies. He was not an addict of any kind, I’m sure. And he was the only surgeon at the hospital in all those years who never lost a patient on the operating table. His wife had to be taken care of
like a child; that was why the sister lived in. Mrs. Jonas had hair like a young girl’s, long and done up. Her sister, Caroline, brushed it in the evenings.
That woman doesn’t know who she is half the time. Neurasthenia. Now, it’s not neurasthenia. Never seen out unless it’s in the car with Jonas, and then she looks at you like we’re all afloat on suds. How could her own sister allow it, for years
 … Reb and me sat in the living room. Mrs. Jonas played the Victrola and drifted like a feather.
I’ll tell you how.…
Mrs. Jonas was thin and her sister baked burnt-sugar cakes to tempt her into eating.

She was a beautiful girl and came here with a whole trousseau from New York City. Such dresses as you’ve never seen.
Reb’s mother really was like a child, wandering around in the house. She was wakeful at night and stayed in her room, then slept all morning while the sister, Caroline, worked in the office with Doc Jonas. Then Caroline took her breakfast in, and I suppose gave her a shot. I don’t know, none of that was ever mentioned. By late afternoon, when Reb and I were there after last classes, she was up and dressed and happy in her vacant way. She wore clothes that women wouldn’t wear on the street, evening clothes—kind of lavish, like the clothes of a rich young girl. She used to remind me of the farm in Randolph County, because her dresses looked like what the women wore there on Sundays.

The widow sister, Caroline, looked like Mrs. Jonas in the face, but she was different. Like a thin dark rock, moving through the hall in her brown dresses. She did all the work around there but seemed to do it invisibly; I ate dinner with Reb and the Doc pretty often, and she never sat at table with us. Reb’s mother was nervous about eating and took her meals in her room. Maybe Caroline sat with her. Doc would leave for the hospital on evening rounds, and Reb and me would go to the parlor to steal ourselves a glass of brandy.

I remember Reb dancing with his mother once, on a winter night.

She came into the room very animated and turned up the radio, and was dancing by herself until she noticed we were there. Reb stood up and made a deep bow, then danced her all around the room. Made a big show of her, turning and dipping and lifting
her all past the big windows, with the chandelier lit up and throwing shadows across the walls. You could see by how Reb moved how light Mrs. Jonas was; they were both laughing. It was a nice picture, with the dark outside. Then I felt something behind me—I knew it was the widow before I even turned around, and it gave me a chill. But when I looked she wasn’t even watching them. She was standing, real still, looking out the window at the snow.

Marthella Barnett fell in love with Reb his senior year, and she was no match for him by most standards. She came from a big family and had no upbringing. Barnetts owned the pool hall next to Shackner’s Store; the families were related and both had bad names. They were from Coalton and Bess would warn Reb about the girl, say Shackners were trash back then and hadn’t changed. They’d moved the store when the Coalton mines shut down and come to Bellington the way a lot of people did. Marthella was a pretty girl and met Reb in the pool hall—she was fifteen and had a beau she broke off with to go for a ride in the Pierce. Reb didn’t take her seriously at first, called her Tarbaby.

She looked even younger than fifteen because her father didn’t allow her to cut her hair or braid it or use rouge.

Barnett was known to marry his daughters off before they could graduate from school, but he thumped the Bible as he shoved them out the door.

Marthella was a dark little thing—the family had guinea blood, or Indian. Reb let her follow him around awhile; then he started taking her out; Reb driving and Marthella sitting way over on her side against the door, touching the dash with one hand.

I wouldn’t for a long time, when I did first chance with any other girl. Turn a corner and she’s standing there, trying to give me presents—cigarettes, an empty watch case. She told me she never had but she would, she wanted to. I laughed her off, told her she wasn’t legal. Drove fast to scare her, but she never scared. Her black hair hung to her hips. She would pull it over one shoulder so as not to sit on it, and look straight into the road, the black hair in her lap like some kind of animal. She
would, she said, do anything, and her father wouldn’t know, no one would, she would never tell. For a long while we did other things. Holding off got to be a game, and she did what I said, no matter where, fast or slow. Then she’d kiss my wrists like I was all that gave her any peace. Once we went in her father’s bedroom while he was sleeping; she leaned against the wall by the foot of his bed and I was kneeling—she tasted like sour honey, small and tight and she bit her own hands to stay silent. She didn’t do these things for me, do you see? It wasn’t natural, she was only a kid. Like being a kid, a girl, was a disguise, and I saw her, I was the only one. I didn’t understand, I didn’t know what I saw.