Free Mary Coin by Marisa Silver

no
out of the way.
She was in the way of what was happening to her. She
was
what was happening to her. She had not been able to envision this event when her mother described it, couldn’t think how water that could slip through your fingers could also break as if it were a solid thing. Her organs knotted and seized with a force that made her whimper. She knew her body was beyond her now, and she could only stand by helplessly while it did what it would do. Carlotta Coin had taken a powerful dose of castor oil before she’d had her baby so that she would not soil herself in front of the midwife. This fussiness seemed laughable to Mary now. The contraction subsided, leaving only a backache, the dull throb she felt at the beginning of her monthly bleeding. She walked to the edge of the river where logs floated, indolently knocking against one another. Her feet slid over the lichen-covered rocks until her toes touched the cold water. A heron flew down and settled itself elegantly on the opposite bank. A second contraction gathered in her pelvis. She knew she ought to go back to the cottage and wake Sarah, who had birthed other babies in the camp. But she was not ready yet. She walked along the edge of the river until she found a place where the logs drifted apart from one another and she could see her dark form reflected in the water. Shedding her nightdress, she turned to the side and marveled at the incredible shape of her body.
    “Mary?”
    Toby was behind her, holding out a blanket. “What are you doing?”
    “Look at me!” she said. It was the way she used to call her mother to watch her while she did a headstand or balanced on a fence, needing Doris’s gaze to make the moment real, to stamp it into history. “You’d like it if I spent my days watching you breathe,” Doris used to say in exasperation whenever she was called, but she always came, her hands covered in flour or stained with pig guts, sanctioning these small victories with a terse nod.
    “Are you dreaming, Mary?” Toby said.
    “Yes!” she said. “No!” She laughed.
    And at that moment, she felt as if a hand had reached up into her in order to turn her inside out. “Mama!” she cried.

9.
     
    B y 1925, there were three pulling at Mary’s skirts, prancing circles around her, beating on her with their fists, and letting loose their pinched and plaintive whines because they wanted her attention while she was kneading dough for bread, silently reciting her mother’s lesson:
Three, not two.
She stopped what she was doing for a moment and watched the torrent of Ellie, Trevor and June, mystified that she could have released so much sheer energy into the world. She and Toby had their own cabin now in exchange for a healthy cut of Toby’s wages. The mill buildings sat down by the river, but the family cabins and the bunkhouse for the single men were tucked into the foot of the forested hills. To have a home of her own, to not be living under the gaze and judgment of another woman, was something Mary took pleasure in each day, no matter that the cabin’s single window was cracked or that the walls were so haphazardly joined that the house was filled with flies during the day and with cold mountain air at night. She looked out of the window toward the mill. The men were too distant to make out, but every once in a while, she might see a lean, taut figure walking from one building to another with a board slung across one shoulder, and she would know that it was Toby. She did not see him now, but she noticed a crowd beginning to gather around the tracks that ran down from the mountain. A train whistled in the distance.
    “Mama! Mama!” Trevor grabbed her hand and pulled. Ellie was already out the door, even though Mary had warned her not to leave the house without asking for permission. Aside from foreign men coming and going, there were other dangers at the mill. Children had been injured playing on unstable piles of wood. A boy had drowned trying to