Free Mary Coin by Marisa Silver Page A

balance on a floating log. Trevor slipped his hand from hers and raced after his sister. June sat on the floor stacking the wooden blocks Toby had made, and Mary quickly picked her up, knowing that cunning Ellie would draw her trusting brother into some kind of trouble. Sure enough, as soon as Mary reached the tracks, she saw that Ellie had dared Trevor to see if he was brave enough to stand on an iron rail as the train pounded closer. Mary pulled him to safety and gave Ellie a smack on her arm.
    The children fell into a reverent silence as the big Shay engine appeared trailing flatcars loaded with freshly cut logs. The train slowed to a stop, exhaling its vaporous breath. Then came the hurly-burly of activity as the men sprang into action, shouting orders as the long arm of the unloader began to sweep the logs off the train. The sugar pine and white fir and giant sequoia logs came out of the forest like newly injured soldiers, their sheared ends exposed and raw-looking. The wounds touched Mary in a way she knew was foolish, but she could not stop thinking of the trees as amputations. She imagined the stumps standing alone, filled with longing for their missing parts. She touched her stomach. Of course this was the next baby talking. Pregnancy made her wide open. She might be unaccountably moved by the sight of a dog crouched to do its business, the pathetic wobble of its hind legs, the still vacancy of its watery eyes. A month earlier, a crazed hummingbird had spent four days tapping on the window of the cabin. Ellie, an easily enraged girl of four, was furious with the bird and pounded her fist against the window, but Toby grabbed her hands and explained that something had gone wrong with the bird’s mind and that it was mistaking the glass window for a tree. To Mary, the misperception seemed not crazy, only human, and she had wept.
    The children did not want to go indoors. Mary took them to see the planer where their uncle Levi smoothed the newly cut planks so that running your hand along an edge you could mistake the wood for silk. The air was tangy with the wet, warm scent of cut logs combined with the acrid smell of the steam boiler that Uncle Robert tended. Four men carried a pale, debarked log to the long timber mill where Toby worked the spinning blade of the circular saw. Trevor begged Mary to let him see his father run the giant machine, but Toby had forbidden the family to watch him work. “I forget myself at the sight of you,” he told Mary one night when they were in bed. He lay behind her, his mouth moving against her damp neck, his hand draped over her stomach, massaging the tight drum of her stretched skin. “You don’t want a one-armed husband, do you?”
    Mary coaxed the children back to the cabin with a promise to round up the cousins for a game of Run, Sheep, Run. While Ellie took charge, designating herself as fox king, Mary thought back to when she was a girl and she and Betsy had traced the attributes of their imagined husbands in the dust outside the chicken coop, erasing the words with their shoes as quickly as they wrote them so that Doris would not witness their silliness. Betsy had been practical: no farting, no burping, no false teeth. Now, as Mary sat outside the cabin on a three-legged stool trying to occupy June, she remembered her list: good singer, small ears, doesn’t kick dogs. She realized that in some ways she had never been without Toby. She had conjured him, and then he had appeared as if her writing had released a messenger into the wind who had gone looking for those words as they existed in a single man. And here he was: handsome, kind, enough of a singer to soothe a miserable baby or make them all laugh when he struggled for the high notes of the birthday song, which he insisted on singing at top voice, holding the special boy or girl in his arms and waltzing them into their next year.
    She wondered what Betsy’s life would have been like if she had lived. She would probably