Free Mary Coin by Marisa Silver Page B

not be spitting out children like watermelon pits. There were ways to avoid it. Mary’s sisters-in-law swore by Lysol douches and had only two children each. Mary knew that Toby could arrange things so that he was outside of her. But when it got to that point, she could not bear the feeling of his withdrawal and she would hold him tightly. And these children—she could not imagine them before they came into being and now she could not imagine them not existing. Ellie, with her bossiness and her discontent; Trevor, with his wide eyes, who took everything his sister and his cousins told him on faith, a sweet gullibility that had landed him a quarter-mile away from the mill one day, searching for hidden treasure; June, who, though still a baby, would pitch a fit if Mary tried to get her into a dress. It was true Mary had cried when she fell pregnant for the fourth time. And there had been the undisguised fear in Toby’s eyes the night she admitted it to him. But when she looked at her children playing their game of chase, she thought of them as a fist held up to fate. She’d met women at the mill who spoke longingly about the places they had come from—Arkansas, Kentucky, or Oklahoma. But Mary knew these women were reveling not so much in memories of a place as in recollections of their girlhoods, when there had been few demands upon their time and none on their bodies. She listened to their complaints, knowing that for her, each new child settling onto her breast for the first time was a confirmation, another puzzle piece locking into place.
    Each afternoon, when Toby came home from his shift, he would hold June in his arms while Trevor and Ellie tried to claim his attention. For the first hour, his face assumed a gentle, uncomprehending smile because his ears were numbed deaf by the clang and roar of the mill’s machinery. But once he got his hearing back, and the older children had gone off to their games or chores, he’d talk to June about what he’d seen during the day, about how it had taken twenty Chinese men to roll a huge section of red fir to the head saw, or how a sawyer had to be sent home because he was drunk on the job. He’d ask the little girl’s opinion about whether their mother was the prettiest woman in the town or only the most beautiful.
    “You’re a fool for talking sense to a baby,” Mary said two months later, after Della was born and he was regaling the infant with tales of his day.
    “A baby understands everything right from the start,” he told her, staring down at the bundle of blanket that was his newest daughter.
    Each year found him holding on to the seat of a borrowed bicycle while Ellie, then Trevor, then each child in turn veered and fell, scraped and cried. Intimate with shame, Toby whispered instructions into their ears so as not to humiliate them in front of the neighbor children who had come out of their homes to watch. When June took off without a hitch as if she had been born to ride a bicycle, Toby stood back and watched her disappear down the road.
    “There she goes,” he said.
    Mary heard the tremble in his voice and saw his jaw working against his feelings. “She’s free now,” she said, linking her arm through his.
    “No such thing,” he said.
    •   •   •
     
    B y the time their fifth child, Ray, was born, there were rumors from the east of men jumping out of the windows of tall buildings. Orders were down at the mill, and there was not enough demand for the foreman to run double shifts. Toby was one of the first to be let go, then Robert. Levi could get more cuts out of a log than any other man on the crew, and the boss offered to keep him. The brothers knew it would be harder for three men arriving at a new place looking for work than it would be for one, or even two, but having survived their father, they had a notion of their collective endurance, and they determined to stay together.
    They moved from one mill to the next for as long as the work