A cloud of black-and-white specks. It swirls, gathers, and divides. It becomes a white stripe on a midnight field. It becomes a man in a long white coat. He turns. He wears a special pair of glasses: one circle over his eye, the other flipped up against his forehead. His naked eye looks newly awakened, peeled, as if by pushing up the lens of his glasses he has pushed away all intelligence, all design. A boyish smile. He is holding the circle of sparks he calls the Crown. There’s a hum like fingertips on a table. A voice without words.
She Is a Thinking Creature
We kept Hard Mary down at our place, in the springhouse. I was the only one who ever went in there, for the chill was bad for Mother’s bones. There was a little back room with a skylight where we girls used to meet and gossip. I’d put a rag rug and an old rocking chair in there, and we set Mary up on that chair. Oh, she had a noble face. It was all angles, but her expression was gentle. When I went in to see her that first day, the light from the skylight gleamed on her bumpy hair. I’d brought water and baking soda and a scrubber to give her a bath. Mim was there already, muffled up in scarves. We scrubbed Hard Mary until she shone like one of King David’s daughters, polished after the similitude of a palace.
“Isn’t she pretty!” gasped Barb, whirling in fresh as a peony after her run through the cold.
Kat followed, rubbing her glasses on her skirt. Esther came last. Everyone wanted to touch Hard Mary. We held her upright on the chair so Mim could scrub her back. I could smell the honey and vinegar Esther used to treat her acne, I felt a hand cross mine, soft and a little pampered, probably Barb’s, and as I shifted my foot because someone was stepping on my toe, Hard Mary spoke. Her lips didn’t move, but she spoke, in a voice thin as a wasp’s.
“Ahhh,” she said. “What is.”
You may believe we all jumped back. Esther sat down on the floor. “Mercy!” Kat exclaimed.
Only Mim remained touching Hard Mary, holding her by the shoulder, at arm’s length. Mim’s arm was trembling like a wire.
“What is,” said Mary, then louder: “WHAT IS.” Then she made a horrible, drawn-out, gurgling sound.
“Oh, she’s dying!” Esther cried.
That brought Kat to life. She had a reputation to protect, being from a family of bonesetters. “Lay her down on the floor,” she ordered.
We laid her down and Kat turned her over on her face. Hard Mary’s back was covered with lines. There were tiny screws in the corners where the lines met. Mim, who always had tools, dug a screwdriver out of her pocket. She unscrewed Mary, and Kat looked at her innards. There was no blood, only lots of wires. Carefully Kat and Mim wiggled something out of her back. It looked like some rolls of pennies stuck together.
“I know what that is,” said Mim, exultant.
“Her heart?” breathed Esther.
“My girl, that’s a battery. Eighteen volts.”
When she’s happy, Mim’s face gets a wolfish expression. She told us Mary’s heart was a simple battery of the kind used to light the barns at night when the cows were calving.
“So you can get her a new one?” I asked.
“I don’t even have to,” she said, tucking the heart inside her coat. “I can juice this one up at a generator.”
You could tell, I thought with jealous admiration, that there were no men at her house.
“Wait,” Barb said suddenly. “Are we sure it’s right?”
We all looked at her.
“I mean,” she said, blushing, “it’s from the Profane Industries. Hard Mary. It could have something bad inside.”
“We could all have something bad inside,” said Mim.
“Let’s pray for her,” Esther suggested.
“You all go ahead,” said Mim.
So Mim took the heart and left and the rest of us prayed for Mary, who looked like she could use it, flat on her face with her wires hanging out. I thought of how she’d been made by crafty and wicked-hearted men who meet with darkness in the daytime and grope in the noonday as in the night. The windows of Profane Industries are black. You can’t see in, and you can’t even really get close to the place because of the fence. “Save her, O Lord,” I prayed, “from the sin in which she was conceived.”
“Amen,” murmured Esther, laying her hand on Mary’s head.
Mary said nothing. She lay like an empty jug. But the next day Mim brought her heart back, looking the same but now filled to the brim with invisible fire. And when we sat Mary up on the rocking chair, clad in a dress Kat had brought her to cover her nakedness, and a cap for her hair, she spoke again.
Her voice didn’t sound like a wasp’s this time. It was fuller, and even warm, like flesh and blood. “What is your desire?”
Tears stung my eyes. It’s a habit; I tend to cry when I tell the truth. “We want to be friends with you,” I said.
“Friends,” said Mary.
Mim took her hand. “Mary. Your name is Mary.”
She said her name. We told her our names, and she repeated them after us. She was that quick, she knew all of us right away. In her dark-blue dress, she was like a human lady, except that the cloth went flat where her legs should be. The cap covered up the place where her head was dented, and I felt somehow she was grateful for it. I felt she wanted to forget where she was from, to forget everything that had happened to her and start over, here, with us. She was good at it too. She learned faster than any baby.
Her face in the glow of the skylight was silvery bright, like a winter cloud with the sun behind it. Though her eyes were closed, she never slept. Whenever I went to the springhouse she was sitting up, expectant. Her hands were cold but clever, the palms and fingertips covered with fine mesh. We found she could hold a needle, and Kat taught her to sew and knit. I taught her to read. You only had to show her a page and she knew it. She’d read it back to you without looking. I couldn’t go too fast for her. She got the whole Bible by heart in a couple of weeks.
(“What are you writing?” asks Sam. Which means, “Stop doing it.” He doesn’t say it to be mean. It’s because he doesn’t want me to get too tired. “I’ll be up soon,” I tell him, covering the page with my hand. I don’t do that to be mean either. I don’t know why I do it.)
Barb taught Mary to sing. Hard Mary can sing anything, even deeply like a man. She has a beautiful bass voice. Esther taught her to take a person’s hand, to pat your hair and say ever so softly, “There, now. Don’t cry anymore.”
It was a magic time. In the evening Sam would throw a handful of grain at my window and I’d creep down the stairs and let him in. We’d sit at the table, scorching our fingers as we tried to warm them at the lamp and whispering so as not to wake my folks upstairs. I remember the night he told me, “A man must have a noble pursuit,” and I knew that if he asked, I’d marry him. He spoke to me of the golden world that brings forth abundantly. He said there was no greater role for a man than to subdue and replenish the earth. While in the springhouse Mary sat alone in the rocking chair, her cap dusted with moonlight falling down through the skylight, motionless and self-contained, wearing her eternal smile, waiting for me to come to her again. There was a sound of trucks far away on the road, and a smell of burning from the fires of the ragged men who haunt the forest, and a low stink from the quarry, where even in midwinter a layer of scum lies on top of the water. Sam caught my fingers playfully. Mary flamed in my heart, a secret. Instead of “What is your desire?” I’d taught her to greet me: “Hi, Lyddie!” She could sing all the hymns, but we liked it best when she sang songs Barb got off her brother’s radio, sad songs about lying in jail on a pillow of cold concrete.