The black-and-white specks stand quivering. No one is there. The specks make the lines that are walls and tables and the ceiling that is home. Even when nobody comes, the world moves. There is a little glittering energy at the boundaries of things. This alone is entrancing, but when he returns, when the dots coalesce and spin, it’s so beautiful, almost too much. It’s almost too much after so many hours alone. He has a box and he is taking something out of it, that is eating. His shoulder hunches when he eats and he shakes an object over the box, casting off a sprinkling of fine dust. He looks up and winks. Individually the black-and-white specks mean nothing, but together they make a feeling that is love.
She Uses Only What She Needs
Hard Mary has no greed. She doesn’t eat. Her insides are pure, as neat as a well-kept sewing basket. She doesn’t soil herself. She doesn’t sweat. She is mild as May. She has never owned a second cap and dress.
It’s true Mim brought her a second heart. I don’t know from where. We used to keep it underneath the rocking chair. When her heart began to run down, Mim would switch it out and take the dry one off to be filled. Many men could use such a simple change of heart! We learned that Mary could tell us when her heart was running down, not by speaking but by a red light that came on inside one cheek. The light would be pink at first, hardly noticeable, then it would grow red and start to blink. When she got feverish like this, we’d do the operation.
Everything clean and trim. Not a drop of blood.
Mim constructed a kind of legs for her so she could walk around. It started out as a hooplike frame, just to fill out her skirt so she didn’t look so flat, then later Mim added six wheels like the ones on a shopping cart. I suppose she might have stolen them. I don’t know. Sometimes you find shopping carts abandoned along the road, rusting in the rain. It’s not a sin to take things other people have thrown away. I don’t think of Mim as a thief. I think of her as thrifty.
It was marvelous what she did. Hard Mary can bend to sit down and get up. She can turn about the room. She’s the same height as me. Sometimes, breathless with excitement, we’d take her out back behind the springhouse so she could practice walking over the melting snow. From a distance, we knew, she’d look just like an ordinary girl. “This is daylight, Mary,” we said, “this is a tree.” We got her to pet Mim’s wretched old dog, Hochmut, who suffered this treatment in silence, his eyes half closed, trembling from nose to tail.
When she got used to walking, she’d go far from us, a dignified lady over the pasture, but when we called her, she always came.
I thought we’d saved her. I thought she was going to live with us forever. I thought they’d forgotten her down at the Profane Industries. After all, they’d thrown her away. Then one Sunday evening a car drove right up to our house and a man got out of it. We heard the engine turn off and the door slam shut. My little brother Cristy ran to the door and Father told him, “Slow down.” I heard them from the kitchen, where I was washing dishes with Mother. “Now who can that be?” I asked her lightly, drying my hands on my apron.
“Beggars, I expect,” she said.
We do get a lot of beggars here in Jericho—foreigners from town asking for bread, barefoot kids wanting to stay awhile, mothers stowing their babies in our barns for us to raise. The elders are always having meetings to figure out which ones to keep and which to send away. Somehow, though, I didn’t think this was a beggar. My whole insides were buzzing like a hive. I ran to the front room, where Cristy crouched at the window, hugging himself for joy.
“It’s a Mercedes!” he hissed.
I peered out. Father stood with his back to us, his hands propped on his hips. The evening was cold enough to see his breath. A long beam of reddish light came slanting across the dark, newly tilled fields. A foreign man was talking to Father. He was tall and elegant, with thinning white hair that the wind lifted. He held his hat in his hands. He had the clean, straight foreign teeth and the soft, sleek foreign body and he was wearing a coat that went down to the ground. He smiled at Father and seemed to be talking in a nice, reasonable way. My insides, which had been so active, had gone still. It was like my marrow was solid lead. The low light struck the man’s glasses and I realized I couldn’t tell where he was looking.
I jerked away from the window and pressed my back against the wall.
A door slammed. The car started up.
“Oh boy,” said Cristy. “Look at her smoke.”
Father came in and I took his hat, blurting, “What did the man want?”
“Why, nothing,” he said, surprised. “Only looking for something he lost.”
“What is it? What did he lose?”
“Some foreign stuff,” Father answered, frowning at Cristy, who was dancing about, whispering, “Mercedes! Mercedes!”
My knees were turning to water. “What foreign stuff?”
“Lyddie!” Mother called from the kitchen.
“How should I know?” Father said. “Go help your mother.”
As I went out, he began wrestling Cristy. He farted, which he could do whenever he liked, and while Cristy giggled he said, “I believe I smell a car.”
I went to the kitchen, moving as stiffly as Hard Mary herself. It was then I began my plan for her defense.
He is the Father, the King, the Master of Miracles. He makes me to wear the Crown. His acolytes pass behind him, ready to do his will. They are Kyle, Jonathan, and Judy. They carry his instruments, plug needles into the wall. Judy brings him a cup of black. He takes it without looking at her, both circles over his eyes. He lights up the Crown and gives me visions. I see the everlong and the bent. I perceive the knobs and globules. I am familiar with the scrim. I know collision. I am counting very fast.
She Is as Innocent as a Little Child
“All right,” said Kat. “We’re here now. What’s this about?”
We had gathered in Mary’s room. A lamp burned on top of the old chest I’d put there to hold her sewing things. Though it was March, we were well wrapped up against the vapors from the spring. Kat’s face was pale and accusing. She had a bad tooth.
I took a breath. “It’s time to tell the others about Mary.”
“Oh, no,” said Esther.
“Don’t just say no. Listen and hear what I have to say.”
I told them about the foreign man. I was sure he’d be back, and nobody would keep him from taking Mary away from a bunch of girls. “They have to know her like we do,” I said. “They have to see her as one of us. If people know about her, they’ll protect her.”
Barb stared. “Are you cracked?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
Barb’s cheeks were flaming. “Can you hear yourself?” she demanded, waving her arms. “Tell who about Mary? The bishop? This is it,” she said, looking around at the others. “We always knew this day would come, and now it has.”
She untied her cap, yanked the strings tighter, and tied it again. Only the previous week, her engagement had been published. She was going to be married to Mel Fisher on Sunday—handsome Mel, who used to croon along with her brother’s forbidden radio and had once accidentally burned down a woodshed with a cigarette.
“Don’t go, Barb,” I said.
“Which day?” asked Mim.
We all looked down at her. Mim was the only one who was sitting down. She sat on the floor with her back against the wall. She never seemed to feel the cold. Hochmut lay with his head in her lap.