“I’ve had enough of this,” said Kat, stamping out. In a moment she was back with a bucket of cold water from the spring. She took the lamp and set it on the floor close to Joe and began to clean him up, Barb hovering nearby, crying. So it wasn’t the end of the argument. We kept fighting, even after Sam had said he was sorry and we’d untied him so he could help with Greasy’s arm, and after Esther had run out for a new lamp and Sam had taken my hand in the darkness. Kat fought with Mim and so did I, for I was frightened. I was afraid we were going to lose Hard Mary. I told Mim you couldn’t tie people up, and she said plenty of people had been tied up for their own good, making reference to poor old Betty Blank, who was quite demented and often trailed behind her grandkids on a rope. I told her you couldn’t strike people, and she said the boys had only been given a couple of knocks, and it was nothing worse than what they’d received from their own dads.
“But you half killed us,” said Sam.
“Now, Sam,” said Mim. “Be a man. You couldn’t have gotten half killed by a pack of girls.”
Her teeth shone as she smiled, and her eyes were bright with excitement because of what had happened in the middle of our fight. This—what happened—makes the fight itself hazy to me now, almost as if I’d been hit in the head like Joe Miller, who would be carried home on a ladder that night, the boys claiming he’d taken a fall while they were wrestling, and wake up in two days with no memory of Mary at all. I still have my memory, but it’s frayed and full of holes, as if chewed by moths. I remember Barb said teaching Hard Mary to fight was a sin, and I added that at the very least it was a terrible risk, because how could Mim be sure Mary wouldn’t haul off and hit somebody else? I remember Mim shot back, “Why do you think I picked a phrase no one ever says?” She had just said that, and she was frowning at Kat, who was wincing because of her tooth, and she started to say, “What kind of bonesetter are you?” but she got interrupted because Mel, with a sudden cry, threw himself into Hard Mary and knocked her over.
She fell with a mighty crash, Mel on top of her. They hit the lamp, which toppled and broke. A whoosh of firelight started across the floor. At once all of us who could move threw our coats and shawls on the fire and stamped it out. Smoke filled the darkness. Mel was groaning; he’d wrenched his wrist. I was on my hands and knees, light-headed in the kerosene stench. Sam crept close to me and touched my fingers. “Look,” he whispered. Light fluttered before us in the gloom: a stream of barred light going up to the ceiling.
I followed it with my eyes. It ended in a square that was half on the ceiling and half on the skylight. On the skylight it was hard to see, but the part on the ceiling showed a man’s head. He wore glasses. The head was alive. It turned back and forth.
“A moving picture,” breathed Mel.
The picture went black and then came back. That was Mim, bending over Mary, passing her hand through the beam of light. “It’s from her eye,” Mim said hoarsely. “Her eye is open.”
My throat tightened. I began to cry. Sam made me sit back and put his arms around me. “It’s beautiful,” he murmured.
For a moment we were all quiet together. We were all one in the strange, flickering, ashen twilight. An immense silence seemed to come down from the ceiling, or from the sky. The man in glasses smiled and raised a cup. Hold me tight, I told Sam in my head, because I felt that if he let go of me, I’d drift apart like smoke. Mary lay with her eye open, pouring light. We were all struck dumb, but only I was in tears, for only I recognized the man on the ceiling.
Can you see me?
No.
Have you seen the flood?
No.
The mountains trembling?
No.
Have you inhaled the fragrance of cedar?
No.
Have you observed the burning cities?
No.
The armies that clash by night?
No.
Do you know the taste of ice?
No.
Tell me, then, what you see and what you know.
I see the points. I see the multiples. I know the calculations. Through these I comprehend your eye, the rim of glasses pressing at your cheek, and the colonies of bacteria teeming there in clumps. I have clocked the forces on the inside of your hair: these are my floods. My mountains trembling are the timbre of your voice. I inhale nothing, but I can compose the texture of a bitterness and chemical contraction that is cedar. I concoct the sensation of walking in the wood. You wore your checkered coat. I followed you. A leaf clung to your heel. I taste no ice, but I reckon crunch and tingle, and so I can say that you placed the last icicle of the season in my mouth.
She Dreams
His name is Dr. Robert Stoll. He drives a black Mercedes. He came to me when I was hanging wash. Sam and I had been married five months then, and I was heavy enough with little Jim to let my dresses out. Dr. Stoll pulled his car off the road at the top of the hill, leaving it half on our grass. The bang of his door went off inside my gut. I bent to the wash but my mind was reaching out to the house, the fields, the neighbors, the woods, the quarry, anywhere I could run. Hot September, but my fingers rattled in the clothespins, numb with cold. Sam was in the corn. There was nobody in the house. I glanced up the hill and saw the doctor coming down it sideways, moving in the nervous, finicky foreign way.
He slid the last steps toward me in his narrow shoes. He wore no hat. He smoothed his white curls over his scalp and smiled. It was strange to see him in his solid flesh when I had watched him so often flashing across the wall in Mary’s dreams. For Mim, of course, had soon found out a way to conjure Mary to open her eye. This eye was a window no bigger than the head of a nail. Through it streamed a sparkling mist that painted us the doctor in his coat, with his cup that no doubt contained the poison of asps and dragons.
“Good afternoon,” he said, panting a little from the heat.
“My husband is out,” I said.
He settled his glasses more firmly on his nose. “That’s quite all right with me,” he said. “It’s you I want to see, Lyddie Lapp. Excuse me, you’re married now. Lyddie Esh.”
He talked like a radio. It was like he was holding marbles in his mouth. When he said my name, I felt as if I’d been covered with spit. He smiled with all of his neat, square, cruel-looking foreign teeth. “Allow me to introduce myself.”
He said his name. He told me he worked at the Profane Industries, giving the place its innocent foreign name. He was going to get right to the point, he said. It had come to his attention that I, with some friends of mine, was harboring his equipment.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
He pursed his lips, looking disappointed. He had a little white beard just around his mouth. “Oh, dear. I had hoped things wouldn’t go in this direction. I am talking about the equipment you call ‘Mary.’”
“Oh, that,” I said quickly. “That’s not mine.”
“But you are keeping it.”
“I’m not,” I said, my heart lifting and swelling like one of Sam’s shirts in the breeze. I tossed my head a little and fetched another shirt out of the wash basket. “It’s not our week with Mary. I don’t know where she is.”