Machine Dreams

you. Not Billy.
    Still, you and I will go on and on, despite whatever differences, whatever quarrels. For me, we are what’s left. How are we different? Body and soul, I know—but some things don’t change.
    You were late getting born. I drank a bottle of castor oil to start my labor. I remember leaning out the door, still holding the bottle, yelling to the neighbor woman across the road that I’d drunk it all. August, ten in the morning, already hot as Hades. Then there were twenty hours, on and off the delivery table three times that night while other women had their babies and got on with it. I thought you were a boy for sure; no girl would cause such trouble. But when I knew I had a daughter, I was so thankful—like my own mother had come back to me.

THE SECRET COUNTRY
Mitch
    I was born on the farm in Randolph County, 1910, lived there until I was six. Then went to Raynell with my aunt and her husband. He was a conductor on the railroad—big business then, everything went by rail. It was a new job for him and not traditional in the family; they had all been household farmers and worked the mines. Mines weren’t like they are now. Then, there was no automation, mostly crawlspace, and the coal hauled out by mule. Three of the brothers died in the mines, including my father, but I never really knew him, never even remember seeing him. I know he was there sometimes in the summer, because there are photographs.
    My mother lived at the farm during her confinement and left right after I was born. The birth certificate gives her name as Icie Younger, but no one ever told me anything about her. Her people were from down around Grafton and she went back to them. When I was selling road equipment for the State I used to travelthrough there. Asked after the family several times but no one had ever heard of them.
    I grew up living always with one or another of the sisters. In the beginning there were twelve kids in that family, seven boys and five girls; and the farm was five hundred acres. Bess was the youngest, twenty when I was born, and she took care of me. The boys, my uncles, worked all over the county once they were grown, but the sisters stayed home until they married. Even after, they came home in the summers—the sisters and the wives of the brothers, with all the children. The men came for a few weeks and made repairs, helped the old man. They grew their own food but didn’t farm much on the rest of the land—too mountainous and rocky—but all those hills were rich-timbered. The family had already started selling timber to the Eastern businessmen, who came in and clear-cut and paid a fraction of what the trees were worth. Later the mineral rights were sold as well. Hampsons had been in that valley a hundred years with just their neighbors, and didn’t understand much about business.
    The farm was beautiful, two big white frame houses cross-pasture from each other, the smaller a guest house, and a plank sidewalk built up off the ground so the women wouldn’t dirty the hems of their dresses on Sundays. The houses had full circular porches with fancy trim, and a black iron fence to keep the barn animals out of the yard. The women held church socials and picnics. They picked berries near the barn and used their big hats for baskets, then were all day making pies.
    Church was the only social life, and Coalton Church was a half hour’s wagon ride away; in warm months there was something going on nearly every night. Don’t ask me what. But my uncles had built that little church for the town, and the family gave the land for the graveyard. It’s still called Hampson Cemetery, and most of them are buried there: the grandparents, the parents, all the brothers but Calvin, who left home at seventeen and disappeared out West, and all the sisters but Bess, who is ninety now and the only one left living after Ava died.
    Ava died at a hundred, think of that. You remember her funeral. That was the old family plot. Snowing so hard no one could drive past the gate and they had to walk the casket up. Besstook the death hard. The old house was just down that road, out the Punkin Town turn-off. Foundation still standing, but that trail is steep mud in bad weather.
    All those winters the family stayed put, just ate food they’d dried or put up in pantries, and venison the old man shot. They kept one path shoveled through the snow to the barn, and the walls of the path were as high as a man’s shoulders.
    I know all