Machine Dreams

old homemade album Bess must have pasted together. The pictures are taken outside the old house, and everyone is dressed in their best. My father is wearing a woman’s big hat and posing like Napoleon.
    They had his funeral there at the house. The brothers made the casket out of pine board, and the lid was kept shut. That was the practice in that country; if a man died in the mines, his coffin was closed for services, nailed shut, even if the man was unmarked. They would have put Warwick’s coffin on the long table in the parlor, the best room. The window shades in that room were sewn with gold tassels. Silk tassels, and children weren’t to touch them. The parlor was seldom used, but it was dusted everyday, spotless, and the floor was polished once a week with linseed rags fastened onto a broom.
    It was soon after Warwick’s funeral Bess left the farm.
    She came to Bellington because it was the closest good-size town, and started working as secretary to Dr. Bond. Bess would have been in her late twenties, an old maid. She met Clayton because he was Doc Bond’s younger brother.
    Doc Bond and Doc Jonas were the only two doctors here besides the veterinarian. Clayton was in the construction business, always was, so the three men started the hospital. Bought two houses; Bess and Clayton lived in the smaller and built onto the bigger one. Knocked down walls inside, built wards. The modern addition that stretches out from the back now wasn’t there then; the place was much smaller. Didn’t need to be so big; most people birthed and died at home. And Bess has lived here, in this house across the alley, for sixty years. She sold the hospital twenty years ago, but they still get mail addressed to her. She learned a lot about nursing by working for Doc Bond, keeping theoffice, helping with examinations. Doc Bond died a few years after the hospital got going, and Clayton was building roads, so Bess ended up doing most of it herself—ran the hospital, the kitchen, hired nurses, did the books. Katie Sue and Chuck grew up running back and forth between the house and the hospital.
    There was so much talk about Doc Jonas in the later years that Bess didn’t like to let him use the hospital, but for a long time hers was the only one in town and she couldn’t turn his patients away.
    Some swore by Jonas, others said he was a scoundrel. I grew up with his son, Reb, who we always called Doc after his father. Doctors’ sons then became doctors as well, inherited their fathers’ patients same as another boy would inherit a farm or a storefront. Reb never cared much for doctoring, but he liked being called Doc and he liked not having to go to war when the time came. He and I had some scrapes, all through high school while I was living with Bess and Clayton.
    But that was later. Right after Warwick died, I was sent to live with Ava, my aunt ten years older than Bess, and her husband, the train man.
    I lived with Ava and Eban eight years but was gone every summer, to the farm, to one cousin or another. Eban was a railroad porter, then a conductor. We lived at Raynell, down near the Kentucky border. That town has nearly disappeared now, but when the trains still moved goods and passengers, Raynell was a big junction for Southern Rail. There was a pride about the railroad then—a railroad uniform in the ’20s had almost as much respect as military dress. Eban wore blue trousers, suitcoat and vest, and a visored hat trimmed in braid. He wore white shirts with cuffs that Ava was always ironing. She would stand at the ironing board, a broad wooden one, while the iron heated on the stove.
    If Bess was the youngest and prettiest of those Hampsons, Ava was the most stubborn. She was spirited and tall, a handsome woman even if her face was plain. Knew her mind and fought plenty with Eban. They had two little girls, just babies when I went there. Ava kept me out of school all she could, to watch themand help her do the garden. Train ran right back of the house, right the length of the town. Houses shook when the train passed. Kids always played on the tracks, tag and roughhousing. Ava had a fear about her kids getting too close to the trains. The younger girl was slow, never said a word till she was three or four, and collected things the way blackbirds will, shiny things. That was my cousin Emily. She would always be going down to the tracks to pick up pebbles or bits of glass. She never really learned to talk but would sit and stare