Machine Dreams

at anything bright, a gas light or a coal fire. That child died young. Just took sick and died suddenly. They stood her coffin up against the wall; the box wasn’t very big, about as high as a man’s waist, and it was narrow at the foot the way homemade coffins were. The church at Raynell gave a velvet altar cloth, deep red, to put inside.
    Ava arranged the flowers all around. Seems to me she asked the children who lived near to come to the service and sing a hymn. Yes, she did, and the shortest ones were in the front, closer to the coffin; I was nearly ten years old by then and stood in back.
    Ava was distracted for weeks. A neighbor woman came in to look after the other daughter and me.
    Near that time the B&O Railroad discovered they had employed a leper and, for want of any other plan, deposited the man on forest land by the tracks near Raynell. Townspeople were alarmed. It was said this man was a Chinese known as Li Sung, banished by his own government because of his disease. He had a brother in Washington, D. C., who was a tailor, and he traveled to that city to work in his brother’s shop. He wore gloves to cover the lesions on his hands, but somehow his brother discovered the secret. Or maybe Li Sung confessed. Anyway, he was turned out and wandered for a time, then finally got a job maintaining track for the B&O. The railroad often hired laborers who didn’t speak English, and paid them very low. Li Sung never removed his gloves and co-workers became suspicious, so the rail superintendent sent him to a doctor well-known in that area. The leprosy was confirmed. B&O had no policy for such a case, so they isolated Li Sung in a boxcar at the rear of the train and transported him all over the state, asking privately after hospitals. No hospital would accept him, and passengers began avoiding the railroad. B&O lostworkers on all lines, since no one knew which train pulled the car where the leper was kept. Finally it was decided to put Li Sung in some isolated place with supplies and make him stay there. The railroad sent the B&O surgeon and a caretaker out to prepare a site near Raynell. They found a grassy knoll near the river and put up a World War I army tent with a stout pole in the middle, then camped to await the leper’s arrival. The B&O brought him in by night. Employees stood aside as Li Sung was ordered to the tent, then they burned the boxcar and left on the train.
    The surgeon stayed behind in the town to arrange for Li Sung’s meals, and offered a small subsidy to any widow willing to prepare his food. The food was to be delivered once a day in disposable wooden trays provided by the County, and Li Sung himself was to burn the trays at his campfire.
    Ava had done nothing for weeks but mend and starch all the dead child’s clothes, smoothing each piece and packing them away in clean boxes. She’d ironed even the handkerchiefs and undergarments, but it was all done and now she volunteered to cook for the leper. Eban tried to talk her out of it, but for the first time she seemed more herself, so he signed a paper saying he allowed the endangerment of his wife and family and would not hold the railroad accountable.
    In just a day, the County delivered six months’ supply of wooden trays and stacked them like firewood on the south wall of the porch.
    The appearance of the trays got the town talking. There were fears Li Sung would bathe in the river and contaminate the water. The railroad surgeon walked with Ava and me to show us the route to the tent, ten minutes’ walk along Ransom’s Ridge. We put the tray (bread and cow cheese and cold grits, as it was a warm day) on a stump fifteen feet from the site. And the surgeon yelled for Li Sung to come out.
    He did, and stood by the tent pole, barefoot, dressed in a white button-collar shirt, suspenders, and the wool trousers of a winter rail uniform. The trousers were too large for him and he wore bulky work gloves, tied to his wrists with twine. He was slight and looked younger than Ava, who must have been in her late thirties then. Not many people in those parts had seen anOriental. His black hair was long like a woman’s and hung in one thin braid down his back. His eyes were slanted, almost like slits, and hid any expression. He stood politely and waited for us to talk. The surgeon yelled—as though the leper was deaf—not to go into the river or touch the water, to fill his bucket by holding to the handle and dipping the bucket in, and to