Machine Dreams

with the dark outside. Then I felt something behind me—I knew it was the widow before I even turned around, and it gave me a chill. But when I looked she wasn’t even watching them. She was standing, real still, looking out the window at the snow.
    Marthella Barnett fell in love with Reb his senior year, and she was no match for him by most standards. She came from a big family and had no upbringing. Barnetts owned the pool hall next to Shackner’s Store; the families were related and both had bad names. They were from Coalton and Bess would warn Reb about the girl, say Shackners were trash back then and hadn’t changed. They’d moved the store when the Coalton mines shut down and come to Bellington the way a lot of people did. Marthella was a pretty girl and met Reb in the pool hall—she was fifteen and had a beau she broke off with to go for a ride in the Pierce. Reb didn’t take her seriously at first, called her Tarbaby.
    She looked even younger than fifteen because her father didn’t allow her to cut her hair or braid it or use rouge.
    Barnett was known to marry his daughters off before they could graduate from school, but he thumped the Bible as he shoved them out the door.
    Marthella was a dark little thing—the family had guinea blood, or Indian. Reb let her follow him around awhile; then he started taking her out; Reb driving and Marthella sitting way over on her side against the door, touching the dash with one hand.
    I wouldn’t for a long time, when I did first chance with any other girl. Turn a corner and she’s standing there, trying to give me presents—cigarettes, an empty watch case. She told me she never had but she would, she wanted to. I laughed her off, told her she wasn’t legal. Drove fast to scare her, but she never scared. Her black hair hung to her hips. She would pull it over one shoulder so as not to sit on it, and look straight into the road, the black hair in her lap like some kind of animal. She
would, she said, do anything, and her father wouldn’t know, no one would, she would never tell. For a long while we did other things. Holding off got to be a game, and she did what I said, no matter where, fast or slow. Then she’d kiss my wrists like I was all that gave her any peace. Once we went in her father’s bedroom while he was sleeping; she leaned against the wall by the foot of his bed and I was kneeling—she tasted like sour honey, small and tight and she bit her own hands to stay silent. She didn’t do these things for me, do you see? It wasn’t natural, she was only a kid. Like being a kid, a girl, was a disguise, and I saw her, I was the only one. I didn’t understand, I didn’t know what I saw.
    After Marthella began to shadow Reb, the older girls were a little cruel to her. She wore white nurses’ stockings because Shackner’s got them in at the store. The girls asked her where her bedpan was, when would she get her cap and make an honest living.
    I was courting Dot Coyner, and the four of us went to the river once that spring. Dot thought Marthella was odd, the way she would say things that had no bearing on the conversation and do anything Reb told her. Reb told her to climb to the top of the rocks in two minutes, in her shoes, and started counting out loud. Marthella jumped up and ran, held her dress up and climbed like a boy. Only reason she didn’t fall was because she moved so fast. Then Marthella was standing on top, and Reb said take off your dress and jump, jump in. That water was cold, freezing in early April. Dot stood up and said we were leaving, that Reb was disgusting and made anyone ashamed. Okay, all right, Reb told her, and yelled at Marthella to come down. But before anyone could do anything Marthella did jump, holding her arms out like a circus tightrope walker. She was lucky she hit in deep water, dropped and sank like a stone.
One night I was looped and got so twisted, for a second I really did think she was my mother. Then she was Marthella again and I hit her, I told her she smelled like something burst open, too sweet and dirty, not my mother, not my mother, and she cried and begged me to forgive her.
She came walking out of the water, embarrassed at the looks on our faces,and we had to wrap her up and get her back to town before she caught pneumonia.
    Wasn’t so rare then for girls to marry at fifteen, especially country girls, but everyone knew Reb Jonas wasn’t about to marry a Barnett. There was just no one to stop them; Doc