Machine Dreams

just wanted her to disappear, all of it, disappear with her face the way it was when we got out of the Pierce and walked into the ocean. She had never seen ocean.
    Fourteen years between high school and the war. Time passed like lightning.
    Why didn’t I ever get married? Having too much fun, I guess, wasn’t ready to settle. And it was the ’30s too. A peculiar time. You worked for nothing. Everyone did.
    I went to college a year and dropped out, then worked in construction with Clayton. He got me on at Huttonsville. Maximum-security prison there used to work chain gangs and they needed foremen. I worked crews awhile. Those were rough men, but I never had trouble, never held a gun on them. Worked all but a few without leg irons and never had a man run. Prison labor was an accepted thing in this state for many years. But I did better working on my own—lived in Morgantown, Winfield, working for various companies. Clayton and I didn’t start the cement plant until after the war. Earlier I traveled a lot and stayed in boarding houses, moving with the work crews on the road jobs. Between times, I stayed at Bess and Clayton’s in Bellington, in my old room. It was good to have a man there: Bess was busy at the hospital and Clayton was gone a lot; I helped with the kids in his absence.
    Every spring we went out to the cemetery at Coalton. Even after the land was sold and deeded to the mining companies, Bess insisted on taking the kids every year.
Our people are there and as long as I’m breathing those graves will be tended. It’s anyone’s duty. One day we’ll be lying there ourselves, miles from anything.
Clayton was away, working at Huttonsville most likely. Bess had Katie Sue and Chuck ready. We were in a hurry, wanted to get there before the heat of the day came up, and Katie cut a fit. She got sick in cars when she was little and dreaded riding any distance. Seven or eight and high-strung as an old lady. She hid in the house and wouldn’t answer us. I got damn mad and switched her with a birch switch. Don’t you know I regretted it for years. Only hit her a couple of times across the legs but shehollered like she was killed. I guess it bothered me too that these kids didn’t care anything about the farm—to them it was just a deserted old place. I still liked to go there. House and land were empty, but otherwise it was all the same—mining companies didn’t work that property till after the war.
    I went to the farm before enlisting, one of the last things I did. Took a good look. Went out with Reb. We sat on the porch of the old house and drank a few beers. I wasn’t real happy about the army, but they were going to draft me. Reb had a wife and children, but they wouldn’t have helped if he hadn’t been a doctor. He said if all the docs in town hadn’t signed up on their own, he’d have paid them to enlist so he could stay home and deliver babies.
    The farm looked pretty, wintry and frosted and quiet. I enlisted in March—March 2, ’42—so must have been late February. Grass in the fields didn’t sway, didn’t move in the wind. Everything was chill and clear. Reb finally said it was time to leave and not sit any longer in the cold like fools.
    The war swallowed everyone like a death or a birth will, except it went on and on. I was gone three years. They dropped the atom bomb on Japan as our troop ship steamed into Oakland harbor. No one really understood what had happened at first; soldiers got on the trains and went home.
    I had my thirty-fifth birthday on the train—cake with candles, and ice cream. Red Cross girls kept all that information on us, must have been their idea to celebrate. They were nice girls. The men got a kick out of it and joined in with the singing. The train was hitting rough track about then, and one of the girls (she was from Ohio, I believe) came walking down the aisle carrying a big square cake, lurching from side to side and trying to keep the candles lit. The way the car was jolting and shaking made me think of the boat crossing to the Philippines … April of ’45, how bad that night storm was. Raining and blowing, gusts of wind till you couldn’t stay on deck. Not a star in the pitch black and the boat tilting so you couldn’t keep food in a bowl. I looked out the train window as they were singing; we were crossing the Southwest. Flat, yellow land, and the sky was sharp blue, blue as it wasin Randolph County the summers on the farm. I thought I would go