Mary Coin Read Online Free PDF Page A

as it does now. The screen door closes before she can get her sleeping bag inside. As she struggles, she sees that he is watching her. Her face forms into a mask of scorn, as if this were his fault, too.

Mary

5.
     
    Tahlequah, Oklahoma, 1920
     
    H er mother told her that she looked at people too hard. “It’s like you’re a robber trying to break inside a person’s skin,” Doris said, as she threw a ball of dough against the table and attacked it with her big hands and the strength of her broad shoulders. “It makes you strange.”
    “I’m not strange,” Mary said, although she liked the idea that she might come to possess Toby unawares simply by the power of her gaze. She watched him in the next field over, guiding the horse and plow through the rows, the dirt turning dark as he passed, as if he were pulling a blanket over the raw earth. She watched him hoist bales of hay, wondering how his rattlebone frame could counter the weight of the dried grasses. Toby Coin, “that sickly boy,” as all the mothers referred to him for years, shaking their heads sadly as if already committing him to a collective memory. He’d managed to outwit all expectation just by staying alive, beating back whooping cough and measles and scarlet fever so that he became a miracle boy as well. Mary saw how people looked at him in town, their eyes narrowing as if they didn’t trust that he was quite human. His cheeks were sunken below their bones, and Mary sat in church and thought about tracing those sharp ridges with her finger, and then her tongue. As the preacher exhorted the congregants sitting shoulder to shoulder on the hard wooden benches to believe against the odds of bad planting seasons and poorer harvests, telling them they should feel special for having been chosen by God to withstand his insults, she felt something reach down to the deepest part of her, as if a hand were touching her there, the way she sometimes touched herself at night, holding her breath, careful not to wake Betsy and Louise, who lay next to her, or her brothers, who slept on the other side of the house’s single room. All the land: acres of chocolate dirt and golden lashes of wheat, the blue Cookson Hills tangled with trees and networks of undergrowth, and the distant Ozarks, which seemed to Mary a mountain range big enough to cover the world. Yet, in their churches and houses, in their schools and even in their beds, people were always huddled in a bunch as if they had to mass together against the threat of too much freedom.
    Doris gathered the flattened yellow disk into a ball and pounded it with the meat of her fist. “Do this three times,” she said. “Three. Not two.”
    “Should I write that down?” Mary said.
    “Don’t be smart.”
    “That’s not likely.” Mary knew how to read and write, and Mrs. Petit told her she was the best at sums in the whole class. But when Mary turned sixteen, her mother pulled her out of school. As far as Doris was concerned, Mary knew nothing of any real use.
    “Someone’ll shoot you for looking at them that hard. Or worse,” Doris muttered.
    “What worse?” But Mary knew the answer. She could tell that her mother sensed something moist and wanting in Mary’s parted lips. “You trying to catch flies?” she’d say when the two of them walked through town. Mary was narrow-hipped, with barely a chest, but it was something else about her that caught men’s attention, a sultry drag to her gait, as if she were waiting for someone to step into her path and make her change direction.
    Her mother was right: she looked hard at the men who walked into the Last House, which sat at the edge of town, far enough from the stores and saloon, the hotel and the two churches that it resembled a child excluded from a schoolyard game. Men entered through the doorway, their shoulders bent low as if they were expecting some unseen hand to yank them away from their sinful intention. She watched those same men when they came