Mary Coin Read Online Free PDF Page B

back at her once before he disappeared into the crowd. The half-dead boy who missed more school than he attended had held her hand so tightly that his sweat was still on her palm.
    William Coin’s first wife died when Toby and his older brothers were young, and he raised them as he did the livestock on his farm. He fed them and threw water on them every so often when they were dusty and put a switch to their hindquarters when they didn’t work fast enough. Three years ago he went to Tulsa and came back with a new wife, a woman he referred to as “the spinster,” although she was not yet thirty, and whom he quickly filled with babies. Now that Mary was no longer in school, she was sometimes called to help the newly pregnant Carlotta Coin with her housework. Doris was happy for the money, but Mary was more excited to be in close proximity to Toby.
    “Did you hear me?” Doris said. She was holding a fresh ball of dough and wiping the sweat from her face with her forearm.
    “Three times, not two,” Mary said.
    Doris looked at her dolefully. “You must have left your brain in bed this morning. I said we’re out of sugar.”
    “I’ll go,” Mary said. Anything to get away from the house and her mother’s critical gaze.
    Doris put more corncobs into the fire beneath the iron stove then slid the loaves inside. The stove heated the sod house to an intolerable degree, but outside was worse, the Indian-summer air dry and cracking like Doris’s skin. Doris was thirty-nine, and her braid of jet hair was already laced with gray. Her face reminded Mary of the shape of a flower vase, the planes of her cheeks rising up at a gentle incline to her prominent cheekbones, features Mary had inherited, although not her mother’s nut-brown Cherokee coloring or her coal-black eyes. Mary wondered how long it would take to inherit her mother’s calloused hands and matching nature. Her brothers worked the field with Titus, the hired man, but, as her mother was quick to point out when the boys complained, she’d be happy to trade places with them and let them cook and try to clean a house made of dirt.
    “Wash these up before you go,” Doris said, handing Mary the rolling pin and mixing bowl.
    As Mary plunged the dishes into the wash bucket, she studied the house’s only decoration, a framed newspaper photograph nailed to the wall. The dirty glass fuzzed an already indistinct image of her grandfather, whom the accompanying headline proclaimed as “The Cherokee Murderer,” as if there were only one of them across all of history. Mary leaned in close to read the article she’d read a hundred times before. Her grandfather had been chased down and killed for the murder of a white man. He’d built a house within a house, one wall of sod protecting the other, where he’d hid with his family until the posse attacked with dynamite. Mary imagined lit sticks dropping down like shooting stars while women and children, her mother among them, ran out into the night, shrieking the stumbling syllables of Cherokee that the old people who shuffled along Main Street still spoke when they were drunk or telling secrets. She’d memorized the final sentence of the article.
The condemned man walked calmly into the night, the house in flames behind him, accepting his dastardly fate.
Mary wondered what it would be like to walk toward death. Would her mind leap forward to a place where the dying had already happened so that she could feel herself in heaven even before she got there? Or could she stop time with the power of her mind just like the photograph did? Her grandfather was already dead when the picture was taken, his body propped against a door. Someone had settled a rifle in his lifeless arms. Mary tried to figure out exactly what got subtracted from a man when he died so that even if he was made to pose like the living, there was nothing vital about him. She’d seen animals die—lame horses her brothers shot to be merciful, her old dog, Pete,