Machine Dreams

this because I heard about it, growing up—I was too small to remember, really. Just a few things.
    I was lying in the grass and watching my uncles hammer slate on the barn roof. They were all big men dressed in broadcloth shirts. They swung the hammers full circle, from the shoulder, as they drove the nails. Tall pine ladders lay against the barn walls and thick yellow ropes hung down. The slates were shining like mirrors.
    And once I looked out a window at snow. Snow as far as you could see, pasture fences covered and trees gone, so their top limbs fanned out of the snow like spikes. Nothing but snow. Snow like an ocean.
    In the winter, I was the only child.
    I was with Bess at first. We were in the big house by ourselves, except for the old parents, and at times the brothers stayed a few days. The wagon was hitched on Sundays, and not even then in January, February. Snow too deep for the wheels. When Bess was a girl, she’d gone to finishing school for a year in Lynchburg, so she’d been farther from home than any of the other women. She was the youngest, and pampered. The older sisters would tell a lot later how she’d been sent away to learn to ride a horse like something other than a savage.
    Bess had been married once before; she was young and it was kept secret in the family. Divorce was rare then. The first husband? He wasn’t from around here. Seems to me his name was Thorn. She probably came back from finishing school and had big ideas at eighteen, nineteen. Left with this Thorn and went out West; I don’t think she knew him very well. Just within a month or so, she wired home from St. Louis—he’d taken off and left herout there. It was my father, Warwick, went to get her. He was closest to Bess in age and had warned her against leaving in the first place. They booked passage back on the train, but it was near Christmas and a winter of bad blizzards; they were weeks getting home.
    Afterward Warwick was very protective of her. All this was before I was born and no one ever talked about it. Why would they? What’s the difference, it don’t matter.
    Bess stayed there on the farm for seven years then, and helped—putting up food, companion to her mother. Maybe she felt chastised, but the family would not have said a word to her. She was like a mother to me.
    The brothers all had parcels of the land but were twenty, fifty miles distant. They farmed or mined and drifted by the homeplace every few weeks, on horseback, alone; women and children didn’t travel in the winter. My father, Warwick, was the only brother worked in towns a while and wore a suit. Later he went back to the mines, but then he was a wholesaler for a dry goods company. Just a few weeks after he brought Bess home from St. Louis, Warwick brought this bride of his to the farm and moved her in. Then he left, as Bess tells it, and was only back twice the months the girl was there. She was a girl he’d met in his work, a working girl. She never gave any facts about herself, Bess says, and went away after I was born. Went away as soon as she could travel, and sent no word to anyone again.
Warwick paid for a wet nurse half the winter, but there is more to a baby than feeding it
I never saw my father, not really.
You did see him, you don’t remember, He had the new wife, but by then you were accustomed to us. Then he died when you were still in skirts.
…
    They gave the impression it was his new wife didn’t want me, but I knew it was him. I don’t remember what he looked like, except from pictures. I just remember him yelling at me once or twice. He never did a damn thing for me, never noticed me. One summer—I was real young, at the farm—I had a baby coon. My father had his rifle and was standing over me. It was out at the edge of the fields, away from the house, where the grass was tall. He said go into the field and let that coon go, you can’t keep a wild creature. I held the coon and walked in. The grass was over myhead, deep and high. He started shooting. The gun made two sounds, a big crack from behind, like thunder, and a high zing close by, like a stinging fly close your face. The grass was moving and he was shooting where the grass moved. I stayed still for a long time. I don’t know what I thought. Years later I asked Bess about it and she said wasn’t Warwick did that at all, was a neighbor man, because it was a danger to have coons when there was rabies in the county.
    I don’t know. He was well liked. There is an