Machine Dreams

greed of the chickens, but ate placidly, like machines. The only time they seemed at all human was at calving, and that was terrible to watch. They bawled in pain and seemed bewildered, as though they didn’t know what hurt them. Then the calf was out on the straw, blinking.
    Mother milked into a quart cup and dumped the milk in a can. When the can was full she pulled it to the house in a hand wagon. We had the coolest cellar, like a still tomb, with stone walls and a stone floor. Rough shelves along the side were lined with masonjars sealed full of tomatoes and beans and beets. The jars were just jars but you were always aware of them in the dimness, dense and weighted. The milk crocks were on the floor, white earthen urns. Mother wore a long man’s apron over her dress and skimmed the cream off the milk with a wooden spoon shaped like a small flat spade. We dipped the milk back into cans with a gourd dipper and carried them up the stone steps, across the yard into the kitchen. The bottles had to be boiled and the milk strained through a sterile cloth. She set some of it aside and let it curdle to frothy clumps the size of popcorn, then poured that heavy yellow cream over it and ground fresh pepper on top. Her cheese was famous but I wouldn’t touch it, and they had to beg me to drink milk. I guess I didn’t like it because we were always fooling with it, from dawn to dusk, the cows and the milk and the bottles.
    Mr. Hardesty delivered for us and I helped him in the summer. I could see him driving the cart along from way down the street. He had an old barrel-chested workhorse named Gus, and that horse knew every stop by heart. Gus was well known around town. Mr. Hardesty did landscaping and plowing as well—Gus wore blinders then and pulled a big double rake by harness; they graded yards for seeding or turned gardens. When we delivered milk, I met them at the top of the hill and handed up our four metal racks of four bottles each. Then I rode beside Hardesty and jumped down to take the orders to the doorsteps. The horse always waited just long enough. There was one customer who’d died a couple of years before I’d ever started helping, but Gus stopped at that house anyway. We sat waiting the time it would have taken me to run to the door and back.
    My father got worse as time went on. When my friends stayed with me, he used to stride into the room, pull the sheets off us, and tell them to get dressed—he didn’t want strangers in his house at night. One autumn we were burning trash on the hill. He picked up a pitchfork of blazing leaves and chased Mother around the fire. After that we had to have him put away. A couple of weeks later, a guard knocked him down and that was all. I was fourteen. My mother and I turned on every light in the house that evening and sat on the porch, looking at the street. October, aclean moisture in the air. We both felt such relief. We’d been ashamed to send him there, but we’d gotten afraid of him and had no money for anything better. I didn’t know until he was gone what a shadow he’d cast. Partly because we were free of him, the next few years were good. We took in roomers, students from the college. I had a part-time job and lots of friends; I was eager to know people. You may not like me to say so, but high school was the best time of my life.
    On Sundays in the spring, the kids in my crowd got all dressed up and walked downtown to the drugstore for sodas—that was our big thrill. But Tomblyn’s was beautiful then—as grand, everyone said, as any soda fountain in Washington or New York. The big mirror was beveled glass, and the fountains themselves were brass. The floor was marble tiles with a black border, and the deep booths, mahogany. Only the high carved ceiling and bar wall are left now, and the store is half as large as it was.
    We girls took pains and were high style, but really, all the young women then dressed like matrons—silk shoulder pads in our dresses and those big hats. We got the shoulder pads from our mothers, and silk lingerie at rummage sales; you couldn’t buy silk during the war. The war influenced everything. We were the Class of ’43, and all the boys worried the fighting would stop before they could get overseas. Rummage and church sales were War Benefits; all the women’s clubs rolled bandages and collected tin. High school girls wrote to boys who’d graduated five and six years before, boys who’d driven their cars past them as