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Show Moon - 7 that she look at him. At night she thought of him and rubbed her breasts beneath her her nightgown, round and round, like laying the softest stick of charcoal on her skin and smearing it thick and black. She liked selling railroad tickets. Mr. Henry was a kind boss. He left her alone, trusting her to do it right. She liked the authority of the brass bars between her and the people. Her quick understanding of the timetables was a kind of triumph, the way she could plan a route faster than any of the others. She liked the sound of the trains, the scream of brakes, the sensuous hiss of steam, the whistle that sounded like all the cries of loneliness rolled up into one. And she liked to think of the great network of trains as a gigantic living hand clamped onto the country, thick with throbbing veins, pressing into it alive and sweating and excited. And she, a heart, pumped people into it, directed them, urged them into the living flow with her smiles and her fine mastery of timetables. Father was sick with something that wouldn't go away. The name of what it was no one said. Ruth was furious. "You're just like him," she yelled once late at night, when Anne, shivering in the new chill of winter, could not sleep. "You want me to take care of you, just like he did. You want me to make you better, when you know that only Christ..." Anne heard him murmur indistinctly, then her mother again: "I won't have another baby in this house. It is Error, Error, and you are weak, weak in your faith." She brought church practitioners to the house and sent them to his room. She stopped bringing trays to him, saying, "Let him get up when he's hungry enough." She would not bring him his books, and his books-thick volumes of poetry, philosophy, Victorian novels-were his life. Anne sneaked books into his room and brought |