So she had not overlooked the auctioneer’s eye for her. John got out of his chair and moved slowly toward her. She met his eyes in the mirror and stiffened with alarm. His two hands landed on her arms. She froze as she stood. He felt the power in his hands and closed his eyes to stop himself. She wouldn’t struggle. She never struggled. She had let him have his way the first time he tried, when she was fifteen. Sometimes she had run away first, into the darkness under the trees, but if he sat still, very still, she had always come back and let him have his way.
She bore the bruising grip on her arms with perfect stillness until he himself was trembling. He shoved himself away from her so that she staggered against the sink. “Why you brushin’ your hair?” he shouted.
Hildie screamed with surprise and ran to her grandmother in the front room, dodging between John and Mim.
Mim went pale beneath her freckles. “It’s only right to look decent when company’s comin’,” she said. Without moving away, she started taking the dishes from the drainer and putting them away in the shelves overhead. “What are we goin’ to give this week? she asked—a question she’d already asked too often.
John stood in the middle of the room watching her, his green eyes half shut.
She glanced at him. Then, skirting him widely, she walked out the back door of the kitchen, not stopping to pick up her jacket, though the day was chilly and spitting rain.
John sat down on a chair to wait, feeling the pulse at his temple subside and his breathing slow to normal.
“John?” called his mother.
He didn’t answer. Hildie poked a head into the kitchen, then scuttled back to her grandmother. “He’s there,” she reported.
“Johnny?” Ma called again. “You got no call to treat her like that.”
“I just asked her a simple question,” he snapped.
They let him be and he sat waiting. She didn’t come back until nearly three o’clock. When she did, she came in and went straight to the sink and continued emptying the dishes from the drainer, her blouse wet from the rain and sticking to her shoulders. “What are we goin’ to give?” she asked again.
“Nothin’,” he said without moving.
“Why should we stop?” she said. “There’s the whole attic yet.”
“Old Caleb Tuttle ain’t allowed him so much as a broken chair for a month.”
“Oh, Caleb Tuttle. Fanny says he meets them with a shotgun now. Can you just see it? Meetin’ Perly Dunsmore and Bob Gore with a shotgun? Caleb was always spoilin’ for a fight.”
“I still say we done our share,” John said.
“You wouldn’t rather have some cash than that junk in the attic we never use? And it’s a good cause. Don’t you like to think we have a real police force? They’d come right away if we had a need.”
“For what? For what would you ever need a cop when you’d have time to call one?”
Mim shrugged. “Well... you never know. The world’s gettin’ worse.”
She went to the woodbox and picked out sticks of kindling to start a fire for supper. She lifted the lid of the stove and turned to John. “Say no if you like,” she said. “But I for one like to be part of what he’s doin’ for the town.
“He’s just in love with his own palaver,” John said.
But when Dunsmore and Gore arrived as they had promised, John and Hildie met them in the yard, led them to the attic, and let them take the painted-over rock maple chairs that needed gluing.
Monday, John came in to lunch with the mail. “The check for the chairs only comes to a dollar seventy-five,” he said. “The note here from Perly don’t say nothin about that. Only says he was sorry he didn’t have time to come in and say hello to you and Ma.”
“Well that was just junk,” Mim said.
Ma settled herself at the table. “I feel some better knowin’ he sent a word to me,” she said.
John washed his hands, then stuck his whole head under cold running water at the sink. The water pump started up underneath them and kept on churning after he turned off the water. He rubbed his head with a towel. “I don’t know,” he said. “I could do without the visits happy enough.”
“I think you be a bit green, Johnny boy,” said Ma. “There’s a man can give you reason, too.”
Mim turned toward the stove and hid her grin in the soup pot. “I am thinkin’ of some hard facts, Ma,” John said. “Like why nobody’s asked me to run the grader this year, not once, when the roads are graded all round by now.”
“I keep tellin you,” Mim said. You ought to go down to Jimmy Ward and ask him outright.”
“You hintin’ it could be an accident?” John asked. “An accident Ian James graded our road this year when ain’t nobody but me or Frank Lovelace done it these fifteen years?”
“Most like,” said Mim.
“I suppose you calculate what Gore said as accident too?”
Bobby Gore? Ma said. “Ain’t nothin’ but mush in his head. Just like his daddy.”
“Old Toby’s mean, Ma. Maybe Bobby takes after that too,” John said.
Mean he is, she agreed. “Chased his own flesh and blood off the place every one by the time they was fifteen and told them not to come back. She reached out to caress Hildie’s arm, but Hildie was absorbed in blowing bubbles in a glass of milk with a straw. “Serves old Toby right if he ends up on the dole.”
“It’s us endin’ up on the dole worries me,” John said.
The houses around the Parade were two-story colonials painted white with black or green blinds, most of them with a rambling series of tacked-on porches, ells, and outbuildings. Lindens store was tucked away in a corner, though not as inconspicuously as some residents might have wished. It had been a stable until a Linden two generations back boarded up the windows, filled the long flat interior with merchandise, and opened it up as a general store. In his time, Ike Linden had covered it with gray asbestos siding crisscrossed with dark lines supposed to make it look like granite. Except for the addition of a small plate glass window and a line of bare light bulbs hanging at intervals from the ceiling, the store looked pretty much the way it always had—not so much old-fashioned as just cluttered and dim. Outside it was identified by two Amoco pumps, a tired Coca-Cola sign, and a random display of outdated posters.
Nowadays, Harlowe people drove the seventeen miles down Route 37 to the shopping center when it was time to stock their shelves. Nevertheless, almost everyone in town had occasion to duck into Linden’s two or three times a week. They came for milk and bread, treats for the children, tomato paste for a half-cooked supper, the right-sized screw, stove black, birthday candles, the newspaper, home-made banana bread, and gasoline—not to mention library books, insurance, hunting licenses, and tickets to the New Hampshire sweepstakes.
Part of old Ike Linden’s genius as a storekeeper, and as a selectman too, was his ability to hear volumes and say practically nothing. This, combined with his mastery over such an abundance of material goods, gave him a reputation for knowing a great deal. People had always brought him their questions about income tax, etiquette, unruly wives, and new strains of apples. And Ike did his laconic best to satisfy them without giving any distinct answers. These days, the old man sat in the back room smoking and pondering over the store’s accounts, and young Ike and his wife Fanny tended to the store.
“Father-in-law around?” John asked Fanny when he stepped into the store that afternoon, ostensibly to buy some razor blades.
She jerked her head in the direction of the back room.
“I go in?” John asked.
“Best you wait,” Fanny said. “He’s got company.”
So John went and stood awkwardly in front of the shelves where the fertilizers were stored, reading the labels, and glancing over his shoulder when the door opened to see who might come in. Presently, after a number of summer people had been in and out chattering loudly as if he and Fanny weren’t there at all, Walter French shuffled in.