He stood in front of Fanny. “I want some sponges,” he said.
“That aisle,” she said, pointing.
“Can’t find them,” he said, without looking. So Fanny got down off her stool and went and fetched him a forty-nine-cent package of sponges.
French turned then and caught John’s eye. John hadn’t heard whether any new deputies had been appointed in the last few weeks. French had a hang-dog look built in and didn’t seem the kind anyone would want for a deputy. For an awkward moment, John stood with his mouth open to speak. Then he reflected that a man like French, with his hungry brood of children, might serve Perly’s purposes very well without being a deputy at all. He clamped his mouth shut, nodded distantly, and turned back to the fertilizers.
The bells jingled as the door swung shut behind French, and John turned to consider him again as he retreated. Through the jumble of items hanging in the window, he caught a single glimpse of a uniformed state trooper fitting his Stetson to his head as he strode away from Ike Linden’s door. The deep smooth rumble of a car motor starting mixed with the cough of French’s truck. It was a blue Oldsmobile with New Hampshire plates. John had noticed it when he came in.
Inadvertently, he turned to Fanny, the question in his face.
She stared back blankly. They were the only people left in the store.
“Go on in and see the old man if you like,” she said.
Ike was a dark outline where he sat in front of the window. As John’s eyes adjusted, he felt confused. The man he had planned to talk to was a strong man, but Ike was very old. He clutched a light blue sweater around his shoulders like a woman. His glasses hung on a chain around his neck, but he didn’t bother to put them on to look at John.
“Trouble?” John asked, standing in the middle of the floor over the old man and nodding in the direction the trooper had taken.
“Friendly visit,” Ike said, and rearranged the papers on the card table in front of him.
John continued to stand. He heard the bells jingle in the outer store. “I came to see how come I been shut out of runnin the grader this year,” he blurted out.
“Jimmy Ward runs the roads,” Ike said.
“But Jimmy’s a deputy,” John said.
Now Ike put his glasses on to peer up at John. “Still runs the roads,” he said.
“Thought maybe that was why I been let out,” John said. “And you’re a selectman too.”
“I’m a tired old man,” Ike said. “And I never was one for med-dlin’.”
John flushed and leaned his hands on the back of an easy chair that stood in front of him. “Just thought maybe you could help,” he murmured.
“What’s that?” shouted Ike, distinctly irritated.
“Thought maybe you could get me work,” John said loudly.
“That’s what I thought you said,” Ike said, turning back to his papers. “Can’t say’s I ever heard a Moore beggin’ before.
John clutched the chair, watching as the old man picked up a paper and brought it close to his eyes.
“I been gradin’ roads for fifteen years,” John said.
The old man made no motion to indicate that he had heard.
John turned and pushed through the curtain into the store and headed for the door.
“Your razor blades,” Fanny said from the dimness.
John backed up, swept the package of blades off the counter, and continued toward the door.
“That’ll be a dollar twenty-one,” Fanny called after him.
John gulped on air and stopped. He reached into his pocket, pulled out two crumpled dollar bills, and presented them at the counter.
“Never mind,” Fanny said as she picked his change out of the register. He has all he can do to help hisself and us these days.”
A lot of the stuff in the attic was disintegrating with heat and dust and age. The auctioneer took it away in great truckloads and the attic emptied out more quickly than they could have imagined. The only thing they got a decent check for was the trunkful of Mim’s mother’s letters and cards—thousands of them, gnawed at the corners by squirrels and sprinkled with the decaying lace from valentines. Mim’s mother had belonged to a quilting club, a flower club, a postcard club, and a matchcover club, and she had corresponded with members from all over the country. Every letter started with a flat chronicle of failures, deaths, and ailments. The letters her mother wrote back, Mim thought, must have been almost indistinguishable from those she received. A large energetic woman, who believed every promise she ever heard, Mim’s mother had chafed at reality right up until the day she died. Mim had been one more failure. She’d married young; she’d married a farmer; she’d turned her back on the promise of her young beauty -that beauty which, according to all her mother’s dreams, should have won her a doctor or a senator or a prince. The letters made Mim uncomfortable. She half believed it was the complaining itself, the act of putting it on paper, that had kept her mother so unhappy. Herself, Mim never put pen to paper if she could find any way to get around it.
On June twenty-eighth, Perly and Gore took the three cartons of half-finished quilts, the only thing of any value left in the attic. After they left, John and Mim and Hildie climbed up and surveyed the debris: the gnawed bits of cardboard boxes, the rotted quilting scraps, the dust shoved up in scuffled ridges, the chewed corncobs of the red squirrels who lived up there all winter, and a heap of rusted smudge pots left over from the time John’s father had tried to grow peaches. Mim went down for a broom, and they spent a hot and dusty afternoon cleaning the big room.
When they were finished, Mim folded her arms and watched Hildie run up and down on the wide loose boards. “Best spring cleaning we ever had,” she said. All that rummage was just an invitation to fire. I bet we never feel a need for one speck of it.
“And that’s an end to it,” John said. “An end to it once and for all.”
Mim didn’t answer until they were following Hildie down the path to the pond to bathe. Then she said, “Well, they got eyes in their head to see with. There’s just no point to pesterin’ us again.”
John didn’t answer.
“Do you think, John?” she asked.
“If you’re so positive, why you askin’ me?” demanded John.
4
On Thursday, John and Mim were up in the garden picking the first of the peas and Hildie, squatting near the tangle of vines, was busy shelling and eating them. From time to time all day, in the course of their work, they had paused to listen. Gradually now the sound of a truck grew unmistakable, and one by one they all stood up and watched the road.
“It’s just Cogswell,” breathed John.
“Might be he needs a hand with a job,” Mim said!
Cogswell jumped down from his battered green truck, waved, and started up the pasture to meet them. He was a tall rangy man with a looseness to the way he moved that was only partly related to his drinking. Like everyone who knew him, the Moores felt a kind of fond protectiveness for Cogswell, and at the same time a sense of awe, for he was a man who was always out of step.
Nevertheless, the Moores moved toward him slowly. They met in the meadow, where the rank grass was up to Hildie’s shoulders, and faced each other as if they had met by accident.
Will you look at Hildie? Cogswell said at last. “She’s spindled since I seen her. Pretty near big enough to milk a cow.”
The child clung to the pocket of Mim’s jeans.
Cogswell fished in the pocket of his shirt and pulled out a wad of tissue paper. “For you,” he said and held it out to Hildie.
Hildie took the offering and unwrapped it. It was a small green plastic marine kneeling behind a gun. Hildie gave Cogswell a dazzling smile. “A hunter,” she said-.
“That’s mighty nice, Mick,” Mim said.
“One of the kids dropped it in the truck. Benjie got a whole bagful for his birthday.” Cogswell put his hands in his pockets and looked around at the pond and the house and the cows further up in the pasture. “Appears the crows got a fair amount of your corn,” he said.