Now the M.C. was making all the contestants twirl a baton, and a young woman in a sequined dress had just dropped the baton on her foot and was jumping up and down on the other.
“What would you have us do, Ma?” Mim asked. “It’s not as if me and John was all that partial to givin’ our comforts away.”
“I’d have you tell him where his business lies. That it ain’t here.” John exploded out of his chair. He glared at his mother. “There’s only just one way to get that message across, Ma,” he said. He paced the room from stove to window and back. Then he turned toward his mother again, grabbing the steel trim on the cold stove behind him and hanging on. “And the only thing keepin’ me from that, Ma, is I got three women on my hands.”
Piece by piece they let the furniture go—the overstuffed chairs and the rocker from the front room, the old dropleaf table in the dining room, even the pine kitchen chairs. One week Cogswell settled for three crates of shell beans.
Meanwhile, as if their decision to let the furniture go had bought some time, the Moores settled into the end of summer. The corn, what the crows had left, was ripe. And the cucumbers and tomatoes and squash and beans were in full season. They took Hildie swimming in the pond every day and tried to teach her to climb without stepping on loose stones or dead branches that might give way beneath her. They mowed and raked the hay, pitched it up into the old hayrack with forks, then pulled the hayrack to the barn with the tractor and unloaded the hay through the upper doors of the barn. Together in the late afternoons, complaining of the heat and listening to the crickets, they put up tomatoes and squash. It was a wonderful year for blackberries, and after supper John and Mim and Hildie roamed the edges of the pond in the last light picking blackberries and sometimes high-bush blueberries, eating what they could, and collecting more to can.
The days grew shorter as their supply of furniture dwindled. While the weather was still nice, they would carry Ma out at mealtimes and settle her in the big wooden lawn chair with a tray, spreading their own plates and glasses out on the granite stoop. Afterwards they milked, squirting milk into Hildie’s mouth to make her laugh, then they scrubbed the bright steel pails in the kitchen with soap and water heated on the stove. Twice a week John churned butter. At lunchtime when the stoop was warm with sunshine, they drank the chilled buttermilk and watched for the first red stains to mark the swamp maples by the pond.
They never mentioned the missing objects, but their lives changed. They did things they had never done before. They carried a picnic supper up to the top of the pasture. One still day at dusk, they loaded Ma onto the truck and took her down as close as they could get to the pond so that she could see the fish jump. John drove up to the gravel pit and got a load of sand to dump by the side of the barn so Hildie would not dig in the dirt of the road. One day, Mim, pulling carrots in the garden, leaned her elbows on her knees, looked out over the house toward the pond, and said, “Funny, I feel like it’s my own relations been here those generations back. I feel attached.” She sighed. “It is the prettiest place.”
John did not stop working, but he glanced at her and at his child throwing a stick for the dog behind the house, then running to fetch it herself because the dog was too lazy. “We never sprayed the ivy,” he said. “It’s bad luck.”
It seemed clear to Mim that Fanny Linden’s perch behind the counter of the store gave her a uniquely unobstructed view of the complex situation in the town. Despite her stinginess, Fanny was not unkind, and so, John’s experience with old Ike notwithstanding, Mim continued to hope that Fanny somehow knew what should be done and would let her know too.
Thus, whenever she went into the store, she lingered, talking weather, labor pains, and ailments with Fanny the way she always had. Fanny went on and on, her voice as flat as the cheese she made, but Mim could glean few clues. Neither Fanny nor the store seemed changed in any way. She did learn that Collins up on the ridge had fallen under his bulldozer and had to have a leg amputated.
“Course that don’t slow Jane down none,” Fanny said. “She’s in here just as often as ever, all gussied up like she thought we was New York.”
“How could he fall under his own bulldozer?” Mim asked, wishing she could find out where the Collinses stood with the auctioneer.
“Takes talent, don’t it?” Fanny said. “This has been one bad year for accidents.”
Mim frowned.
“Course there’s one good thing come of it.”
“What’s that?” Mim asked cautiously.
“You mean you ain’t heard about the ambulance? Why I thought everybody’d heard by now. They broadcast it loud enough. That happened last Tuesday after Collins got hurt. Some of the money came from the police budget. Guess they got some extra now on account of the auctions. Then Perly Dunsmore dona.ted what was missin’. He went hisself, Perly did, up to Boston and come back with a brand new ambulance. Everything the very best. They was showin’ it out there on the Parade all day Wednesday. Next time someone gets hurt, it’s nothin’ but twentieth-century care for them. That’s how Perly puts it.”
“You think Perly had to donate much?”
“He says so,” Fanny said. “Soft-like he says it, but plenty loud enough to hear.”
“The auctions must be rakin’ in a pretty penny. Young Ike helpin’ with them?” Mim said, trembling at her bluntness.
“Store’s open Saturdays,” Fanny said. “Always was. But we keep an eye on things from here. Don’t hurt our business none, all that flock of outsiders landin’ on our doorstep every Saturday—and all in a spendin’ mood too.”
“Oh,” said Mim, abashed. “I don’t suppose. Do you... have you been donatin’ much?”
“Nothin’,” Fanny said, sitting unnaturally still, even for her. “They ain’t asked and we ain’t volunteered.”
Harlowe shared a preacher with eleven other towns. She spent one quarter in each area, preaching in three different towns every Sunday. It wasn’t a job with much appeal for men with families, and so for eight years they’d had a woman—Janet Solossen. Once a year she called on the Moores, rattling in over their road in an old Willys Jeep, always just when they least expected her. She wore men’s work boots and covered her large uncorseted frame any which way, usually with blue jeans and dark turtleneck sweaters. Before she came in, she always stood and talked cows and tractors with John in the yard, running nicotine-stained fingers through her cropped yellow-gray hair. In the front room, she smoked and talked babies with Mim, and quilts and television with Ma. Nobody thought she was particularly smart, since she always talked about what they knew, but they noticed that she usually had good answers when problems came up, and they had long since concluded that, woman or not, she had a line to God in the proper way of preachers. People had stopped calling her “that lady preacher.” She was just “the preacher” generally, and “Reverend Solossen” to her face. Except for the newcomers and the French Canadians, most of the people in Harlowe still got married and buried out of the Union Church, but there weren’t as many as there used to be who paid attention to it on any regular basis.
“The first Sunday of the preacher’s quarter here’s comin’ up,” Mim said. “I don’t rightly see how she can come by and not notice.”
“And when she asks,” John mocked, “I suppose you’ll say you gave it all away because an old man took a stroke, and an elm tree fell on a greenhouse?”
“I expect the preacher could sit patient for the whole long tale.” And if we tell her and she thinks it’s us is wrong and passes on our tellin’?”