They picked the last of the green tomatoes and hid them under the floorboards in their bedroom, then pulled up the bean and tomato stakes. They picked pumpkins and what few squash were late to ripen. They picked bushels of wormy apples. The cider press was gone, so Mim cut them up and made apple sauce from some and hung the others on strings from the rafters in the attic to dry. They put plastic over the windows of the front room and the kitchen. And every day they went into their woods and cut a load of firewood. John got up on the roof with a burlap sack full of bricks on the end of a rope and cleaned the chimneys, and together they emptied the traps behind the stoves.
It was too cold now to bathe in the pond. Instead, on Saturday afternoons, they heated three big kettles full of water and poured them into the galvanized tub. Ma got the first bath, than Hildie, and finally Mim and John. Mim heated a bowl of water and, scolding and coaxing, washed Hildie’s bright thin hair.
The leaves began to fall from the trees and everything seemed to move closer to the house—the pond, and the pines where the road opened up, and the edges of the pasture. Mim brought the old wooden lawn chair into the kitchen so that Ma could sit in the kitchen comfortably.
John went and told the doctor’s wife he didn’t have the cows any more.
“Why is everyone giving up cows?” Mrs. Hastings asked. I see Lovelace and Rouse don’t have theirs any more either. I hear they’re being sold at the auctions. You must be getting a fine price.”
John stood before her thinking of the check for five dollars he d gotten the week before for two good milkers.
“Well, I guess it wasn’t that much we paid you,” she said with a touch of irritation. “It was good butter, I’ll say, but I guess it just isn’t worthwhile any more.”
“The doctor,” John said, “he must know what’s going on. All the...”
“What?” said Mrs. Hastings. “Inflation? If it’s Harlowe and this auction business you mean, I have to tell you right out we never could understand what makes you people tick. How can anybody hope to understand people who won’t raise a finger to better themselves? It’s just like the butter problem. Nobody even wants to do an honest day’s work any more.”
The tall woman opened the back door and stood brooding at John, waiting for him to leave.
John paused in the doorway, meeting the contempt in her gaze.
“Ma’am,” he said, “for all your fancy schoolin’, ain’t much you do understand.”
After Hildie was in bed, John poured the money out of the crockery jar over the sink and counted it, as he did at least once a week. “A hundred seventy-three,” he said. “And a hundred in the bank.”
They had never been so low going into winter. “Six dollars a month for a phone what never rings,” he said. “Don’t suppose they’ll be askin’ me to run the snowplow neither.”
“What if there’s an accident?” Mim said.
“A phone ain’t that much help,” Ma said. “We got along without a phone happy enough when Johnny was a boy. Some things we can do without.”
There was an unaccustomed peace in the house. Ma had stopped complaining. She lived on her couch as if it were an island. She slept there at night near the warm stove, and in the mornings she made room for Hildie and the two of them played “Let’s pretend,” or told stories about when Grandma was a little girl—stories Hildie could soon tell as well as her grandmother. They cut up ten-year-old magazines from the barn and pasted them together in new ways with flour and water paste. Sometimes they watched Sesame Street together, and for a week Ma worked with her stiff hands sewing together two puppets from quilting scraps the auctioneer had overlooked.
“I ’most wish she’d start in to meddlin’ again,” Mim said.
“Makes her seem old, don’t it?” John said. “To take it all so peaceable like it’s nothin’ to do with her. But she was always that way. It struck home with her, his pullin’ a gun on me. Time will tell how peaceable she is at heart.”
Hildie was not always so cooperative. She hated to leave her warm corner to go with John and Mim into the woods for firewood. She whined and complained until Mim screamed at her and she threw herself on the floor and cried. Each morning they headed into the woods in silence, John carrying Hildie on his shoulders, still pouting and working hard to shiver.
John would notch a tree with the chain saw. Mim would set Hildie firmly out of the way. Then, while John sawed through the heavy trunk, Mim put pressure on the wedge to make sure the tree fell where they intended. The trees seemed incredibly long stretched out on the ground. Mim limbed them with the ax, and John, measuring with a pole, sawed them into nine-foot lengths. Together they lifted them onto the wood sledge. And when they had a load, they hitched up the tractor and dragged it back to the woodshed. After the snow came and there was little else they could do, they would split the big sections, then cut the green wood into eighteen-inch lengths and pile it in the woodshed, in a separate pile from last year’s dry wood.
“Best we saw it up this week,” Mim said one Tuesday. “You wait. He’ll be after the saws this time.”
“Not the saws,” John said. “I draw the line at the saws.”
“When you didn’t for the cows?” Mim asked.
The next day, without splitting the logs first as they usually did, and without discussing what they were doing, they spent a long day, each using one of the chain saws, cutting the wood to lengths. And on Thursday John let the saws go with barely a glance. After that there was no point to going into the woods, so they spent the week splitting the wood and piling it.
John climbed up and put a patch on the tin roof where it was rusted through, and Mim dug a barrel of potatoes from the icy soil, packed them in straw, and rearranged the cellar to hide them behind an empty set of shelves. They continued to cook and can the last late pumpkins and some chard. They drew Ma’s couch up closer to the parlor stove, and kept a fire going in the kitchen range all day. Hildie drew patterns in the first frost on the windows, and they all kept a lookout for the first snow.
Hunting season started on a Tuesday. Cars lined the road, some of them with out-of-state plates. Hildie stood on a box at the window watching the silent red figures moving in and out of the woods. Hildie was not allowed out of the dooryard, and the grown-ups stayed in, occasionally answering the summons of a stranger asking if he could park in the yard. From time to time, the}- heard the hard flat report of a single shot in the woods.
On Wednesday night, they woke to rifle shots nearby—a dozen of them and so close together they had to be made by several guns. Hildie came into her parents’ room, dragging her blanket. “Mama,” she whispered. “Do the hunters come at night?”
“Sometimes, Hildie. If they want to shoot a deer too scared to run,” Mim said, straining her ears toward the dark woods. “There, lovey, don’t you be frightened,” she added, but she wasn’t sure whether it was she or the child who was shaking. The shots had broken open a dream in which she was being hunted down. She pulled Hildie in under the covers.
But it was John who gathered the child to him and buried his face in her hair. Hildie fell back into a heavy sleep in the comfort of his arms, but he lay planning the moves he would have made if he had had his guns still, craving the shotgun very specifically. He hadn’t touched it from one year to the next; yet, as if he had carried it with him always, he could conjure up the precise heft and balance of it in his hand, the chill of the inky barrel, the smoothness of the stock.
When it became clear that John was not going to get up, Mim folded back the blankets and crept out of bed. Touching the cold plaster walls and the banister with her fingertips, and feeling for the chipped edges of the stairs with her toes, she made her way downstairs in the dark. At the door to the front room she could hear Ma’s breathing, heavy and uninterrupted and weary.