She whirled around and examined the black verges of the forest that surrounded her on three sides. The woods on the edge of a pasture are like a window, easier to see out of than into, and she could only feel the presence of the hunters stalking silently, invisible within the dimness. High in the woods, near Cogswell’s field, there was a sheltered place between a huge seed hemlock and the flat face of a cliff, and every year the hunters left a bushel basket full of beer bottles under it. Sometimes too, working in the woods the following autumn, she and John would find a beer bottle upright on a rock, half full of rain water as if a hunter had put it down suddenly to lift the gun from across his knees and take his deer. Mim let her eyes fall down over the empty pasture toward the house and listened to the sweep of wind across the gray sky.
Then she turned and sank her gloved hands into the fiery sea of ivy, grasped all she could, and pulled it free. It snapped quite suddenly and sprang back around her body. She stepped away, leaving the ungainly mass in a heap outside the wall, and went back for more. She tore at the ivy, pulling tendrils of it sometimes twelve feet long. She pulled up the junipers and kicked at the poplars till they were bent and stripped of leaves. She worked until the ground around the gravestones was trampled and brown. Then, in three trips, she carried the pile of ivy over and dumped it in the woods. She stood over the broken brown twigs showing in the dirt. In spring they would send up wild new growth. The pruning would be like a tonic to the ivy. She stood over the cemetery too tired now to cry. All her effort, she knew full well, might ease her anger now, but it would all grow back in fresh red shoots in the renewal of spring.
Back at the house, she brought in four pails of extra water. Adding boiling water from the kettles, she washed her gloves, her wool shirt, her jeans, her socks, her jersey, and finally, with harsh yellow soap, herself.
By Thursday, when Mudgett and Gore came, the poison ivy was raging all over her arms and face. They took the water pump and roamed around looking for something more. Gore found the old wooden barrel of potatoes where Mim had hidden it in the cellar, heaved it onto his shoulder, and carried it out to the truck.
After they left, Mim stood at the sink with her back to the others in the room and indulged in the painful luxury of scratching at her face with her fingernails. Then she scrubbed her hands yet again with the yellow soap and a plastic brush. She was afraid to touch Hildie for fear of starting the plague on her, and John would not touch her even in their bed.
Finally Ma said, “Well, and just what do you plan for Christmas dinner now, missy?”
Mim turned. “There are more potatoes in the earth,” she snapped.
John sat with his feet on the fender of the stove as if the women weren’t there. The shavings he peeled from the stick fell to the floor beneath his feet. There was a long silence.
Mim stood at the sink scraping carrots. “Could we get ourselves on welfare, do you think?” she asked. “It’s hardly even shameful nowadays.”
“Since when?” Ma said. “Maybe not for folks who ain’t got sense enough to hang on to what’s theirs.”
“No one goin’ to put us on the dole when we got a stand of pine like that one east of the pasture,” John said.
“But what good is that?” Mim said. “Soon’s we make it movable, they’ll cart it off.”
“If you let them,” Ma said.
“Well, what would you do? You with all the answers,” Mim asked Ma. Then she turned on John, rubbing her face again. “And you?”
John didn’t look up. He had whittled the stick in his hands to a point like an enormous pencil, and now he kept on peeling away at it, sharpening it more and more so that, like a pencil, it diminished as the pile of shavings on the floor accumulated.
Mim stood in the middle of the room, their silence swelling around her in stifling clouds.
Suddenly Hildie flung herself into her grandmother’s lap, away from Mim.
Mim smashed out the swinging kitchen door so that it rocked on its hinges as she pounded up the stairs.
Their room was cold, and the mattresses on the floor smelled of damp. She grabbed John’s brown sweater off a hook and crushed it against her face, rubbing and rubbing until she started tiny flecks of blood.
The next day Mim announced that she was going up to Cogswell’s to see Agnes before the road was snowed in. “I’ve a mind to borrow some calamine,” she said.
John went over to the cookie jar over the sink and brought back a dollar bill which he laid out on the board tabletop.
Mim rubbed her cheeks, looking at the dollar. “It’s really that I want to see Agnes,” she said.
He shrugged and she put the money in her jacket. Hildie was following Mim so closely that every time Mim moved she nearly tripped over the child. “You’re not comin’,” she said. “So just get your big self out of my way!”
John scooped up the child and held her like a vise while she howled to be free.
The road over Constance Hill that connected Moore’s place and Cogswell’s had once been the main post road, two carefully leveled lanes terraced into the steep grade of the hill. But now the lower lane was grown up in trees already a foot thick, and the upper lane, the one they used, was deeply rutted from the rushes of spring storms. Thus, in summer it was less than a mile over the hill to Cogswell’s, whereas in winter, when the snow cut off the road, they had to travel seven miles around the foot of the hill. Mim drove carefully, one wheel up on the high center hump and the other way up on the edge so that the saplings crowding the road scraped the panels of the truck with a sound like fingernails on slate. At the crest of the hill, she looked past the stone wall into Cogswell’s blueberries. They spread in a scrubby growth around boulders and burned stumps, skipping bald patches of ledge and clusters of raspberry canes, and stopping only where the hill dipped down and vanished into forest. Unlike Moores pasture, which looked down on the pond and the flat green stretch of Freedom Ridge to the south, Cogswell’s field faced north and, on a clear day, the view stretched past the Heskett Hills to the mountains. It was the first time in fourteen years that Mim hadn’t been up to glean what berries were left after the rakers were finished.
It would have been easier to call when Cogswell had asked her to. Now she turned over excuses in her mind. She had come empty-handed. It was the season for pumpkin bread, but she could hardly afford the butter and sugar. It didn’t make sense to rattle over the hill to borrow something that only cost a dollar. She should have brought some chrysanthemums. They weren’t worth anything now that Mudgett ran the church.
Cogswell’s house, which would have been a center-entrance colonial if the windows on one side hadn’t been slightly askew, had new sash and a new coat of gray paint. The lawn had been let go toward the end of the season, so there were wilted dandelions and daisies mixed in with the battered green growth.
Two Doberman pinschers came bounding out and leaped against the doors of the truck, their paws scratching at the windows. As if they fed on neighbors, Mim thought and made sure the doors were firmly fastened. She waited in the truck for someone to come out and rescue her.
The inside front door opened and Cogswell’s oldest child, thirteen-year-old Jerry, stood behind the storm door cradling a heavy shotgun in his arms.
Mim waved to him and waited. He continued to watch her warily over the din of the dogs.
Finally she rolled down her window a little and the dogs leaped up eagerly as if in hopes of a finger or two. “It’s just me, Miriam,” she shouted. “Can I see your ma?”
The boy kicked open the door ahead of him and came toward her, still pointing the gun. “Put your hands up on your head so I can see them,” he called.