Mim put her hands on her head with a sense that this was play. Before Hildie was born, she used to come over sometimes, especially in the summer, to spell Agnes. She felt that this was not the first time she had responded to a command from small imperious Jerry to “Stick ’em up.”
“Dad said once to let you in, but that was a while back,” the boy said. “You after somethin’?”
“I heard your ma’s feelin’ mean,” Mim said. “And I always did come callin’ every year.”
“She’s okay,” Jerry said, standing by the door of the truck with his gun pointed at Mim, considering. Mim sat very still, aware that her face itched and she didn’t dare move to scratch it.
“I guess you can come on in,” he said. “Down, Rex. Here, Duke. Shut up now.”
The dogs cringed growling at his feet and Mim, moving very gingerly, climbed out of the truck and walked in at the rarely used front door ahead of the boy. Just inside the door, the five other children clustered on the bottom of the stairs. Mim tried to smile at them. She knew them all. She remembered sitting at the picnic table in the shade of the maples, letting them tumble around her. They would talk and talk, even the littlest ones— they got that talking streak from both sides—and whoop, running out onto the lawn to show her backwards somersaults and lopsided cartwheels. Now they were silent, and she looked at them in alarm. In the fading afternoon light of the front hall, it seemed to her they were peaked, and the youngest, Jonathan, a year older than Hildie, was sucking his thumb. They looked wary, the way Hildie did when she had just kicked over a pail of milk and expected to get a whack—five pairs of sky-blue eyes waiting for her to strike, and another behind her attached to the heavy shotgun. She didn’t ask them why they weren’t in school. She could tell by looking that they wouldn’t answer.
But Jerry had at least put the gun down in the corner. He nodded in the direction of the front room, and Mim opened the door and went in.
Agnes was a tall woman with big bones, who had grown blowzy with the birth of her children. She never had been quite in control —of her big body, of her sprawling house, of the garden Mick planted and left for her to tend, of her six children, of her affections or her tears. She reminded Mim of the peach trees Pa had planted that fell beneath the weight of their own fruit when they weren’t pruned. Agnes could never keep anything in place, least of all her tongue.
Leaning 011 the arm of a new maple rocker upholstered in a pattern of golden eagles and flatirons, she faced the door, waiting for Mim. Mim was startled at the way she looked. She had gained a lot more weight, and all of it showed in the blue jersey pantsuit she was wearing. The jacket was a mass of stains down the front as if she spilled everything she touched. And she had cut her gray-brown hair short and possibly given it a permanent, for now it stood on her head in an almost solid mat of tangles.
Mim put her hand to her face. “You’re looking a bit pale, Agnes,” she said. “Kids too. You been ailin’? And winter not come on yet?”
“Ain’t nothin’ I can do for the child,” Agnes said, her surprisingly high-pitched voice screwed down tight on the words. “I can’t think why you come to me.” She got up and walked heavily across the room. Her toe picked up a corner of the new hooked rug and she stooped to lay it down again. Then she went to the back window and stood with her back against it, and Mim noticed that she was leaning on a radiator.
“Central heat!” she said. “You sure done a lot with this room.”
“It’s bad luck,” Agnes said. “So don’t bother bein’ green. I got six to count every hour. I get up at night and count them.”
Agnes hugged herself as if for warmth, but Mim felt a prickly heat spreading from her wool jacket, making her face itch.
She giggled, ashamed that Agnes should think her jealous, embarrassed at Agnes’ strangeness. “You know, Agnes,” she said, “the foolish trick I pulled? You know the poison ivy’s been growin’ in on Pa’s grave these seven years now he’s gone?”
Agnes backed up and sat on the radiator. “He still sucks his thumb,” she said. “At night it makes a clickin’ sound. You hear it all over the house so you know he’s there. But Benjamin, there ain’t no way to tell about him, short of goin’ in there and feelin’ his head for warmth.”
“Well, I went up there,” Mim went on uneasily. “I was all in a flap, and I yanked it out by the roots, all that ivy. It kept jumpin back at me as if to say you shouldn’t tackle anythin’ head on like that. Now I’m all over ivy, worse than measles. Look at my poor face.”
“It ain’t so terrible,” Agnes said, examining Mim’s face. “They pay. They pay. Better that than what happened to Molly Tucker’s boy.”
Mim rubbed her face. Agnes had always talked a mile a minute and only half made sense—her words, like her feet, tripping over each other. She would have filled her house with company if there’d been anyone interested. Usually she had an oversized laugh she couldn’t hold in. And she loved to do favors as long as they didn’t require organization or too much money. Slowly and a bit too loudly, as if she were talking to someone who was deaf, Mim asked, “I was just wonderin’, could I borrow some calamine?”
“They’ll go to good homes. That’s what he says. ‘Good homes. Anyone willin’ to buy them must really want them. Mostly they can’t have them.” Agnes laughed. “Think of that. And here I am. Half buried in them. But you’d never be bothered countin’ someone else’s all night long. You couldn’t care like that but for your flesh and blood. Not when the floors get cold. And you wouldn’t put up with the clickin’. It ain’t regular like a clock and it always catches you the hardest when you want to sleep.”
“Agnes?” Mim asked, rubbing her hand across the back of the new rock maple sofa. The colors were all very bright, though the blinds were down and the room was in shadow. Then, as if she weren’t thinking right herself, she found she had no words for the question pressing on her throat. She said instead, “The room is done over real nice. Did you fix it yourself?
“This ain’t such a bed of roses that I can see,” Agnes said, her big jaw drooping. “Now there’s Jimmy Ward. He just up and left. Mick don’t know I know, but I heard it from my Joanie. Joan’s the only one tells me what’s goin’ on. She says he just up and went. Not all that deputy business and bein’ a selectman and a deacon both at once could keep him.”
“You don’t mean he left Liza after all this time?”
“No, no. All of them in the truck, with what all they could carry. Not a soul knew they was gone till next day when one of the Pulvers noticed the cows bellowin’ in the field near crazy. Seventeen he’d got too, with the extras, though he never took much interest in stock.”
“Where’d they go?” Mim asked.
“They ain’t leavin’ tracks.” Agnes paced across the room to the front window, fitted one eye to a small hole in the shade, and looked out. “He was pickup man for Carroll and Carroll’s pretty itchy. You can’t hardly blame him. Then his boy, Ward’s boy, took a bullet in the leg up huntin’, and Ward, he don’t think it was no accident. He must have got to thinkin’ the way I been thinkin’. There’s two ways most anythin’ can fly.”
“Jimmy Ward’s boy took a bullet in his leg?” Mim asked. She was still standing just inside the door in her coat, leaning on the wall.
Suddenly Agnes straightened up again and came toward her. Her eyes were wide and her face blotched with color. Mim straightened up, expecting the weight of the other woman to land on her. “Where’s Hildie?” cried Agnes. “Oh my God, where’s little Hildie?”
“She’s home,” Mim said.
Agnes retreated. “You hadn’t ought to leave her out of sight. You got to hang on for dear life, Mick’s never gone a minute I don’t expect him back in a coffin. And then what? Ain’t like I could drive. You’re real smart the way you can do for yourself. And I always thought you was so queer.”