“Who?” John asked.
“All the people movin’ from the city to the country,” she said.
John and Mim were climbing up the pasture to replace any fallen stones in the back wall so the cows wouldn’t stray into the woods. It was always a good hike to the top, but that morning there was a fog curtaining their progress, and it seemed a journey. The child walked between them, subdued, keeping their hands tight in her own. An invisible phoebe called over and over as if counting their quiet footsteps up and up on the steep brown island fading into whiteness, and occasionally crows cried in the distance.
Halfway up, they turned, as they always did, to look out over the pond, but it was lost completely in the fog. “Look at the house,” Hildie whispered.
“Looks nice,” Mim said.
What they saw was a white cape set into the side of the hill with a fence of tall hand-carved pickets across the back. The mist bleached away the weathering on the paint, the rusty tin over the woodshed, the missing bricks in the chimney, the plastic over the windows, even the tangle of last year’s morning-glory vines still clinging to the fence.
“Looks all polished up,” John said.
“Like summer folks had got their hands on it.” Mim laughed and turned to climb again.
Eventually, the small walled cemetery under the cherry tree emerged through the fog. “Look out,” Mim warned as they approached, catching Hildie before she stepped into the brown remains of last year’s poison ivy. “We ought to spray that,” she said, before it gets a hold this summer.”
“Before Ma goes,” John murmured. “Now there would be a pretty mess.”
“Might not suit your pa either and all the ones before him to be lyin’ like that in such a bed of poison.”
But the child had turned to look down again. “It’s gone!” she cried. “The house is gone!”
“No more than you’re gone from it.” John laughed. He caught her up to carry on his shoulders. “Look at the willows, pet. See that smudgy yellow? They’ll be greenin’ up and we’ll have spring before we’re halfway ready.” They headed toward the high back wall of the pasture, scanning it carefully for broken places. But most of the granite chunks remained in their accustomed places, fastened by a sinewy net of Concord grape vines.
“All things considered, I don’t half mind,” Mim said.
“What?” asked John.
“Bein’ the way we are,” she said.
2
As mud gave way to black flies and black flies to mosquitoes, Bob Gore came again, and yet again.
The Moores heard about the auctions at Linden’s store. Every week more people came, more people smitten with the romance of a country life, part of the same blind force that, since before Hildie was born, had been tearing up the hillsides with bulldozers and setting in the trailers and tiny modular houses designed to look traditional. Some of the new people drove halfway to Boston every day to work along the outer belt highway. Some manned the bright glass and steel factories going in along Route 37 as it made its way south. And more and more summer people poured in off the interstate every weekend, invading Linden’s store in flimsy striped and polka-dot clothes, complaining about the price of produce, and gobbling up the plastic balls and pinwheels and inflatable elephants that Hildie loved so.
When Gore came, John led him down under the barn to the cavernous area that housed a century’s collection of broken rockers, tables with legs missing, cracked mirrors, rusted cider presses, and outdated tools. “How long you figure you can get people to buy this rummage, Bobby? John asked one week.
“I wonder myself sometimes,” Gore admitted. He stopped to light a cigarette and watched the smoke curling up into the cobwebs overhead. “Perly’s like a magician, but still...
“Hard for me to figure people with nothin’ better to do in spring than go to auctions.”
“Well, they ain’t farmers,” Gore said. “Sets you on your heels to see all the city folk pourin’ into the Parade on a Saturday. The towns around here are growin’ all right. And even the people just drove up for a weekend can’t seem to think what to do with a Saturday. Mow the lawn, cart the garbage to the dump, complain about the bugs. What the hell? I guess Perly’s right. The auctions make them feel a part of things.”
“I can’t say the checks ain’t welcome,” John said.
“What Perly says is it’s just buyin’ and sellin’ in the best American tradition, and we give them a better show than a discount store, which is where they’d be in the city on a Saturday. Guess some people just like to part with money.”
“You plannin’ to goldplate your cruiser, or what?” John asked, unearthing an old soapstone sink and indicating that Gore should lift one end.
“Manpower,” Gore said. “I’ve got me five deputies now.”
“Five!” John said.
“Well, like Perly says, ‘Prevention’s the best cure,’” Gore said, running his hand over the gray stone appraisingly. “I told you we got Mudgett, and now we got Jimmy Ward, Sonny Pike, Jim Carroll, and your neighbor there, Mickey Cogswell.”
“Tough lot,” John said, frowning.
“Perly says,” Gore said, looking up at John, “it’s men like that make people want to bring up their sons in Harlowe.”
John lifted his end of the heavy sink and helped Gore carry it out to the truck.
“When you goin’ to come and see our man in action?” Gore asked. He’s a regular wizard. Puts a spell on a crowd so they can’t help what they do.”
“But, Bobby,” John said, “you come to us every Thursday bustin’ at the seams with every slick thing that man’s said all week. What do we need to see him for?”
The Moores found few free moments in spring. Spring was the time when they laid the foundations for another year of living. John plowed up and reseeded the quarter of the pasture that was most grown up in hawkweed and daisies. Mim pruned and sprayed the apple trees. John harrowed and manured the garden and the new patch for the squash. And Mim and Hildie planted, pressing the seeds into the wet earth by hand. They took down the plastic covers from the windows, and hung up a swing for Hildie and an old tire. They planted flowers in front of the house and in the bigger garden across the road that they still called Ma’s garden, though now it was Mim instead of Ma who cut the flowers to sell to the church. And, of course, they milked the cows in the mornings and drove them up into the pasture, then brought them back and milked them again in the evening.
The child went with them everywhere, sitting on her own stool near them as they milked, keeping out of reach of Sunshine’s tail and asking endless questions or singing idly to herself. John and Mim listened quietly and answered when they could, resting their heads against the warm flanks of the cows and leaning into the rhythm of milking the seven cows.
They were married over a decade before Hildie was born, and the quick fair child was so unlike her parents that Ma teased her, telling her she must be the changeling child of a dandelion. John and Mim had planned a big family. It was a part of growing to put out branches, as many as possible. When they were married, the price of milk was holding and nothing seemed difficult. Even when the milk stopped paying, they would have accepted children as part of the course of things, had they come along. But, by the time Hildie was born, their plans had faded to an almost forgotten ache, not from longing for a child so much as from a sense that they had been passed over by the rhythms of the earth, like the apple tree that bloomed so prettily but could not be coaxed to bear.
John and Mim had always gone to the fields and the woods and the barn together and fallen into step like brothers to do what had to be done. And practically from the time Hildie was born, they continued their habit, taking the baby with them or leaving her sleeping with her grandmother, by then too crippled to care for a child, but able enough to ring the gong to summon them when she woke up. When Hildie was tiny, Mim carried her on her back or tethered her to a stake like a goat, and when she grew older, she seemed to stay nearby just naturally. And, in a way they hadn’t expected and never mentioned, it made them feel complete, even happy, to have the child about.