Rather suddenly, at about two in the afternoon, they found themselves finished and simply waiting in the warm kitchen for the hour to leave. John sat in his usual place on the bench in front of the kitchen range with Hildie in his lap and Lassie at his feet, moaning in her sleep. Mim stood at the back door looking up at the pasture. The wind blew with a cold whine, laying down silver furrows in the brown pasture, then riffling them upright again.
“A good northeast gale blowin’ up,” John said, almost with satisfaction. “Long’s it don’t rain now, we’ll be all set.”
“That has more the sound of a wind to bring on snow,” Mim said.
“Papa?” said Hildie. He rocked her. “Let’s stay home.”
“Yesterday you was jumpin’ up and down to go,” Mim said, turning to the two of them.
John could hear his mother stifling her sounds from the front room, passing the time before they could go, a stretch of time as bare and desolate as the empty house itself. Already the sounds the women made reminded him of the whimpering of the refugees hurrying across the face of the television set—mothers and grandmothers and little girls, brittle and distant as the blanched bones of birds on the forest floor.
“But why do we got to go?” Hildie asked.
John stood up abruptly, standing Hildie on her feet on the floor. “Ask Mama,” he said, and went to his own mother in the other room.
She was sitting on the couch looking out the front windows, across the orchard to the pond. She did not look up when he came in. Her hair was gray and the light was gray and her very cheeks seemed gray, as uneven and fragile as ash. She had an army blanket pulled up to her chin.
“Ma,” he said, and sat on her couch beside her. She dropped the blanket and pulled his head down against her shoulder. There was practically nothing left of her. There wasn’t room for his head on her shoulder any more.
“You know,” she said, and he felt rather than heard the catch in her breath. “When I was a youngster I had a hankerin’ to see the world. But then your pa came along and he says, ‘With this out your window, honey, ain’t nothin’ you could find wouldn’t be downhill.’ So we set right here and never budged.”
John sat up and looked at her.
“Funny, ain’t it, when you think on it,” she said, “how now, after all, I’m a goin’ to see my blessed world.”
“Ma,” he said. “I’m...” His face was flushed as if with sunburn, and his eyes were as deep and muddy as the pond in summer. “Give me time, Ma. It may look like I’m pullin’ out, but it’s not in the way of quittin’ quite, not like it seems.”
“Never mind, son, never mind,” she said. “There’s some things can’t be helped.” And John held her in his arms as if it were she who was the child.
Outside, John and Mim and Hildie stood in the dooryard looking out over the pond. The wind roughed it up so that the light fell deep into the troughs and left the surface dark as ink. “By mornin’,” John said, “I bet the pond’s caught.”
“It’ll skim over ragged if this wind keeps up, even if the snow don’t get it,” Mim said.
“Crummy skating,” John said.
“And how many years since you been skatin’, John Moore?” Mim teased.
“Hildie’s about of an age to learn,” he said.
Walking three abreast, John and Hildie and Mim headed into the dim pine forest and followed the old logging road that circled around and came out at the top of the pasture. Far overhead, a restless canopy of branches broke the sunshine into tiny dancing circles. Light-starved seedlings and brush had died back and rotted, leaving an open expanse of dead pine needles which gave beneath their boots, then sprang back silently behind them. The wind rushed at the green needles overhead and they flattened against one another with a high hissing sound. Occasionally the wind reached down to sing through the dead lower branches and lift the green tassels on Hildie’s stocking cap.
“He’ll cut the pine,” Mim said, “before he sells.”
“Who, Perly?” John said. “He won’t cut the pine nor sell neither.”
“You figure he’ll really save it for a playground?” Mim said.
“Nope,” John said.
They crossed over the bridge where the brook ran in the spring and headed up a steep incline out of the pine grove. Hildie rushed ahead and clattered nearly waist deep through maple and birch and poplar leaves. Crisp oak leaves still clinging to the high branches chattered in the wind. The smaller beech saplings held their leaves too, papery thin and yellow as daffodils. The wind and sun swooped down through the branches, dappling the woods with light and hustling the leaves up into pinwheels that spun and died, then spun again. They passed through a thicket beneath a seed hemlock and came out to the Christmas grove— dozens of wild white spruce, protected far overhead by spreading maples. Underfoot, princess pine and a spiky chartreuse creeper were so thick you couldn’t step without crushing them.
“Near time to cut a tree, and still no snow,” Mim said.
“Dry year,” John said.
“Will we come back for Christmas?” Hildie asked. She was pulling up greens by the handful. “Can I help make the wreaths this year?”
As they went on, the spruce gave way to juniper, and the creeper to the rusty orange of dried ferns. And then, quite suddenly, they stepped through the break in the stone wall and out into dazzling sunshine and the icy force of the wind. The cemetery was just as Mim had left it, except that the wind and sun had dried to gray the earth she had bared. A few curled tendrils of dead ivy still poked from the ground. “I sometimes breathe easier that nothin’ grows in winter,” Mim said.
Hildie stood gazing at the gravestones that she had never seen so clearly before. “My grandpa’s under there?” she asked.
“Don’t go no closer now,” Mim said. “That stuff is wicked poison even now.”
But John, whose father and grandfather and great-grandfather were there, wasn’t looking at the cemetery. He stood on the crest of the hill, looking down, past the sweep of pasture and the weatherbeaten house, toward the pond. Mim went and stood next to him so that her shoulder brushed his.
He shook himself with irritation and moved away from her. “Where do you have in mind to go?” he asked her. “Just where but here can you be thinkin’ there’s a place for us?”
“But you said,” Mim said.
“Oh we’ll move into the truck and play house if you like,” he said. “But nobody’s goin’ to cut that pine.”
“Like as not, he’ll keep the pine,” Mim said.
“I’m sayin’ I’ll keep the pine,” John said, his eyes the same color as the dead grass and the sandy soil.
Mim’s eyes were the color of the sky arching over the land and away as far as they could see. “We will go?” she prompted.
John nodded. He ran a hand through Mim’s short curls and picked up Hildie, who hid her face in his shoulder against the cold. Then the three of them started down the hill into the hard wind.
They ate, and Mim put the last dishes and bits of food into the cartons, even a bottle of leftover soup. Ma sat in the lawn chair with her hands clasped in her lap watching. John whittled on a stick, and Hildie and the dog watched warily, anxious at the preparations.
Mim took up the broom and started to sweep the house. The next person to see it would be Dunsmore. She prickled with red hatred, yet she wanted him, when he took what was hers by right, to see reflected in it that she was a clean and decent woman. She was swept with an awe at his power. It required a reversal of everything she wanted and believed to think that such power— whatever its devious route—could be directed at ends that were anything but right and good. It seemed that if she could only stir this man to decency, to a true vision of what it was that he was doing, he would set her world to rights. And yet she knew that if she had any way at all of touching Perly—and she burned with a guilty sense that she did—it had nothing to do with her decency or her competence as a housewife. She had no way of stirring that power in him to anything but further evil.