John put his knife on the table and went out. Mim stuffed Hildie into the chair beside Ma. “Now don’t say a word, hear? Not one word.”
Hildie hid her face in her grandmother’s lap. “Stop tellin’ me. I know,” she cried, her shout muffled by the folds of Ma’s dressing gown.
Cogswell didn’t get out of the truck, just opened the door and waited. His flesh and clothes were stained dark gray. The lines on his face were traced in black and his eyes were rimmed with red.
“What on earth... ?” Mim asked as she approached. Then she smelled the smoke on him.
He shook his head. “God knows,” he said. “The whole town’s goin’ up in smoke. We been fightin’ a fire at Sonny Pike’s. Not enough he gets shot, but now forty acres of his pine are gone and his barn’s started. Seems like the house is a goner too. Then there was fire bustin’ through the roof of Pulver’s barn when I went by. They was wettin’ down the house, but it’s attached and the wind’s all wrong. Cogswell stopped and rubbed his face, pushing the soot into dark streaks.
The wail of the bulldozer rose and fell around them. Cogswell shook his head. “Perly sic that on you?”
John stood with his arms folded. He nodded.
“Couldn’t even wait...”
“We ain’t goin’,” John said. “Thought I told you that.”
Cogswell looked at John, his blue eyes more focused than they had been in months.
“What I want to know is what you’re doin’ here,” John said, “with your deputy buddies in all that trouble?”
“Well, you know, they got the Powlton fire department now, and Babylon and Walker comin’. Trouble is, we just heard that the Ward place they cut up and sold—that’s on fire too, in a couple of different places, and it’s way to the other side of town. That was about the last straw. Me and James and Stone and a bunch of other deputies with houses of their own to worry about took off. Poor Sonny was jumpin’ around screamin’ at us to help. But I got visions of my own dry fields. Half of them ain’t even cut this year. And some of them from Powlton quit workin’ too and got to arguin’ about whose town is it anyway, and why should they risk their necks with us takin’ off. Meantime, the fire’s runnin’ up the hill curlin’ up trees like leaves, workin’ its way up to the Geness place.”
John stood listening, his face grim.
Cogswell ran his hands through his hair. “If I shoot off the shotgun three times, will you come give me a hand?” He glanced at Mim, then at John. “Look,” he said, swallowing, “I know it’s your side settin’ them fires. And I don’t say my side ain’t got it comin’, but does that mean you and me got to be at war?” He reached for John and touched his sleeve. “What can I do, Johnny? There’s no fire department left to come.”
John looked up the road toward the sound of the bulldozer, considering. “So, half the town’s on fire,” he said slowly.
Cogswell pulled himself wearily around behind the wheel. “Maybe you’re right, Johnny,” he said, slamming the door. “We don’t any of us deserve to live till mornin’.”
As he headed up the road, Mim ran past John to the truck and pulled the door open, running to keep up with it. “Why don’t you all leave, Mickey?” she cried.
“I can’t, Mim,” he said, braking to a stop. “Agnes keeps askin’ till I can’t hardly stand it. But I can’t. How can I? It’s just another way of dyin’.”
John came up behind Mim and leaned past her to grasp Cogswell’s arm. “You hear that fellow up there knockin’ over my woods?” he asked. “You think you can do somethin’ about that?”
Cogswell looked startled. Then he fingered the gun in his holster and took a deep breath. “Yeah,” he said. “Guess maybe I can. I can try anyhow.” And, instead of going home, Cogswell turned around and went back up the hill toward the bulldozer.
John and Mim stood together in the yard, listening. The bulldozer stopped work almost immediately. There were no shots and they were too far away to hear voices. Presently, the big motor roared again, then gradually began to recede.
Mim looked at John. “He was only up there an hour,” she said.
“This time,” John said.
Mickey drove past them with a grin. John returned his salute with a shout of reassurance.
The wind curled around the chimney and slid off the steep roof with a whine. It rattled the doors and worried the plastic over the windows. In the room that had been Hildie’s, splinters of glass continued to pull away from around the bullet hole and sift to the floor. The rest of the day passed somehow and no one else came.
“Thursday gone,” Mim said in their bedroom that night, “and no one from Perly except that bulldozer.”
“Fires are keepin’ them busy,” John said. “But you can bet Perly’s already switchin’ and schemin’ how to have us dead and buried one way or the other, all of us, deputies included. And him left to sell off the whole empty town.”
It was so cold they took Hildie into their bed and piled her quilts over their own for warmth. Impatiently, they waited for the long night to pass. Finally, the dawn appeared over the frost line on the windows and they could see gray clouds blowing like dust balls over a dead-white morning sky.
“Snow up there,” Mim said. “We ought to go this mornin’ quick, before we get snowed in.”
“Back of that truck’d be cold as the bottom of a well,” John said.
“Well get a stove in Concord. You said yourself he’s goin’ to bury us all, and we’re the first ones in his path.” She was pleading now. “Johnny, please.”
John got up without answering, pulled on his overalls and jacket and went down to see to the stoves. After breakfast, he took up a stick and his knife. Hildie climbed up next to him and watched, wide-eyed and still, as one by one the chips fell away and the stick disappeared.
Mim pulled on her jacket and went out to the well for water.
“That snow won’t wait,” she insisted when she came back. “It’s comin any minute and here we’ll be.” She was fretful and peevish. She kept making work for herself in the kitchen, then abandoning it halfway through. “Were gettin’ this one last chance,” she kept saying. “And you two won’t budge.”
“Go then,” said Ma. “You and the child.”
“How can I, Ma?” moaned Mim. “And leave you and Johnny here?”
The clouds piled up overhead thick as pudding. They waited all morning for the next move. But nothing happened. Even the snow held off.
Four o’clock was already darkening into another night. They heard the motor and said nothing. Mim swept up Hildie, lifted their coats off their hooks, and moved to the door.
It was the yellow truck. She stared, half believing that what she saw was only one more repetition of the vision she had suffered so often during the long days of waiting. It was not until the truck was so close that she could pick out the features of Dunsmore and Mudgett that she took Hildie’s arm and rushed her out the back door.
Ma made her way into the kitchen and stood by the sink, upright between her canes. John stood behind the closed door waiting.
Perly led the way up the walk, unarmed as always, moving with big-boned ease. He was a perfect target for a sniper hiding, say, behind the unmended upstairs window. As if he read John’s thought, Mudgett, following warily behind the auctioneer, his hand near his gun, glanced upward at the second-story windows, then with a quick darting motion, turned to his left to check the dark opening to the barn.
John opened the door himself and the two men stepped inside and stopped with their backs to the door, the cold spreading from them.
“Where are Mim and Hildie?” Perly asked.
“Gone,” John said.
Perly raised an eyebrow and considered. “Harlowe’s filled with trouble lately,” he said.