“Well, I have to hand it to you,” Mim said to Perly, still thinking the new couch was not so pretty as the old one. “We none of us ever even noticed.”
“Your own never do,” Ma said.
Perly stood in the doorway with his arms folded and accepted their comments. “Sometimes a new set of eyes...” he said, and lit up with a beaming smile.
“Well, I do thank you, Perly,” Ma said, in a glow with pleasure. He went over and took the hand she offered in both of his.
In silence, John helped Gore carry the couch down the front path to the truck. Gore wedged it securely into the end of the truck bed and padded it with a couple of tattered quilts.
“You got no new tales this week?” John said. “It’s amazin’.”
Gore leaned on the couch where it rested in the truck, its bright slipcover hidden now. He fished in his pocket for matches. “Come round to the house, you’re lookin’ for talk. You know there’s always some of the old bunch around on a Sunday. But you never was one to come round much.”
“Thought Perly’d got you all tied up these days,” John said.
“Nope,” Gore said. “Things’re about the way they always been, exceptin’ the auctions on Saturdays.” He climbed out of the truck and glanced up at the attic window.
Dunsmore appeared in the doorway with the women. Even Ma had struggled to the door with her canes to say goodbye.
“Well, thank you,” John said as he approached the truck. “That was nice of you.”
“My pleasure,” Perly said. “Your mother’s quite a woman. She’s really a symbol of what this country stands for. I can see that.”
John stood with his arms folded, watching the auctioneer. Perly’s motions were quick and easy, a little too quick and easy, John thought with a twinge of dislike.
Gore climbed into the truck. Perly opened the door on the passenger side and held out his hand to John. “See you next week,” he said.
John placed his hand in the other man’s momentarily. “What for?” he asked as the strong hand gripped his.
Perly cocked an eyebrow. “Well the auctions aren’t over,” he said. “Someone will be around.”
“Like you said,” Gore announced from his high seat. “We got enough cops for a circus now. Got to keep them busy.
Smiling, Perly pulled the door shut and Gore stepped hard on the accelerator.
“Hey!” John cried, but the truck was backing and turning, so that he had to move aside to let it pass.
Mim was mending overalls on the treadle sewing machine in the front room. From where she sat, she could watch Hildie on the lawn struggling to do cartwheels, tumbling over and over and over.
John and Ma sat with her, waiting for the seven o’clock news to begin.
“He has a way about him that makes you feel like gettin up and doin’ things, Perly does,” Mim said. I like to think its not us that’s left behind, but just the other way around.”
“Well, I guess if it sets you to mendin’, it can’t be a total loss,” John said.
“My but he was pleased with hisself about that couch,” Ma said, running her hand over the worn red plush. “Didn’t it seem to you that he was halfway settin’ on hisself to keep from bustin’ or dancin a jig? It’s partly that makes you feel like up and doin’.” That child’s goin to break her neck,” John said, frowning at Hildie through the window.
“Well, he was as good as his word,” Ma said, “far’s that Sunday School’s concerned. Now there’s one old-time value I’m sure was better than what we got today.”
“But Hildie’s a chip off me,” John said, chuckling. “She don’t take to Sunday School.”
“That’s because he told them about Abraham that was all ready to cut up poor little Isaac,” Mim said. “I expect she’s worried about what you’ll be up to next time you get het up. Now that’s one story no mother could ever understand.”
“That’s just because you got no faith you think that way,” Ma said.
“You’re the only one left around here as has much faith, Ma,” John said. Poor Hildie. God don’t ask for things like that nowadays, and I’m hard put to think He ever did.”
“No, its just the little things He asks the likes of us,” Ma said. Like noticin’ when an old woman needs a higher couch to ease a worn-out back.”
“You think its that he was noticin’? Or that Grandpa’s old one is more like to catch a buyer’s eye since Mim fixed it up so proper?”
“You never had no faith, son. You young people can’t remember what old-time values was.”
“Is it old-time values Gore’s usin’, then, when he says he needs a whole troop of deputies?” John asked. “What’s he got in mind to use them for, I d like to know? Is it old-time values tellin’ me I got to keep on feedin’ auctions every week? Before we know it, hes goin’ to have every other man a deputy. God knows what he plans to use them for.”
“Must be twenty towns in New Hampshire have an auction every Saturday,” Mim said, pushing the denim overalls under the needle and making the machine whir.
“And I been tellin’ you all week,” Ma said, “you can’t blame Perly for Gore’s prattlin’. Anything said by a Gore, you can put right out of your head. That was ever a topsy-turvy household. Weren’t no one in it ever cared two whoops in thunder for the truth.”
On Thursday, John was restless. After he had milked the cows and put them out to pasture, he lingered over breakfast, drinking cup after cup of coffee, casting around for chores to do in the house. At every long sigh of wind through the pines, he expected Perly and Bob to burst through into their yard.
He finished patching a hole in the screen door and turned to speak to Mim. She was blacking the stove, holding her body away from the stove to protect her clothes. Hildie, catching him idle, took his hands and started to climb him like a tree. He sat down by the table and bounced her on his knee, watching Mim.
Mim turned from the stove and stood at the sink to wash her hands. Afterwards, she took her brush from the shelf and started to brush her hair. She brushed it and brushed it, staring at her image in the small mirror over the sink that John used for shaving every second or third day. Her light hair sprang back from the brush into fuzzy curls. Usually she only brushed it like that when she washed it Saturday mornings. Hildie slid down Johns legs and climbed up again. Mim put the brush down and leaned in closer to the mirror.
John pushed Hildie away. The heat rose slowly to his head. Ma’s judgment rang in his ears: “Shes a far sight too pretty to make a decent wife to a man.”
Mim had been seventeen when he married her and so lovely he ached when he touched her. If anyone had asked him why he married her, he’d surely have said that was the reason. But he was pleased when, after a couple of years alone with the fields and the trees, with only his eyes and those of his parents, she forgot she was pretty and didn’t bother with a mirror from the beginning of the week to the end. It was all for him. And he remembered thinking, from time to time, in those first years—when she was running down the pasture in summer, or diving into the pond, or coming into the kitchen in winter, rosy with the cold—that it showed a man’s worth to have a wife who looked like that.
He hadn’t thought of such things for years, but now he saw that she was no longer young. Her slender hands on the hairbrush had grown as tough as his own. The good fair skin, which had once stretched so cleanly over the straight features that her face completely hid her thoughts, was faintly patterned now so that laughter, mockery, and her quick characteristic squint of doubt seemed always there, ready to break through. Still, her body had filled out and gained confidence without losing its grace, and her eyes remained the deep clear blue of a winter sky.