by Joan Samson
Ma sat on her couch by the window in the front room, straining to see through the barn doors to what they were doing. She refused to ask how they were coming, although she no longer said she wouldn’t go.
On Monday morning, John said, “Tonight, late, late in the wee small hours sometime, we’ll go.”
They measured and found that the sofa cushions Ma was used to sleeping on would fit against the front wall of their new little house. Mim was pleased. “That’ll be like a piece of home for Ma and Hildie,” she said. They put the cooking utensils into the truck -the dishes, the pails, Lassie’s dish. They installed the kindling box and filled it with small logs to burn in the sheet metal stove they planned to buy as soon as they were safely far away. Their bedding. All the blankets, but only their own mattress. Hildie would sleep with them. They packed all the food they had, but kept it in the kitchen yet for fear of frost. Mim made bundles of their clothing and packed a box of odds and ends for Hildie to play with.
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 dis
hes 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.
“I don’t know why I’m doin’ this,” she said. And yet she finished carefully, sweeping the last dust clumps and food crumbs into a piece of newspaper and dumping them on the fire. Then she set the broom by the door to go.
One last time she put Hildie to bed on the mattress on the floor and lay down beside her to wait for her to go to sleep. The child was excited, and uneasy at the emptiness. “How could you think we’d leave you, my sweet one,” Mim crooned. “It’s on your account we’re goin’.”
But she held the child too tightly and only upset her more. “Why is it again we’re goin’?” Hildie asked.
“Shhh,” Mim said and lay still.
She heard the door open and shut downstairs, and thought that John had started to load the truck. But she listened on and on, and did not hear him come in again. Presently Hildie fell asleep in her arms and still Mim did not move. She lay on and on, aching at the necessity, ever, of releasing the small limp body that, given up to her like this, filled her with such peace.
12
There was a moon, the shape of half an orange. The wind which seemed as solid as a living body did nothing to dim its light. Presently, stumbling up the familiar road, his flashlight in his belt, more for protection than for light, John grew accustomed to the dimness and began to detect the boulders and felled branches before the toe of his boot struck them. Carefully he climbed down into the old house foundation and plunged his arm into the leaves clogging the old dairy shelf. When his bare hand struck the unnaturally cold metal, he cringed.
He pulled the gasoline can out and put his gloves back on. The journey was four and a half miles by the road, and more by the old logging trail and the brook where the footing was so bad. He hadn’t gone through the woods in decades, not since the year he had attended high school. Then the bus had let him off in the Parade, and sometimes, for variety, he had walked home through the woods. Never at night though. And never in winter either.
Now he took the heavy gas can and headed down the road. He passed his own house and gazed at the yellow light in the kitchen, wondering if they’d missed him yet and feeling shut out, the rhythmic crunch of his feet on the dirt road lost on the whine of the wind. He headed across the garden, his footsteps muffled now by the dead vines, and down the old path that passed the place where they raked away the lily pads and arrowheads to swim in summer. He paused at the edge of the pond.
There was always a lightness over the pond. Sometimes in the dark still nights of summer, way back when everything had been new to him, he had swum there with a girl—first with wild Hattie Shaw, who had had the idea, and then later, at his own insistence, with Mim when she was fourteen, then barely fifteen, shunned by his mother, and shy, but willing for him. They couldn’t quite see each other, but the lightness over the pond, even on the darkest night, had been enough to assure him of the milky fact of her beside him, bending to set her clothes on the fallen pine log, then moving into the shallow water and sinking, with barely a ripple, the pale shadow of flesh. Afterwards, his own fingers puckered from the water, he touched the wet new skin, rough as his own with chill. He touched and she ran. He sat on the log and shivered until she came back. Then he took her tightly by the elbows and she let herself be forced onto the blanket he had spread.
John shifted the heavy gasoline can from one hand to the other and walked. The loss. You couldn’t stop it. Not with laws or holding or thinking. They hadn’t been swimming at night since long before Hildie was born. He thought about the stinging bugs now. He didn’t want anything now the way he had wanted the slightest thing then. The way he needed the land was a different thing, a holding fast against more loss than he could bear. The need for the land was more like a retreat than a driving force.
The pond was frozen in ridges to about four feet out. The wind-thrashed water gurgled and sucked at the lip of ice, keeping abreast of him, a familiar presence, as he made his way along the rough path at water’s edge. He stopped at the mouth of the brook. The night had unstrung him. The night and the weight of the gasoline can dragging on his shoulder. He could have clasped the pond in his arms. He put the can down and stood looking out over the pond once again, waiting for it to turn time aside for him the way it always had.
But finally, distracted, he turned and headed uncomforted into the dark woods, and followed the bed of rocks where, in spring, the brook rushed, and even now, beneath the high wind, a tongue of water rang against the scoured stones like the wooden clapper in a bell, warning that they were slippery. Twice he stepped on what looked like a windswept stretch of earth and crashed through ice up to his shin—both times with his right foot. Soon he had a cold foot and a warm foot as well as a free shoulder and a captive one, so that he felt unbalanced as he moved.
The distance was greater than he remembered, but eventually the bed of the brook grew indistinct. He worried about missing the stone wall, about turning off at the wrong wall, for walls, he knew too well, crisscrossed the woods like the paper chains on a Christmas tree. The right stone wall was the one that crested the hill and ended at the old logging road that would take him out behind the Parade. The road was bulldozed fresh the year he was in high school, but perhaps by now it would be so grown in he wouldn’t be able to follow it even if he found it. The water was gone completely from the creek bed now, and the woods were growing darker. If he turned on the flashlight, it would light a narrow path for his boots but black out everything around so that he would be more than ever likely to miss the wall.
Quite suddenly, a low branch reached out and caught in the handle of the gasoline can, yanking John off his feet. He fell full length on the ground. The can struck a rock with a loud clang, and the gasoline splashed around loudly inside. He lay listening until it was still, feeling his bruised knee. He got to his knees and felt for the can. A paddy bird roared up from almost underneath him, the squeaking of wings as loud as any motor. John let out a yell that startled him still more, and settled back on his heels trembling to listen for an answer. An owl hooted not far away, and then there was nothing again but the sporadic wailing of the wind.
He no longer felt alone. But it would not be a man, not here. Only, perhaps, a deer, or even a bear, more afraid of him than he of it. Or worse, a fisher cat or a big dog gone wild. John took the kitchen knife and the flashlight from his belt. He pushed the switch on the flashlight and the woods lit up in glistening black and white. Slowly he swung the light all around him, squinting to see beyond the end of its beam. He caught the lichen on the sides of trees, the heavy ridges of fungus on a broken branch, like tumors stretching skin. And then, almost beyond its reach, the light bounced off something pale and shiny and as big as a head, and after a gasp John remembered the great chunk of quartz that marked the wall he wanted. It was behind him. He had passed it. It was the marker stone he had felt as company.
He took up the gas can and, using the light now, headed out along the wall. He moved more quickly now. He would know the old road, when he came to it,
by the break in the wall. And, if he could still follow the road at all, it would take him out where he wanted to be, or close enough.
The wind still howled from the northeast. It would be at his back once he swung around onto the old road. Hour after hour it had been blowing like that, and suddenly John was struck by the thought that it could not go on like that forever. He hurried, stumbling, beginning to be afraid.
In the dark and frozen woods, it seemed clear that setting fire to a few houses served no real purpose. It was only a way of turning the rage into something he could see and touch and measure, a way of setting it apart before it burst into flame within him and burned him out.
When he thought of the three houses strung out along the Parade in front of the dry pine wood, the one he kept thinking about was Fayette’s. He didn’t want Fayette’s to catch. He counted on the firemen to work on saving Fayette’s because it was the post office. Adeline Fayette was as old as his mother, yet still she climbed onto the high stool at five-thirty every morning and sorted the mail. If you came in early you would find her blowing from the corner of her mouth at the wisps of straight white hair that fell on her face. She was almost completely deaf. She might never hear the high cracking of the pines, the fire alarm, the last commotion. The firemen might not save the post office. Perly might direct them to the deputies’ houses instead. To the James place, its pink paint weathered and a battered sign out front that said, “SAWS SHARPENED, APPLIANCES FIXED.” He thought of James sitting on the edge of the bandstand with Cogswell, swinging his legs and sharing his coffee, waiting for Perly to come and sell the stolen children. He remembered that James had had a little girl who died of polio. That was a long time ago. Perhaps he had forgotten what it was like to lose a child. Or perhaps, like Cogswell, he was only scared.