They put him to bed in his clothes, so that if they heard a car, they could wake him and no one would know he had been sleeping into the bright hours of morning. Mim had hauled the mattress from the truck back up to the bedroom and now he lay under Ma’s old quilts watching the first fuzzy stripes of sunshine spread like gauze across the floor toward Hildie. She lay curled in a ball with her head thrown back, her cheeks chapped to a bright pink, breathing noisily through her mouth. He lay awake and tense, tuned for trucks, sirens, state cars—the final visitation that would break up everything. But all he heard beneath the great lid of winter silence was the breathing of his daughter and Mim’s quick orderly steps below. Out the side door for more wood, out the front kitchen door to the barn. In again. Out again. The bars of sunshine grew shorter and more definite, tinted with blue as if filtered through ice. Wide-eyed he listened. The wind, he realized, had stopped. The wind was gone.
Presently Hildie sneezed, and sneezed again. Then suddenly she erupted from her bed and rolled into his. “Where’s Mama?” she asked.
“Downstairs,” he said.
“Sure?” the child asked, sitting up in her faded blue pajamas. “She said we was goin away before I woke up.”
“No, no,” he said. “Listen. That’s her downstairs.”
Hildie listened until she heard the footsteps and the women’s voices, then she cuddled down close to John, her teeth chattering. “We didn’t go,” she said.
“Nope,” he said.
“I knew it,” she said happily. She put her arms around his neck and breathed into his stubby face. She was barely settled in before she said, “Time to get up.”
“I know,” he said, and as he said it, the drowsiness came on him so strong he could scarcely respond to the child. By the time she crawled out of his bed and scampered down the stairs to the kitchen, he was nearly asleep.
At first, as she worked, Mim trembled. She set the clothes to soak in a tubful of water, then went to the well for more water. She stoked the fire, then set the front kitchen door ajar to the icy weather so that she would be sure to hear them coming before they were upon her. Hopefully, too, the air would thin the gasoline smell in the kitchen. Ma was too excited to be shut up in the front room where it was warm. Mim wrapped her in a blanket in her chair and, glad for the company, moved her in close to the stove.
Mim washed the clothes in three different tubs, waiting impatiently each time for the water in the kettle to heat. Then she wrung them out hard and hung them from the line over the roaring stove. She and Ma rehearsed as she worked what to do when they came. Hide the clothes. The quickest way would be to stuff them into the oven. Shut the outside door. Damp the stove. Run upstairs to warn John.
Mim scrubbed the boots with a brush and yellow soap. And scrubbed them again, but couldn’t get rid of the smell of gasoline. Finally she ran out to the barn and rolled the wet boots in the dust of dried cow dung and hay that still covered the floor. Then she brushed them off and took them in and hid them in a closet.
But still, with all the air and the washing, the kitchen smelled of gasoline. “The gas can, Mim,” said Ma and laughed. “What a pair of dolts we be.”
Mim’s heart beat. She caught up the can and ran to the barn.
She rubbed the bits of dried leaves and the sticky gas stains off with her hands and thrust it into the back of the truck where it belonged. Then, rubbing her hands clean on the frozen grass, she started and straightened, as she had six times that morning, thinking she heard a car. But the wind had died and the dawn was so still she could almost hear the faint crackle as the pond skimmed over with ice. A mallard cried and she first heard the beating of its wings on water, then saw it, dark and graceful against the gray sky of the new day.
When she went inside, she stood at the door looking out over the pond as she had several times a day for twenty years. “Black ice comin’, after all,” she said to Ma. “And we’ll be gone.”
“Never mind. She’ll make a pretty skater anywhere. Just like him.”
Mim pictured her child grown tall, green stocking cap flying as she spun dizzily across the pond on a cloudless winter day. Was Ma remembering such an image of her own child? John a pretty skater? Those were the things you gave a child—the spirit and the pond and the memory.
Mim put her hands to her face, stunned with happiness at the fullness of her world there on the edge of the pond.
“Hey, Miriam,” Ma said softly, and reached out a hand to her. “You always was such a feelin’ girl.”
