The Auctioneer (17 page)

John and Mim moved slowly in the babbling crowd back toward their truck. The wind had picked up and grown colder, so damp now that patches of water darkened the blacktop on the road. A dozen or so people surrounded the auctioneer in a chattering group as he moved toward his house. Dixie trotted at his left heel, shouldering people’s knees to keep her place, her tail waving just slightly in a suggestion of friendliness. Gore moved behind the group, squinting and nervous, his right hand poised near his hip pocket.

“They got a wicked surprise comin’,” John said, watching from the truck.

“Maybe it’s them and maybe it’s us’ll get a surprise,” Mim said. “For my money, Prescott and Jimmy Ward did a smart thing. We ought to clear out too.”

“Folks with cash to buy a farm or a hunk of land just to play games with, like it was a kid’s red wagon... It must take quite a dent to make them hurt.”

“They bought that land and now it’s theirs,” Mim said. “He’s not goin’ to stand for Prescott comin’ back and makin’ any claims.”

“I just know that nobody but a Moore’s goin’ to do with that authentic antique farm on the pond with the steep pasture up behind. He may think it, but he’s wrong.”

“He got the Wards to go,” Mim said, “for all they were such a big deal in town.”

“Ward’s a fool,” John said. He started the truck, then sat over the steering wheel watching the Parade ground empty out. “He may think the Moores are nobody, but he’s goin’ to find out different.”

Sunday morning was icy cold and still, a fragile day. The last oak leaves clinging to their twigs were like blown glass, jingling and shattering at a touch.

“Snow’s late,” Mim said.

John sat on the bench in front of the stove. He had shaved a maple kindling stick away to the size of a scallion, then chopped it into quarter-inch slices as if to add it to the soup. Finally he shoved aside the last shards of maple and his knife, and now he simply sat, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, staring through his fingers at his boots and the fender of the stove. Occasionally he rubbed his scalp until his thick gray-brown hair stood out from his head, reminding Mim that he needed a haircut.

In the front room, Ma sat alone on her couch. Now that the room was bare, it seemed wrapped in wallpaper. The paper had once been yellow behind some sort of bluish vine that had never existed, at least not in New Hampshire. Ma had chosen it because it was springlike, and John had approved because it was cheap. Now it was almost black behind the big parlor stove where fingers of smoke stroked it all winter. It was still a startling canary yellow in patches where the piano and sewing machine had stood, and where the pictures had hung, but everywhere else it had faded to a brownish cream. Mim had potted geraniums from the garden to fill the windowsills, and washed the windows, worrying that the putty was so far gone that even with the plastic they would rattle and perhaps crack in the winter wind. But today sunshine streamed in through the small rippled panes and marked out a warm gridwork on the unvarnished pine floor. Catching the tips of Ma’s gray hair, the light made them shine like milkweed as she sat—perfectly still and years away as she gazed out on the quiet day.

But Hildie had few memories and could not be still. She raced from the front room to the kitchen, and back to the front room, shaking the house with footsteps and jarring the air with shouts. Mim shook out Ma’s pillows, swept the floors, dusted the hot stoves, and fussed after Hildie. Finally she stopped in back of John, with Hildie still whirling around her.

“They’ll take the tractor this week, sure,” she said.

John neither moved nor answered, so Mim repeated her statement in a louder voice. This time John turned his head and looked up at her. She saw that he was trembling with anger.

She turned without a word and grabbed Hildie’s sweater and her own jacket from the hooks by the back door. She caught up the child and whisked her outside. Hildie huddled and held on to her hand, complaining of the cold.

“This is just a taste of what we’ll get before we’re through,” Mim said, but she took comfort in the child’s closeness. They walked across the yard and stood behind the truck. The bed of the truck seemed pitifully small. Mim pulled open the sliding door to the barn and stepped into its dank interior. She could hear rats scuttling. She kicked at the heap of old boards under the stairway. A lot of them were rotting. The problem of building a house on the truck seemed too immense for her. Hildie shivered and pulled at her hand to go outside again.

In the yard the sun was almost warm and she walked with the child down to the road and across it to the flower garden without glancing again at the truck. The last chrysanthemums lay trampled on the ground by the cold, but still pink and rust and yellow. The leaves on the rose bushes, a dusty green, were curled and dry on their thorny stalks. Mim stood idly in the middle of the garden. Hildie let go of her hand and marched up one row and down the next until she had worked over the entire garden. Then she climbed on top of the overturned wheelbarrow and jumped up and down. The dark pond beyond the scrubby growth of laurel and huckleberries reflected the puffs of clouds suspended over it. Mim thought she could detect a crinkled rim of ice around the edges. The year was turning. One storm would do it now.

“Off with you,” Mim said. “I’ll ride you to the barn.”

Hildie jumped down and Mim righted the wheelbarrow. They bumped over the field, stalling on stones, backing up and trying again.

Hildie laughed. “Giddap, Sunshine,” she cried, holding tight to the sides of the bucking wheelbarrow.

In the dark barn, they loaded the wheelbarrow up with hay to bank the roses. Mim was surprised to find that they had everything they needed to do this chore. Mudgett had overlooked the wheelbarrow because, in her carelessness, she had left it overturned in the flower garden. “Nothin’s changed at all for the roses,” she said to Hildie. “Come spring, they’ll green up like nothin’ was changed at all.”

When they heard the truck coming, they were still in the garden. Mim hesitated, then took Hildie’s hand and turned to watch the opening in the trees. It was Cogswell, alone.

John came out the back door. Mim approached slowly as the two men greeted each other, Hildie pulling at her to hurry.

Cogswell glanced at John, and then smiled faintly at Hildie. He fished in the pocket of his faded blue sweatshirt and got out his cigarettes. He cupped the match against the weather, his hands shaking so he could hardly bring the match to meet the cigarette. Then he drew on the cigarette and flipped the match to the ground. He was a tall narrow man, with long hands covered with reddish hairs like electric wires.

“Still got the same old truck,” John said.

“I’ll drive to my grave in it,” Cogswell said.

John raised his brows and waited for whatever news was coming.

“Good of you to call on Agnes,” Cogswell said to Mim.

Mim held tight to Hildie who was squirming to be free. “She’s not right,” she said.

Cogswell shook his head, then looked down at them with a crooked smile. “Who is?” he asked.

John stood before him, his hands sunk deep into the pockets of his overalls, his shoulders drawn up against the cold.

“Your ma all right?” Cogswell asked him.

“She’s not her old self,” John said. “But she’ll weather winter all right, if she don’t starve.”

Cogswell shook the ash off his cigarette onto the ground and spread it carefully over the earth with the toe of his shoe.

“Hear you done over your house,” John said. He took his hands out of his pockets and folded his arms, the muscles between his jaw and his ear working.

“At too much cost,” Mickey said.

“If there weren’t nobody jumpin’ to be deputies, Dunsmore wouldn’t a got so far.”

“Ain’t nobody jumpin now,” Cogswell said. “Not anyway since last night.”

“You mean the auction?” Mim said.

“That and Sonny Pike gettin’ shot.”

“Pike?” John said and lifted a corner of his thin mouth.

Mickey shook his head. “He’s all of a piece, I expect. But he’s got a good hole in his shoulder.”

“Shakes you up a bit, don’t it, Mick?” John said.

Cogswell put his free hand in his pocket and leaned back against the cab of his truck.

“It’s not so much you, Mickey,” Mim said. “It’s just the auction and what he said.”

Cogswell turned to her and spoke quickly. “He sent you this,” he said, pulling a roll of bills from his pocket. “To get you off the land. Three hundred ain’t enough, I know. But its enough for you to set up in your truck and go.”

John looked past Cogswell to the pond. Then he spit on the ground. “Never mind, Mickey,” he said, but he wasn’t angry any more. “You got your own brood to fret over.”

“John,” Mim said and John turned on her too quickly. “If we could go...” she said, ignoring the rising anger in his green eyes.

“It’s time, John,” Cogswell said. “He’s got his eye peeled right on you.”

“It don’t seem like you’re about to scamper,” John said.

“It’s gettin’ to that point,” Cogswell said. “He’s bankin’ on it. After you, then us.”

“Keep your money,” John said. “I ain’t movin. He turned and started back toward the house.

Cogswell took a step after him. “John, you’re a fool,” he said. “You always was that proud you’d cut your nose off before you d give an inch.”

John stopped and turned. “You’re okay, Mickey,” he said. “I don’t forget a turn like this.” His face colored up as his eyes locked with his neighbor’s. “It’s just that I aim to stay.

Cogswell held out the money. “You got it comin’ from one cow alone,” he said.

John looked at it. Mim held her breath. “Guess my land’s still firm enough to carry us,” he said and walked slowly into the house. Mim noticed that his body was bent with age and work and care. He walked as if he were very heavy.

She turned back to Cogswell, eying the roll of bills in his hand, her desire tangible.

He turned to her. “You’re a good woman, Mim,” he said. “You keep tight to your sense of things. Make him see sense too. He thrust the bills into her hand and clouded her with the thick smell of soured whiskey.

Feeling them against her palm, warm still from his, she felt the relief flood over her and longed to fall into his arms. She let her eyes fall into his. Weak with gratitude and the sweetness of the man, she said, “I’m real sorry about her, Mickey.”

He watched her tears come up for him and turned abruptly away. He walked around the truck, got in, and started it with a burst.

Then he got out and came slowly back. “Mim,” he said, his head nodding loosely, “if you can’t get him to see sense no other way, take him to the auction Tuesday at three.” Mickey ran a hand over his face. “Oh Christ,” he said, as if he had forgotten where he was. Then he straightened up and focused fiercely in on Mim. “But mind you don’t let on how you heard about it.”

He got back into the truck and headed up the road over Constance Hill. Mim watched the back of his head through the rear window of his cab. He tipped it back and drank from his flask as the truck swayed precariously up the bad road and out of sight.

Hildie reached for the money in her mother’s hand, jumping up and down to see it. Mim held it high and, standing where she was, counted it twice. Fifteen twenty-dollar bills. Then she turned to the house to face John.

He was standing in the doorway waiting for her. “Give it to me,” he said, his face white and deeply lined.

She gave it to him, feeling the fear that was almost desire touch her fingertips as they brushed his palm. He turned and, in a motion so quick she hardly felt what he was doing, crossed the room, lifted the lid on the range, and dropped in the roll of bills.

Instinctively, Mim dove for the stove. He caught her. One hand tangled in her hair; the other tightened on her arm. She screamed and he shook her.

She felt the world turning around her, the familiar piles of dishes on the shelf over the sink, the board bench and table, Hildie’s frightened face by the door. She screamed and struggled toward the stove. Vaguely, she knew that Ma had hobbled to the doorway and stood leaning on her canes, with Hildie pressing her face to her dressing gown.

“The money, Ma,” she sobbed. “Get the money.”

Finally John flung her loose of him, and even as she fell she yearned toward the stove. Her head hit the fender with a bump she heard more than felt. John slammed the back door so that the kitchen shook. Mim struggled to her feet and opened the stove. A tuft of smoke rose in her face. Inside she saw a jumble of red coals and one bright lick of flame.

Mim crumpled on the edge of the bench, buried her head in her arms against the table, and sobbed. She did not hear the hard thumps of Ma’s canes approaching, but she felt the crooked hand catch in her hair.

“Now, now, Miriam,” she said. “Don’t carry on so. You’ll give the child a fright.”

Mim looked up. Hildie was leaning over the bench on the other side of the table, whimpering. She held out her arms, and the child came into her lap and cried with her.

“It don’t mean he don’t love you, Miriam,” Ma said, stroking Mim’s head.

“Ma,” Mim said. “He’s off the deep end, just like Agnes. He just burned up three hundred dollars.”

Ma’s hand left Mim’s shoulder and clutched the side of the table. “Three hundred dollars,” she said.

“You see him, Ma,” Mim said. “He just sets and does nothin’. Nothin’ but snap and growl. He’s not himself at all. It’s the auction yesterday’s the last straw.”

“Well,” said Ma, “well.” And painfully she took herself back to her chair and settled into it. “It don’t run in our family, bein’ crazy. But then it don’t run in our family, givin’ everythin’ in sight away, neither.” She shook her head. Mim and Hildie were swallowing their sobs, watching Ma. It seemed as if, from the wisdom of her age, she were about to pronounce an answer that would shake the house on its foundations, shake it into order. But all she said was, “With a little luck, it’s the tone and not the other. With a little luck, he’s just a gettin’ stirred up.”

“He was ever stirred up over somethin’,” Mim said.