The Auctioneer (8 page)

Mim whirled and ran down the stairs, practically stumbling over Gore, who was still lumbering down the last few steps, carrying the cumbersome dressing table ahead of him.

As Perly helped Gore lift the dressing table into the van, Mim walked back through the house and stood watching from the kitchen door. Then, while Gore padded the table with the old quilts and tied it securely, Perly walked back up the stone path toward Mim. He opened the screen door and walked in, forcing Mim to retreat. He looked around the kitchen. “I thought Id say hello to Mrs. Moore,” he announced. “She’s something of a favorite of mine.”

“She’s not up to company,” Mim said loudly.

“Mim,” he said. She stood with her back to the wall, and he planted himself before her, leaning slightly so that she could feel his coiled tension like the heat waves rising from the pasture in summer. “Does it mean so much to you? I know the pleasuies of a dressing table to a good-looking woman. But there are other things-better schools for Hildie, year-round church, more ready cash, more comforts... I know what I want.

Mim could not move without flailing out at the man and making him back off, and she trembled from the effort of suppressing her need to do so.

“Comfort,” he said almost fiercely. “You’ve never known much comfort, have you, Mim?”

Mim raised her eyes to Perly’s, blue and defiant.

Perly dropped his gaze to Mim’s hands, pressed flat and angry against the wall behind her. Slowly he raised his eyes to Mim’s again, his face curling into lines of pleasure, perhaps of triumph. “You and I will have to get together someday, Mim,” he said. “I admire a woman with grit.” Then, with his own glittering stillness, he held Mim motionless against the wall while the clock in the kitchen chimed over and over again. When she dropped her eyes, he moved quietly away.

After the truck began to move, Mim slammed the kitchen door and leaned against it, the chipped enamel on the panels cool against her face.

Gradually, she began to hear Ma’s calls, and realized that they had started even before Perly left.

She came to life abruptly and lunged into the living room. “Where’s John?” she shouted at Ma. “Where is he?”

Ma was standing up halfway across the room. She had abandoned the chattering television set and begun the journey toward the kitchen. “What right had you, you fresh miss?” she hissed. What right had you? This is my house and I had things to say to that man.”

“What can you want to say to him?” Mim asked. “What can a body say? He don’t care—”

“No. That’s what,” Ma said. “No. No. No. Not the pair of you together can muster an ounce of gumption. Give the man a chance. You never said a word to hint you wasn’t just as happy to give away your dressin’ table. You never-”

“It’s not the dressin’ table, Ma,” Mim screamed. “I don’t give a hoot about the dressin’ table.” She turned abruptly and sat down on the piano bench with her back to Ma, staring at the dusty keys that no one knew how to play any more.

Ma sighed. “Miriam dear,” she said. She turned and hobbled back to her couch. She settled herself with a cushion against the small of her back and her bad leg up on the stool. Then she said, “Was a weddin’ present from your mother, if I remember right.

Mim nodded.

“Such a pretty thing you was,” Ma said. “A dressin’ table she gave you. This was a mean place for the likes of you.

“It was not,” Mim said crossly, standing up and walking to the window so that she looked out over the green lawn, the stretch of garden yellow with the first marigolds and zinnias, the ribbon of field where they used to pasture the work horses, and then the pond, blue beneath the summer sky. “My mother never had a scrap of sense.”

“Perly ain’t the kind would of gone off with it, child, if you’d let him know.”

“He knows, Ma,” Mim said, her voice rising. “He knows. John told him. I told him. You just wait. He won’t stop.” She started out the front door, but banged back in to say, “All you can do is run, Ma. There are people like that. Either you give in or you run.”

Mim ran out and up the path to the garden to face John. He stopped work and stood grasping the shaft of the hoe tightly with both hands. He watched Mim come and thought about catching her at the waist and shaking her until her waywardness came loose like chaff. But when she was near, running the tips of her fingers over Hildie’s face and hair, watching him warily, he took his hoe to the soil again. He would have touched her then, for his comfort and hers, but it seemed a difficult thing to do.

Alone in the house, Ma sighed. “It’s that crazy streak comin’ straight down the line from her ma.” She settled back to catch the last wisps of her program. She had missed the whole scene where the doctor told Angela that Dirk had leukemia. And now, in the last few minutes, Angela was staring wildly, balling up a handkerchief, screaming, “No! Oh, no, no, no!”

“You’ll pay worse if you try to say no,” Mim said, scraping her chair back from the supper table and stamping to the sink.

“If I’d spent my life doin’ what other people had in mind for me, I wouldn’t be settin’ here right now and neither would you,” Ma said. Ain’t nobody goin’ to tell me to give away nothin’ I prize.”

“He’s not tellin’ you, Ma. He’s makin’ you.”

“He’s just doin’ his job. There’s never any harm in askin’. But you needn’t keep answerin’ the call. If you was a real Moore, you wouldn’t be so eager to give away our belongin’s.”

“I’m a Moore as much as you,” Mim said. “It’s you that’s on his side, refusin’ to see what he is.”

All week the women wrangled, while John sat, sometimes with his head buried in his arms. When he could stand it no longer he shouted and they sulked in silence.

At night, after they were alone in bed, he pressed himself on Mim. “What happened with him? What did he do?”

“It’s not the table, Johnny,” Mim said. “And it’s not the fact he took it. It’s what he is all through. He just made that clear as clear.”

“Well tell him no,” John said, “both of us—no bickerin’ this time to let him get his way.”

“You can’t, Johnny,” Mim said. “You can’t just tell him no. He’ll bring a world of trouble down on us.”

“I can tell him what I please.”

“Johnny, give him something. For me. Give him something. Hold him off. It can’t go on for long.”

“Funny how it’s all gone sour,” John said. “Even his way with Hildie. I hate it when he swings her up like that.”

Just give him something, John. The extra bed in Hildie’s room. Promise me. Just one thing every week to hold him off. Promise me.

But John made no promises. He touched his wife and when she clasped him harshly to her, hiding her face against his neck, the excitement rose in him quicker than his habits said it should. And nothing was clarified.

On Thursday, John checked the guns—the shotgun and the .30-’06—and the square steel box of ammunition. Dull with dust, they lay side by side in plain sight on the top shelf in the pantry back of the kitchen. He didn’t jar them. They looked as comfortable and natural as the tall glass jars of flour, sugar, corn meal, and dried beans. He turned away and went upstairs. From the doorway of Hildie’s room, he pondered the extra bed. It was a rather plain but pretty rock maple bed exactly like Hildie’s. The two beds used to belong to his parents. He must have been conceived on one of them.

Finally he went out to the barn and started the tractor. Up in the cornfield, he ran it back and forth cultivating between the rows under the hot morning sun until he was bathed in sweat. The hours of work had not helped him to any decisions when he saw Hildie race down the path from the back door and stand by the road watching.

It was not the bright yellow truck that he had expected that rolled down the hill and into the yard, but Cogswell’s dusty old Chevy pickup. John covered the field in long strides and joined Hildie.

Cogswell got out of the driver’s side and faced John without a smile or a word. Red Mudgett climbed out of the other side and came around to join the pair of neighbors. Mudgett was wearing the gun again.

Before any of them spoke, the front door opened and Ma appeared. Leaning on both canes, she began to struggle down the rough stone steps.

“I ain’t a goin’ to let you get away this time, Mickey Cogswell,” she called.

Cogswell and John jumped to help Ma out to the single wooden chair sitting in the middle of the lawn.

Hildie danced with delight to see her grandmother outside, and Mim came slowly down the path from the kitchen and stood by John.

“Now, Mickey,” Ma said. “You set right down here in front of me. Me and you’s goin’ to have a talk.”

Cogswell hesitated a moment, glanced at Red Mudgett, then grinned at Ma and folded his long body up like an Indian on the lawn at Ma’s feet.

“And you, Red,” Ma said to Mudgett. “You set too. You make me nervous jerkin around like that. Just as antsy now as you was at eight.”

Mudgett laughed quickly, then squatted on his haunches. He was small and wiry. He watched the old woman with small black eyes that seemed to have no need to blink.

“Now just suppose you tell me, Mickey, what you’re doin’ here,” Ma said.

“Collectin’ for the auction, ma’am,” he said.

She shook her head. “You been involved in some hare-brained schemes in your day, Mickey,” she said. “I keep expectin’ you to make good, everybody’s favorite like you be. How come you keep doin’ such crazy things?”

“That’s what my wife keeps askin’,” Mickey said. “Must be I was born under the wrong star.”

“What if I was to tell you we got nary a stick left we care to part with?”

“I wouldn’t do that, ma’am, if I was you. You can give a little somethin’ this week, a little maybe next week.” Mickey picked up a stone and tossed it into the road, then looked up at Ma.

“If this is Perly Dunsmore’s little project, how come he ain’t here hisself?”

Mickey shrugged. “It’ll all be over pretty soon, Mrs. Moore. Why make trouble?”

“Trouble,” Ma said. “It’s you that’s maltin’ trouble.”

“I think I been a decent neighbor,” Mickey said, pulling at the grass between his knees. “I wouldn’t tell you what I didn’t think was right.”

“Right!” cried Ma.

“Well, smart then,” Mickey said.

“Smart,” Ma said, making room for Hildie beside her in the broad chair. You tryin’ to tell me it’s smart to give away what’s mine? It ain’t even natural. And as for you, Red Mudgett, you was always playactin at somethin. Now tell me is it cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers with that gun—”

“Mickey,” Mim said, stepping closer. “Take the extra bed in Hildie’s room.”

Mudgett jumped up like a released jack-in-the-box. “Where’s that?” he asked.

Cogswell followed more slowly. “That’ll make another week chalked off,” he said to Mim, nodding gravely.

John turned abruptly and went into the barn, leaving Ma to watch the two men load the bed frame and spring into the back of Cogswell’s truck. They left the mattress behind, explaining that it was illegal to sell mattresses. Cogswell left Mudgett tying the bed into the truck, and went over to Ma. “Everything will work itself out, Mrs. Moore,” he said, touching her hand.

“That’s the last thing,” she said, clutching the arms of the chair. “The very tail end of it. You hear me, Mickey Cogswell?”

“Maybe,” Mickey said. “Try not to fret.” He turned away from Ma and went into the barn. John was sitting on a sawhorse in the corridor between the stalls.

Cogswell said nothing. He stood waiting for John to turn.

Finally John looked up and said, “I didn’t know you was so thick with Red.”

Cogswell shrugged. “You think I take to it? It’s me has to ride around with him all day.” Cogswell kicked at a post as if to test it, then leaned against it, tipping his head back wearily. “Never mind,” he said, pulling the flask from his back pocket and offering it to John. “They’re goin’ to round us up one of these days real soon and put a bullet through our heads.”

John shook his head. “Who is?”

Cogswell shrugged again. “I don’t know, exactly,” he said. “If I knew I might just liquor up a bit and turn myself in. Oughta be the state troopers, but I don’t know. There was a trooper I didnt know at Mudgett’s when I picked him up this morning. And that same one and another one was comin’ out of the old Fawkes place, I think it was last Tuesday. Makes you wonder. There’s some money kickin’ around in this, and I for one ain’t seein all that much of it.”

“Old Ike Linden, he in on it?” John asked.

“Who knows?” said Mickey. “I don’t collect from him myself. But Perly has this big thing about privacy. We ain’t supposed to say who gave what, or even who we asked. I think there’s some he even leaves alone. Like Ike, maybe. He’s not one you’d want against you. But I can’t see him gettin’ into the kind of pickle I’m in neither.” Cogswell shook the liquor around in his flask. It was nearly empty. “It can’t go on. Somebody—some head guy some-where’s bound to catch on and put the lid on the whole thing.”

John studied the flask in Cogswell’s hand. “The thing is,” he said slowly, “who?”

“I wish I knew,” Cogswell said, his voice unsteady. “All I know is every blessed plan I get myself roped into turns out dumber than the last. This one’s like to be the end of me.”

“Me too,” John said with a short laugh. “I can’t even get together with Mim on this one.”

Cogswell cocked an eyebrow. “She’s smart,” he said. “Always was.”

“What if I just tell you and Mudgett to get the hell off my property?”

“Well,” said Cogswell, “if that snake out there don’t get you now, then...” He turned and started out of the barn. “Oh hell.”

“Then what?” asked John, starting up after him.

Cogswell stopped but didn’t turn. “Emily Carroll went out of control on Route 37 night before last,” he mumbled.

“She had an accident?” John reached for Cogswell’s shoulder to hold him. “Bad?”

“She’s on the danger list,” he said, turning. “Her back or something.”

“Emily Carroll! She’s got four kids—”

“Five,” Cogswell said. He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his face.

John watched. “But these things happen,” he said quickly. “You make it out an accident, don’t you?”