The Auctioneer (13 page)

Gore side-stepped warily around the room, keeping John within his sights, and picked up one end of the console.

“Just hold on half a minute,” Ma cried, struggling across the room to block the door.

Gore put his end of the console down, which forced Mudgett to put his down as well.

“Ain’t nobody goin’ to just walk off with my TV set like that,” Ma said.

“Want to put money on it?” Mudgett asked.

“I’ll put money on it,” John roared. He lunged for Mudgett, but Mim caught him and stopped him momentarily.

Gore backed into a corner and, fumbling, unsnapped his holster and pulled out his gun. John shook himself free of Mim, but stood where he was, watching Gore.

Mudgett sneered, leaned over, and picked up the console himself. He was a small man and the set was so big it gave him the look of an ant struggling beneath an enormous crumb. He staggered toward the doorway where Ma stood.

“Oh no you don’t,” said Ma, but even as she spoke, the corner of the set caught her in the shoulder. She grabbed at her cane for balance, but the cane slid out sideways on the floor and tangled in Mudgett’s legs. Ma, her weight on the cane, fell headlong to the floor. Mudgett struggled, his feet encumbered by the cane and Ma’s housecoat. The television set swayed precariously. Finally, he freed a foot and groped for the floor ahead of him. When he stepped, he landed on a pile of Hildie’s marbles. His foot flew up in front of him, the television set leaped from his arms and smashed against the stairway, and Mudgett fell swearing into the debris.

“Jesus, Red,” Gore gasped, still standing in his corner watching as John lifted his mother and led her to the couch.

Mudgett picked himself up and kicked at the wreck of the television set. The glass was smashed and the cabinet broken open, revealing a tangle of transistors and tiny colored wires. Mudgett had cut his forehead and a slow trickle of blood started down beside his eye. “I’ll get you for this,” he said to John.

Suddenly Mim came running at him. “Get out,” she screamed. “Get out of here.” Mudgett stepped back to avoid her fists and sidled out the front door. “You too,” she screamed at Gore. “Get out. I just can’t stand it.”

Gore backed around the room past John and his mother and hurried down the path after Mudgett.

Mim leaned against the wall and sobbed. “I can’t stand it,” she moaned. “I just can’t stand it.” Hildie clung to her legs, crying loudly.

John looked up from his mother, his face fierce. “Then why’d you grab me when I went for him?”

Lassie came in and started to whimper.

Ma patted her hair into place as John rearranged her on the couch. “Stop that,” she said coldly, sitting bolt upright on the couch. “You stop that wailin’ this minute, the lot of you. If there’s one thing I won’t have in my house, it’s hysterical women.”

Mim and Hildie looked up, startled into silence.

“I’m quite all right, and so are you,” Ma said, smoothing her housecoat over her knees. “Quite all right.”

But that was not the end of it. For three days, Mim looked after the remnants of the household and tried to create a sense of normalcy for Hildie in the midst of a silence as unnatural as that which precedes a hunter through the woods. John sat before the kitchen range and Ma sat on her couch near the parlor stove and neither said a word.

On Sunday, John brought in a load of wood and dumped it in the woodbox behind the kitchen stove. He chose two sticks, lifted the lid on the range with the handle, and added them to the fire. Then he sat down and leaned silently into the heat once more.

Hildie was building a village in the corner with kindling chips and didn’t look up, but John and Mim heard Ma coming. She moved slowly, thumping the floor with her two canes and dragging her feet in their felt-soled slippers. She stopped in the doorway and leaned on her canes. Her gray hair stood out around her head in stiff curlicues and the rope around her flannel dressing gown was tied in a knot at the waist.

Mim brushed past her and came back with her pillows and blankets which she arranged in the lawn chair. But Ma did not take the arm she offered. She stood steadfast where she was. “I expect I can do without my television set, son,” she said, “if you can do without your ax.”

Mim glanced at John, but he watched Hildie as though his mother had never spoken.

“What’s your plan now?” Ma went on. “You figurin’ to cut down the forest with your teeth?”

Hildie came over and leaned against her father. He took her into his lap and stared at the front of the stove.

“We had bears and Indians and winters that lasted all summer. We had dry spells and floods and wicked men before too. But I don’t recall as our people ever run away before.”

“You see me runnin’, Ma?” John asked, jolting to his feet so that Hildie slid to the floor.

“Like a jack rabbit, boy,” said Ma, her hands white on the knots of her canes. “Where you think it’s goin’ to get you to?”

“Next time I’ll stand up and let him shoot me,” John shouted. “Then where’ll you be?” He yanked the door open.

Ma took a step toward him. “And that’s just another way of runnin’,” she shouted back.

He slammed out the back door of the kitchen, and Hildie, thrust to one side in his rush, began to cry. Painfully, Ma turned herself and started on the journey back to the couch.

“Stay with us, Ma,” Mim said. “You still got us.”

“We still got plenty of wood too,” Ma said, refusing Mim’s help. “And I’d as soon sit by myself. That way I’m sure of where I’m at.” Mim came back to the kitchen and took Hildie into her arms to rock. Through the window over the sink she could see John climbing quickly up the dry brown pasture in the dusk. She worried about hunters.

7

The clocks were gone and the old Moore place was silent, but every human motion seemed to mark off an interval in their inexorable approach to Thursday. The usual list of autumn chores dissolved. There were no cows to care for, no spare dollars to buy paint, no tools to gather wood or mend furniture. Even the endless knickknacks for dusting and polishing were gone. Now that the television set was gone, the Moores had the electricity turned off to conserve cash. Their routines took on a primitive rhythm which would soon have acquired a comfort of its own, had it not been jarred anew with every Thursday visitation.

Their best moments were the sleepy ones first thing in the morning when they lay on their mattress with Hildie cuddled between them, letting some time pass before they got up and ran barefoot down the icy stairs to stoke the stoves and dress, to eat oatmeal without milk, and wait for something to happen. There had always been times after the snow came when they had a few hours a day to sit by the stove and let the flurry of summertime wear off. On stormy afternoons of other years, Mim and John and Ma had played hearts in between trips to the barn. But this was different. John sat on the bench in overalls and a sweatshirt faded to pink and shrunk so that it pulled halfway up his back when he rested his elbows on the table behind him and his feet on the fender of the stove, examining day after day the dust settled into the cast iron leaves and flowers. He spent hours scraping and digging with a hunting knife at a stick of maple from the woodbox. Uneasy at his furious silences, the women avoided conversation themselves, and whole hours went by broken only by Hildie’s fantasy chatter, the settling of the fire in the stove, and the rough scratching of John’s whittling.

It was Mim who disconnected the water pump, now that they had no electricity to drive it. And Mim who went out to the bell pump behind the barn and brought in milk pails full of water, two a day for the kitchen and two to flush the toilet. And Mim who cleaned the kerosene lamp each morning. Even so, by ten o’clock most days, she could find nothing more to do. She dressed Hildie in red and led her out protesting into the cold sunshine. She sought out dandelions and dug them for the roots and drying leaves. She gathered the tubers of day lilies and dug through the garden for the last small carrots and beets. She dug chicory and gathered black birch twigs for tea. There were still chrysanthemums in the garden but she didn’t bother to cut them. “All the mums in Harlowe won’t make one decent soup,” she said.

On Sunday Hildie climbed into her father’s lap and wouldn’t budge. “I want to stay in where it’s warm,” she said, “like Pa.

“Tell her to come,” Mim said to John when she was dressed and ready to go out. “Not healthy for a child to sit all day and watch you brood.” But John looked at her as if he had not heard and kept his arm crooked protectively around the child. “Cant you do anythin’ but set?” Mim cried. * Day after day like you lost all your yeast?”

There was a silence while John rocked Hildie and Ma watched Mim from her chair at the table.

Finally Ma said, “You needn’t act like it wasn’t you first begged him to give it all away. It was you went and gave your ma’s dressin’ table, as I recall, right when John was up for sayin no.

“And what if he had, Ma?” Mim shouted. “What if he had said no? You think we’d be better off?”

Mim moved up the pasture alone, working back tears and the vision of the three sets of Moore eyes accusing her—Ma’s and John’s the color of storm clouds, John’s only more bruised.

The poison ivy in the cemetery was a deep shiny red. It lay like a flood halfway up the grave markers and sent out tentacles from under the stone wall into the pasture. It climbed around and around the trunks of the old cherry tree and coiled its way out along the branches, like snakes moving toward robins’ nests. There hadn’t been any ivy there at all when they buried Pa seven years ago. John had dug a proper grave six feet deep so the ground could never heave the coffin back. Afterward, they had taken Ma up in the tractor once a week and she had tried to get Mayflowers and sheep laurel growing on the new raw place. She knew as well as they that Mayflowers would never bloom in that high dry place, but it was a labor they could not talk her out of, as if she hoped that Pa, wherever he was, could breathe life into the flowers he had loved the best.

When, in the spring, they took Ma up to see if the Mayflowers were in bloom, they found that what had taken root was poison ivy. Ma never asked to go up again.

John didn’t care for poison ivy and wouldn’t take the scythe in there, the way Pa always had, to keep down the growth. And so the ivy and everything else ran free. Black clumps of juniper began for it to climb on, and poplar saplings took root the next spring and mixed their sticky gray-green leaves with the chartreuse of the spring ivy.

Mim had a sudden image of a new-dug grave with the ivy filling it like water in a muddy footprint. Filling it to overflowing so there was no room for the coffin. “Ma’s gettin’ old,” she murmured, but what she saw was the kind of small flat stone that said simply, “Child.”

She whirled around and examined the black verges of the forest that surrounded her on three sides. The woods on the edge of a pasture are like a window, easier to see out of than into, and she could only feel the presence of the hunters stalking silently, invisible within the dimness. High in the woods, near Cogswell’s field, there was a sheltered place between a huge seed hemlock and the flat face of a cliff, and every year the hunters left a bushel basket full of beer bottles under it. Sometimes too, working in the woods the following autumn, she and John would find a beer bottle upright on a rock, half full of rain water as if a hunter had put it down suddenly to lift the gun from across his knees and take his deer. Mim let her eyes fall down over the empty pasture toward the house and listened to the sweep of wind across the gray sky.

Then she turned and sank her gloved hands into the fiery sea of ivy, grasped all she could, and pulled it free. It snapped quite suddenly and sprang back around her body. She stepped away, leaving the ungainly mass in a heap outside the wall, and went back for more. She tore at the ivy, pulling tendrils of it sometimes twelve feet long. She pulled up the junipers and kicked at the poplars till they were bent and stripped of leaves. She worked until the ground around the gravestones was trampled and brown. Then, in three trips, she carried the pile of ivy over and dumped it in the woods. She stood over the broken brown twigs showing in the dirt. In spring they would send up wild new growth. The pruning would be like a tonic to the ivy. She stood over the cemetery too tired now to cry. All her effort, she knew full well, might ease her anger now, but it would all grow back in fresh red shoots in the renewal of spring.

Back at the house, she brought in four pails of extra water. Adding boiling water from the kettles, she washed her gloves, her wool shirt, her jeans, her socks, her jersey, and finally, with harsh yellow soap, herself.

By Thursday, when Mudgett and Gore came, the poison ivy was raging all over her arms and face. They took the water pump and roamed around looking for something more. Gore found the old wooden barrel of potatoes where Mim had hidden it in the cellar, heaved it onto his shoulder, and carried it out to the truck.

After they left, Mim stood at the sink with her back to the others in the room and indulged in the painful luxury of scratching at her face with her fingernails. Then she scrubbed her hands yet again with the yellow soap and a plastic brush. She was afraid to touch Hildie for fear of starting the plague on her, and John would not touch her even in their bed.

Finally Ma said, “Well, and just what do you plan for Christmas dinner now, missy?”

Mim turned. “There are more potatoes in the earth,” she snapped.

John sat with his feet on the fender of the stove as if the women weren’t there. The shavings he peeled from the stick fell to the floor beneath his feet. There was a long silence.

Mim stood at the sink scraping carrots. “Could we get ourselves on welfare, do you think?” she asked. “It’s hardly even shameful nowadays.”

“Since when?” Ma said. “Maybe not for folks who ain’t got sense enough to hang on to what’s theirs.”

“No one goin’ to put us on the dole when we got a stand of pine like that one east of the pasture,” John said.