The Auctioneer (3 page)

“Hard for me to figure people with nothin’ better to do in spring than go to auctions.”

“Well, they ain’t farmers,” Gore said. “Sets you on your heels to see all the city folk pourin’ into the Parade on a Saturday. The towns around here are growin’ all right. And even the people just drove up for a weekend can’t seem to think what to do with a Saturday. Mow the lawn, cart the garbage to the dump, complain about the bugs. What the hell? I guess Perly’s right. The auctions make them feel a part of things.”

“I can’t say the checks ain’t welcome,” John said.

“What Perly says is it’s just buyin’ and sellin’ in the best American tradition, and we give them a better show than a discount store, which is where they’d be in the city on a Saturday. Guess some people just like to part with money.”

“You plannin’ to goldplate your cruiser, or what?” John asked, unearthing an old soapstone sink and indicating that Gore should lift one end.

“Manpower,” Gore said. “I’ve got me five deputies now.”

“Five!”
John said.

“Well, like Perly says, ‘Prevention’s the best cure,’” Gore said, running his hand over the gray stone appraisingly. “I told you we got Mudgett, and now we got Jimmy Ward, Sonny Pike, Jim Carroll, and your neighbor there, Mickey Cogswell.”

“Tough lot,” John said, frowning.

“Perly says,” Gore said, looking up at John, “it’s men like that make people want to bring up their sons in Harlowe.”

John lifted his end of the heavy sink and helped Gore carry it out to the truck.

“When you goin’ to come and see our man in action?” Gore asked. He’s a regular wizard. Puts a spell on a crowd so they can’t help what they do.”

“But, Bobby,” John said, “you come to us every Thursday bustin’ at the seams with every slick thing that man’s said all week. What do we need to see him for?”

The Moores found few free moments in spring. Spring was the time when they laid the foundations for another year of living. John plowed up and reseeded the quarter of the pasture that was most grown up in hawkweed and daisies. Mim pruned and sprayed the apple trees. John harrowed and manured the garden and the new patch for the squash. And Mim and Hildie planted, pressing the seeds into the wet earth by hand. They took down the plastic covers from the windows, and hung up a swing for Hildie and an old tire. They planted flowers in front of the house and in the bigger garden across the road that they still called Ma’s garden, though now it was Mim instead of Ma who cut the flowers to sell to the church. And, of course, they milked the cows in the mornings and drove them up into the pasture, then brought them back and milked them again in the evening.

The child went with them everywhere, sitting on her own stool near them as they milked, keeping out of reach of Sunshine’s tail and asking endless questions or singing idly to herself. John and Mim listened quietly and answered when they could, resting their heads against the warm flanks of the cows and leaning into the rhythm of milking the seven cows.

They were married over a decade before Hildie was born, and the quick fair child was so unlike her parents that Ma teased her, telling her she must be the changeling child of a dandelion. John and Mim had planned a big family. It was a part of growing to put out branches, as many as possible. When they were married, the price of milk was holding and nothing seemed difficult. Even when the milk stopped paying, they would have accepted children as part of the course of things, had they come along. But, by the time Hildie was born, their plans had faded to an almost forgotten ache, not from longing for a child so much as from a sense that they had been passed over by the rhythms of the earth, like the apple tree that bloomed so prettily but could not be coaxed to bear.

John and Mim had always gone to the fields and the woods and the barn together and fallen into step like brothers to do what had to be done. And practically from the time Hildie was born, they continued their habit, taking the baby with them or leaving her sleeping with her grandmother, by then too crippled to care for a child, but able enough to ring the gong to summon them when she woke up. When Hildie was tiny, Mim carried her on her back or tethered her to a stake like a goat, and when she grew older, she seemed to stay nearby just naturally. And, in a way they hadn’t expected and never mentioned, it made them feel complete, even happy, to have the child about.

In the evening the family talked, as they did every year when spring gripped them with energy and stirrings of ambition, about tearing out the big central chimney and putting in a real bathroom with a tub and an electric hot water heater. If Mim could get a few days of cleaning for the new summer people, or sell a few more flowers—if John could get more time from the town running the grader or the snowplow, or a few more jobs helping Cogswell, then they could pay for it. That year they also talked about the auctioneer—about his plans for the town. There was an excitement to his coming that seemed of a piece with the quickening of spring. It reconciled them to Bob Gore’s visits to hear him talk about the things that were happening just beyond the edges of their farm.

“That’s what I always said,” claimed Ma. “That all them people are comin’ here on account of this is where America began. They get to see that all that fast livin’ ain’t worth the trouble it starts.”

“That’s why you watch all them jack-a-dandies on your programs like they was givin’ out the word of God,” John teased.

“And what would you have me do, with my legs no more use than two popple sticks?” Ma cried.

“If the auction checks came out to just a mite more,” Mim said, “could be we’d get our bathroom after all.”

But finally they decided, as they always did when the days grew warmer and lazier, that any change should wait until they had the money in hand.

One Saturday morning, their curiosity got the better of their list of chores. John and Mim and Hildie took a bar of Ivory soap down to the pond and cleaned up. Afterward, scrubbed from scalp to toes, they dressed to go to town—John in clean khakis, Mim in a flowered skirt and yellow blouse, and Hildie in a hand-me-down dotted swiss dress from one of the Cogswell girls. Mim gave Ma a sponge bath and helped her to pull her lisle stockings over her lumpy legs and lace up the black dress shoes.

Secretly, Mim liked going to town, but she wondered if her clothes were right, if she would say something foolish to somebody. She remembered the way people had looked at her when she first came to Harlowe, and she brushed furiously at her hair, as if that would somehow soften the laugh lines around her eyes and make her seventeen again. Now that it was too late, it would have been all right to be admired. Although she had grown up in Powlton, only one town away, she had always felt out of step in Harlowe. John did not hunt or play poker, and she, in turn, did not take part in bake sales or sewing circles. When the others her age had been raising babies, baking, and fancying up their homes, she had known only planting and milking and cutting wood. “No children,” she knew they had commented over their sewing. “Too pretty, that’s why.” Then, when the others, with children in high school, were putting in formica counters and central heat, she was finally raising a baby, continuing to cook and heat with wood, and finding things quite all right and cheaper the way they were. And, although she and John sold flowers to the church, because Ma always had sold flowers to the church, they didn’t feel the need to attend.

If anyone had asked, Mim would have said she was friends with Agnes Cogswell. In summer the Cogswells were their nearest neighbors. Two or three times a year—at least once during blueberry season and once at Christmas—Mim went over and spent a day there. And occasionally Agnes called her up with some question or tidbit of gossip. Agnes wasn’t fashionable either, though not because she didn’t try. Agnes’ problem was that she overdid everything to the point where she scared people away. But Mim, in a quiet way, appreciated her affection and enjoyed visiting in the harum-scarum household with its six noisy children.

Four abreast on the seat of the old green truck, the Moores were all silent as they rattled over the dirt road toward town— Ma with discomfort, John and Mim with their thoughts, and Hildie with eagerness. The auctions were being held on the Parade like the firemen’s auctions. Although they were early, the road that circled the green was parked solid on all four sides, and a good group of people milled around examining the things for sale clustered around the bandstand.

“Balloons!” cried Hildie, jumping ahead of the others as they walked slowly toward the auction.

There was only a smattering of Harlowe people among the summer people and strangers—little girls in pink shorts and jerseys and new sneakers covered with stars, boys in crisp new jeans sporting bright cap pistols, lean couples in baggy clothes, fat ladies with jangling bracelets, and a few serious antique dealers in dark jackets.

“Please, Papa, please,” Hildie cried. “I need a balloon.”

It was Mudgett selling the balloons. John followed Hildie and gave up the thirty cents. He made no mention of the fact that Mudgett had been gone for nearly twenty years.

“Be very careful now,” Mudgett warned. “If you let go, the balloon will float right up into the sky and disappear just like a bad child.”

Flat on his hip lay a neat black leather holster like the one Gore wore when he answered trouble calls. “You need a pistol to sell balloons, Red?” asked John.

“Never can tell,” said Mudgett and straightened up without a smile, his dark eyes dull as charcoal, his once red hair long since tarnished to brown like neglected copper.

John shook his head as they walked toward the chairs to settle Ma. “Red always had that way,” he said. “When he was in school, he just had to look at you to set you squirmin’ without half knowin’ why.”

Mim helped Ma into a chair and hooked her canes over the rungs beneath her.

“Like quicksilver with the Bible verses, that boy,” Ma said. “One look and he could rattle them off better’n the preacher. In the preacher’s way too—so close it made your flesh crawl. Oh, he was wicked fresh.”

“You still got it in for him ’cause you caught him takin’ off on you that time,” John said, grinning.

Ma shook her head. “Some boy he was. Too big for his britches even then. He was settin’ up to get out of Harlowe before he was half growed.”

“Guess he found out the rest of the world’s no different,” John said. “Don’t know of anyone glad to see him back.”

“Fanny says that girl he married’s from Manchester, and she’s showin’ already,” Mim said.

“Him a father,” John said, his foot up on the chair in front of Ma, his elbow on his knee. “God help the child. He used to have this dog. Remember, Ma? One of them black-and-white spotted hounds. He wanted that dog to be a killer. Tried and tried to make him mean. But nothin’ would do. The dog just put his tail between his legs and shivered. At school we’d all stand around, our eyes buggin’ out to watch Red punish the beast. Once in winter, he lowered the dog into the well. And once he dragged him up to the roof of the schoolhouse and let him slide down and fall. He finally killed him feedin’ him broken glass. He pulled the dog the whole way to school in a wagon so we could all see him vomit blood.”

“Well, I know other men was fresh when they was boys,” Ma said. “A baby may soften him up some. I know someone turned soft as a grape.” Her eyes darted here and there in queer contrast with her slow body. “Now you young people get over there and take a look at what’s for sale,” she said. “I see a bed frame looks quite fancy.”

So John and Mim and Hildie moved toward the bandstand and wandered among the things set out for sale.

“A heap of barns gettin’ cleaned this year,” John said.

“Why do you suppose anyone’d put this out to the barn? Mim asked, running her hand down the cornerpost of the fine spool bed Ma had spotted. It was beautifully oiled and finished. “This is a darn sight better than what I call rummage.”

Hildie found a cast-off red wagon and arranged her sturdy self in it. She ran her hand lovingly around its rusted rim. “Not even one little thing?” She pleaded, for her parents had warned her they would not buy her anything.

“Might not go for much,” Mim said.

“We’ll see,” John said, heading back toward Ma.

Hildie followed, pulling the wagon behind her. Then she set herself to kneeling in it, sitting in it, trying out the handle and all the wheels, her green balloon bobbing overhead.

A ripple of attention passed through the crowd. On the porch of the old Fawkes place stood the auctioneer. He was as tall as Gore, but trim and upright. Despite his red plaid shirt open at the neck, there was something sharply formal about his stance which set him apart from the country Saturday slackness of the people waiting for him. His features were fine and tense and his skin was burned almost as brown as his hair. He stood looking out over the crowd, his hands in his pockets. Directly over his head, elaborate carved fretwork hung from the eaves, laced in and out with thick brown stalks of wisteria. Above the porch was the central window, and higher still, at the peak of the roof, a weather vane with a lynx turning restlessly in a light breeze beneath a pointed lightning rod. At the auctioneer’s heel sat a young golden retriever, the tip of her tail moving in tentative friendliness as she waited to walk with him into the crowd.

Finally, a half smile of welcome on his lips, the auctioneer moved down his front steps, across the road, and into the crowd between his house and the bandstand.

The people were beginning to fill in the seats and to settle themselves for the auction. They opened a way before Dunsmore, and he paused to nod and shake hands with everyone from Harlowe.

When he reached the Moores, he stopped and looked at them. “The Moores, perhaps?” he said. “From up on Constance Hill?”

John looked at Mim.

“Lord sake,” Ma cried. “How’d you know that?”

The auctioneer threw back his head and laughed. “I’ve been hoping you d come. You folks do keep to yourselves. I’ve met almost everyone else by now. And I’ve heard about Hildie’s corn-silk hair.” He reached out and placed a broad palm on Hildie’s head.