The Auctioneer (12 page)

John noticed the empty holster first. Then he saw the gun. Gore wasn’t pointing it, just dangling it at his side, half hidden behind his broad thigh.

“Well,” said the auctioneer, “which of your pretty lasses will you part with?”

John stood staring down at the stone. If he bent to pick it up now, next week’s news would be that John Moore had had an accident cleaning up his guns for hunting season—never mind the fact the guns were gone.

And then the three women would be alone.

John held the fence post and looked past the men to the weathered house below to steady himself. It looked small with distance on the gray day. And in the yard, diminished too by distance, Mim stood where they had left her.

“Which ones did you say?” asked Perly.

Silently, John pointed to Moon. He leaned on the post for support as the auctioneer himself moved toward Moon, slapped her on the flank, and started her ambling easy down the field.

Gore kept watch, his feet planted wide apart, his gun tight in his hand, and his mouth half open, gasping for breath.

After that, Mudgett and Cogswell came again for a while. Mudgett led the way and Cogswell ambled after him like an enormous awkward pet. He was drinking heavily and had to be spoken to sometimes two or three times before he responded. They made two trips one week to take the entire crop of squash, and then they took the churn and separator and, finally, the rest of the cows, always a pair at a time. John and Mim worried about Hildie without the milk, but she went on thriving. They still had good vegetables, and they started eating the chickens as fast as they could, one or even two a day. “Guess they can’t take what’s already et,” Ma said.

They picked the last of the green tomatoes and hid them under the floorboards in their bedroom, then pulled up the bean and tomato stakes. They picked pumpkins and what few squash were late to ripen. They picked bushels of wormy apples. The cider press was gone, so Mim cut them up and made apple sauce from some and hung the others on strings from the rafters in the attic to dry. They put plastic over the windows of the front room and the kitchen. And every day they went into their woods and cut a load of firewood. John got up on the roof with a burlap sack full of bricks on the end of a rope and cleaned the chimneys, and together they emptied the traps behind the stoves.

It was too cold now to bathe in the pond. Instead, on Saturday afternoons, they heated three big kettles full of water and poured them into the galvanized tub. Ma got the first bath, than Hildie, and finally Mim and John. Mim heated a bowl of water and, scolding and coaxing, washed Hildie’s bright thin hair.

The leaves began to fall from the trees and everything seemed to move closer to the house—the pond, and the pines where the road opened up, and the edges of the pasture. Mim brought the old wooden lawn chair into the kitchen so that Ma could sit in the kitchen comfortably.

John went and told the doctor’s wife he didn’t have the cows any more.

“Why is everyone giving up cows?” Mrs. Hastings asked. I see Lovelace and Rouse don’t have theirs any more either. I hear they’re being sold at the auctions. You must be getting a fine price.”

John stood before her thinking of the check for five dollars he d gotten the week before for two good milkers.

“Well, I guess it wasn’t that much we paid you,” she said with a touch of irritation. “It was good butter, I’ll say, but I guess it just isn’t worthwhile any more.”

“The doctor,” John said, “he must know what’s going on. All the...”

“What?” said Mrs. Hastings. “Inflation? If it’s Harlowe and this auction business you mean, I have to tell you right out we never could understand what makes you people tick. How can anybody hope to understand people who won’t raise a finger to better themselves? It’s just like the butter problem. Nobody even wants to do an honest day’s work any more.”

The tall woman opened the back door and stood brooding at John, waiting for him to leave.

John paused in the doorway, meeting the contempt in her gaze.

“Ma’am,” he said, “for all your fancy schoolin’, ain’t much you do understand.”

After Hildie was in bed, John poured the money out of the crockery jar over the sink and counted it, as he did at least once a week. “A hundred seventy-three,” he said. “And a hundred in the bank.”

They had never been so low going into winter. “Six dollars a month for a phone what never rings,” he said. “Don’t suppose they’ll be askin’ me to run the snowplow neither.”

“What if there’s an accident?” Mim said.

“A phone ain’t that much help,” Ma said. “We got along without a phone happy enough when Johnny was a boy. Some things we can do without.”

There was an unaccustomed peace in the house. Ma had stopped complaining. She lived on her couch as if it were an island. She slept there at night near the warm stove, and in the mornings she made room for Hildie and the two of them played “Let’s pretend,” or told stories about when Grandma was a little girl—stories Hildie could soon tell as well as her grandmother. They cut up ten-year-old magazines from the barn and pasted them together in new ways with flour and water paste. Sometimes they watched
Sesame Street
together, and for a week Ma worked with her stiff hands sewing together two puppets from quilting scraps the auctioneer had overlooked.

“I ’most wish she’d start in to meddlin’ again,” Mim said.

“Makes her seem old, don’t it?” John said. “To take it all so peaceable like it’s nothin’ to do with her. But she was always that way. It struck home with her, his pullin’ a gun on me. Time will tell how peaceable she is at heart.”

Hildie was not always so cooperative. She hated to leave her warm corner to go with John and Mim into the woods for firewood. She whined and complained until Mim screamed at her and she threw herself on the floor and cried. Each morning they headed into the woods in silence, John carrying Hildie on his shoulders, still pouting and working hard to shiver.

John would notch a tree with the chain saw. Mim would set Hildie firmly out of the way. Then, while John sawed through the heavy trunk, Mim put pressure on the wedge to make sure the tree fell where they intended. The trees seemed incredibly long stretched out on the ground. Mim limbed them with the ax, and John, measuring with a pole, sawed them into nine-foot lengths. Together they lifted them onto the wood sledge. And when they had a load, they hitched up the tractor and dragged it back to the woodshed. After the snow came and there was little else they could do, they would split the big sections, then cut the green wood into eighteen-inch lengths and pile it in the woodshed, in a separate pile from last year’s dry wood.

“Best we saw it up this week,” Mim said one Tuesday. “You wait. He’ll be after the saws this time.”

“Not the saws,” John said. “I draw the line at the saws.”

“When you didn’t for the cows?” Mim asked.

The next day, without splitting the logs first as they usually did, and without discussing what they were doing, they spent a long day, each using one of the chain saws, cutting the wood to lengths. And on Thursday John let the saws go with barely a glance. After that there was no point to going into the woods, so they spent the week splitting the wood and piling it.

John climbed up and put a patch on the tin roof where it was rusted through, and Mim dug a barrel of potatoes from the icy soil, packed them in straw, and rearranged the cellar to hide them behind an empty set of shelves. They continued to cook and can the last late pumpkins and some chard. They drew Ma’s couch up closer to the parlor stove, and kept a fire going in the kitchen range all day. Hildie drew patterns in the first frost on the windows, and they all kept a lookout for the first snow.

Hunting season started on a Tuesday. Cars lined the road, some of them with out-of-state plates. Hildie stood on a box at the window watching the silent red figures moving in and out of the woods. Hildie was not allowed out of the dooryard, and the grown-ups stayed in, occasionally answering the summons of a stranger asking if he could park in the yard. From time to time, the}- heard the hard flat report of a single shot in the woods.

On Wednesday night, they woke to rifle shots nearby—a dozen of them and so close together they had to be made by several guns. Hildie came into her parents’ room, dragging her blanket. “Mama,” she whispered. “Do the hunters come at night?”

“Sometimes, Hildie. If they want to shoot a deer too scared to run,” Mim said, straining her ears toward the dark woods. “There, lovey, don’t you be frightened,” she added, but she wasn’t sure whether it was she or the child who was shaking. The shots had broken open a dream in which she was being hunted down. She pulled Hildie in under the covers.

But it was John who gathered the child to him and buried his face in her hair. Hildie fell back into a heavy sleep in the comfort of his arms, but he lay planning the moves he would have made if he had had his guns still, craving the shotgun very specifically. He hadn’t touched it from one year to the next; yet, as if he had carried it with him always, he could conjure up the precise heft and balance of it in his hand, the chill of the inky barrel, the smoothness of the stock.

When it became clear that John was not going to get up, Mim folded back the blankets and crept out of bed. Touching the cold plaster walls and the banister with her fingertips, and feeling for the chipped edges of the stairs with her toes, she made her way downstairs in the dark. At the door to the front room she could hear Ma’s breathing, heavy and uninterrupted and weary.

Mim stood at the foot of the stairs looking out through the glass in the front door. The sky glittered with stars and the pond was outlined like a dull pewter plate. But the land was so heavily swathed in dark that she could not see the road. They could be standing in her very yard, fooling with their jacklights and their guns, moving in that slow silent way of hunters, so as not to frighten her away from the doorway before they had a chance to paralyze her with the light and the dozen gunsights.

She crept into bed and lay with her teeth clenched to keep them from chattering, sensing in the perfect silence John’s wide eyes. She clasped his fingers where they were cupped around Hildie’s back, but he made no response. “John?” she whispered, but he made no answer. “John?” she said. “Tomorrow, can we bring Hildie’s mattress in here close to ours?”

The next day Mudgett came with Gore.

“Where’s Cogswell?” John asked as he met them in the dooryard.

“Hits the cider a mite too hard,” Mudgett said. “Makes him sentimental.”

“Can’t have no drunks on the police force,” Gore said. “It ain’t like I got a grudge or anythin’ against Mickey. But the way Perly figures it, maybe if we bust him down a bit now, we can—”

“How come,” John said, “if you’re so smart, you can’t keep the hunters in line?”

“You got any complaints?” Gore asked. He shut his heavy lips tight on whatever else he might have said and kept John well centered in the range of his small eyes. His hand fluttered restlessly near the butt of his gun in its holster.

“They was jackin’ deer up here last night,” John said.

The lines bracketing Mudgett’s thin mouth deepened and he said, “Feelin’ tender for the deer, Johnny boy?”

Moore shrugged. “Last I heard there was a law,” he said.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Gore said, straightening up with interest. “You got no idea who it was?”

“You got good reason to be nervous,” Mudgett said. He folded a stick of gum and shoved it into his mouth, dropping the wrapper to the ground. “Sam Parry got a stray shot in the shoulder walkin’ to his barn. Just missed his heart.”

John turned to Mudgett. Mudgett’s face was as grizzled and dark from outdoor living as his own. Face to face like that, John still felt the authority of Mudgett’s five-year advantage, and of his cleverness with sums. “Real sharpshooter,” he said under his breath.

Mudgett considered, chewing his gum as if it were a form of contemplation. Finally, his face cracked into a flat-eyed grin. “You got to admit,” he said, “Harlowe ain’t half so borin’ as it used to be.”

Mudgett was in high spirits. He toured the entire house and shed, taking his time, loading Gore with every last screwdriver and pair of pliers he could find, as well as the ax, the mallet and wedges, the whetstone, the scythes, the rakes and hoes. Every once in a while he stopped and laughed out loud. “Real sharpshooter, eh?”

Gore, incapacitated by his armload, kept a wary eye on John and never turned his back.

While Gore was loading the tools into the truck, Mudgett took John’s big wooden toolbox from the kitchen and practically danced into the front room. “A cuckoo clock!” he exclaimed and lifted it off the wall as Ma watched from the couch. Gore reappeared empty-handed in the doorway.

“I would just like you to know, Red Mudgett,” Ma said, struggling to stand between her canes, “that when my time comes, I am goin’ to rise up and haunt you the longest day you ever lived.”

Mudgett chuckled. “Will you look at her?” he said to Gore. Some Sunday School teacher. Nothin’ I could ever do was good enough for her. You should a seen her.” He puffed out his chest, pulled in his chin and intoned in a falsetto not unlike Ma’s, “You children just ain’t a goin’ to come to no good.” He nodded with satisfaction.

“I remember,” Gore said, making no commitments.

“And many’s the Saturday night, Bob Gore,” Ma said, “you shared Johnny’s bed with him and ate at my table—your own pa too drunk to abide you. And just you keep in mind, young man, it’s sorry luck to bite a hand that’s fed you.”

“Ain’t my idea,” Gore muttered, but Mudgett was already rushing down the front lawn to put the clock and toolbox in the truck. Gore turned to follow him, but, before he could escape, he bumped into Mudgett returning.

“All we got’s a load of scrap,” Mudgett said. “Not one decent piece.”

“Tools sell good, Red,” Gore said.

Mudgett stood in the front doorway snapping his gum. Ma’s program rattled on unheeded. Suddenly Mudgett’s dark eyes came into focus. He swept across the room and unplugged the television set so that the picture of Dr. Rebus and Susan shrank to a point and disappeared. “Grab an end, Bob,” he said.