The Auctioneer (15 page)

“Joanie,” Mim whispered. “Tell me what happened to Molly Tucker’s boy.”

“He drownded in the well,” said the child, with a hard frightened stare. “The little one.”

“But why?” Mim asked.

The four smaller children huddled behind Joan ready to skitter away like beetles if Mim moved. Jonathan sucked his thumb and Mim could hear the clicking sound.

She stumbled out to the truck in front of Jerry’s gun, rubbing her face. The thin dogs crouched growling on either side of the door, ready to leap if she should decide to come back.

There was a new brown Crew Cab pickup in front of Linden’s. It turned out to be Ezra Stone’s. The jangle of bells when Mim opened the door made Ezra look up from the fishing tackle at the back of the store, and she met his yellow eyes full on across the shoulder-high rack of cupcakes and potato chips. Without greeting her, he went back to fiddling with the boxes of fishing hooks.

“Where’s Hildie?” Fanny asked, and Mim turned to find her sleepy blue eyes uncharacteristically awake.

“Home with Ma and John,” Mim answered.

“Oh,” said Fanny, and her eyes went back to sleep. “What’d you get into?”

“Poison ivy up to the top of the pasture by the gravestones,” she said.

“All by yourself?”

“All by myself,” Mim said. “Some people ain’t got the sense they was born with. I need some calamine.”

Fanny opened a glass cabinet over her head and rummaged.

“You got any bottles smaller than a dollar?”

“Nope,” Fanny said.

Mim hesitated, fingering the dollar bill in her pocket. “Been to any auctions lately?” she asked softly.

“Oh they’re still goin’ strong,” Fanny said. “They move them into Perly’s barn when the weather’s foul, is all.” Mim thought her eyes flickered at Stone in the back of the store. “But me, I mind my own business. Run the store the way I always done and mind my own business. She plunked the bottle of chalky pink liquid down on the counter. “That’ll be a dollar.”

Mim stood at the counter. She didn’t want to go. “Any news?” she asked. “I ain’t been to town in ages.”

“Yeah, thought maybe you was gone, too,” Fanny said.

“Too?”

“Lot of people movin’,” Fanny said. “Guess maybe it’s the times.” But she took a big bag and put a
Boston Globe
in along with the calamine.

Mim opened her mouth, but Fanny said softly, “Yesterday’s. We been all through it. You was askin’ after news.”

John took the paper immediately and went to work on it, starting at page one. He read laboriously, shaping his lips around the words and rereading each sentence. When it got dark, he spread the paper out on the table, brought the kerosene lamp up close, and went on reading. Ma had them pull her chair up to the table so that she could work 011 the back half of the paper. John told Mim about anything that interested him as she moved around him, tending to the fire, chopping onions and potatoes for the soup, admiring the fragile edifices Hildie was erecting with the kindling.

“You know that lot of forest fires in California?” he asked. “It says here, ‘Over eight hundred homeless. The American Red Cross, with the aid of the citizens of nearby communities, is providing food, clothing, and temporary shelter. Three hundred fully equipped mobile homes are being transported to the area.’ ” He stopped with his finger under the last word. “They just give them to them?”

“Anybody give you one, son,” said Ma, “you’d be givin’ it away again the followin’ Thursday. ‘Sure. Sure. Help yourself. Take it away. Me? My child? My wife? My old Ma? The silver linin’s all we need.’ ”

Still holding his place with his finger, John looked up at his mother. The lamplight under his chin deepened the lines in his face and seemed to bend them grimly downward. “You got complaints, Ma?” he said. “You got complaints about the way I been keepin’ you these ten years?”

She said nothing more. She bent over the classified pages with her magnifying glass, commenting occasionally on the outrageous price that someone wanted for a used upright piano, or a pickup truck with a plow on it. Eventually it was she who found an ad with a Harlowe telephone number.

Under
Machinery, New and Used:

Secondhand Farm Machinery to be auctioned off Saturday in Central N.H. Call 603-579-3485.

But when Mim leaned over her shoulder to look, what caught her eye immediately was the big ad. “Listen to this,” she cried, taking the paper from Ma. “Says ‘Harlowe, New Hampshire,’ right here.”

Perly Acres. Rolling hills, high ledge, views, fields, pasture, trout streams—preserved in all their rustic natural beauty. Enjoy the beauties of the country, the comforts of your own home, and the luxuries of the finest resort. To be developed next summer: guest lodge, ballroom, community center, movie house, pond for sailing and swimming, trails for snowmo-biling and horseback riding, ski lifts, tennis courts, golf course, even an indoor gymnasium for those “rainy days in the country.” Central caretaking services to protect your property and rent it for you summer or winter when you can’t be in residence. Expert advice and contractors available for building. Complete financing on excellent terms. Get in on the ground floor at ground floor prices. First parcels to be auctioned off this Saturday. One acre. Five acres. Twenty-five acres. Or be the aristocrats of the development and buy one of the first two authentic antique farmhouses to go up for sale. For information and a tour of the properties available, call 603-579-3485.

And then all along the bottom like a border, it says “First Ad. First Ad. First Ad. First Ad.’ ”

John took the paper from her and read it again. “Which houses? Ward’s maybe and who else’s?” he said.

“A pond?” Mim said. “And a hill for skiing?”

That night, after Ma and Hildie were asleep, John and Mim lay on separate edges of their mattress. A full moon over the pond threw a bright ell of light down the wall and across the floor. The dim blue light outlined the underwear folded in piles on a new shelf, and the jeans and shirts hanging on hooks along one wall. Mim’s face and hands and arms, a flat bright pink with calamine, glowed in the half light.

“We got ourselves, John,” she said. “And the truck and money in the jar still. All the smart ones are gettin’ out.”

“Where do you think the likes of us could go? Ain’t like we had relatives.”

“Maine, maybe? Canada?”

“How do you make out we could live without the land?

“Get jobs. Lots of people never had no land.”

“Anyplace but here we’d be outsiders.

“I could work with flowers or cook. You’re a good farmer. You’re real good with stock. You know how to run the snowplow and the grader.”

John snorted. “So does every jackass farmer’s kid in Maine,” he said. “You don’t see the jobs in Harlowe goin’ to some poor slob’s just showed up from nowhere without a penny in his pocket. Without the land, we’re nothin’. Tramps. Gypsies. They’d think we was runnin’ scared. They d guess in a minute we was runnin from the law.” The thought gave John a certain sardonic pleasure. “Not far off the mark either,” he said.

“There’s the city,” Mim said. “I bet they’re not so close with jobs in the city. Can’t be where everyone’s strangers.”

“What do we know about the city?” John asked. “And they’d see right off we wasn’t onto their way of livin. Pick our pocket, hit us over the head, stick a knife in our back. You want to bring up Hildie in the city?”

“But how will we live here?” Mim cried. “He’s got in mind to turn all Harlowe to his ends.”

“The land, Mim,” John said, reaching to touch her in spite of the ivy. “The land is all we got. And what would it do to Ma to tear her loose of it?”

“Not all your talk can change things, John. What can we do but go?” Mim sat up and her voice rose over John’s head. “They give you choices, John—your blessed land or... and her voice fell to a whisper. “Think what happened to Tuckers boy. And them with so much more than us.”

“Mim, Mim,” John said, pulling her down under the covers. “Things is things. But they can’t take your flesh and blood. And they can’t take the land, because we’re on it.”

“Words, John,” Mim said. “That’s not stoppin’ them. What is it they been doin’ all this summer and fall?”

“This is still America, Mim. They can’t. There’s limits.

“John, think. All the land that’s city now was farms one time. And somehow they made the farmers go.”

“But, Mim,” he said. “Jimmy Ward just up and left and so did Oakes. Fanny says there’s others. They’re willin’ to oblige. But ain’t nobody can sell the land out from under us. We got a deed up to Hampton says they can’t.”

“Agnes counts her children all night long,” Mim said. “And she’s on the side that’s supposed to be safe. And even Fanny’s askin’ after Hildie.”

John held Mim. The house banged and creaked and clattered as if it were full of secret footsteps. The November wind outside blew over the pond and the pasture and the stand of heavy white pine. It pulled at the shingles of the empty barn and rattled the loose sash, searching out the couple who lay in each other’s arms listening to the warm breath of the child on the floor beside them.

8

“I’m goin’ too,” Mim said.

“I’ll tell you just how it is,” John argued.

“You won’t. You’re set to stick to the land. You’ll hold back the worst.”

“It’s no day for Ma to be outside. Listen to the wind.

Ma listened silently, to her thoughts or to the wind wasn’t clear.

“Nor is it any place to bring a child,” he went on. “Think of the guns. Too many guns with tempers runnin’ high.

“And it’s you wants to say that all is well,” mocked Mim.

“It’s no place for women,” John said.

“Nor for men either, but for the ones that’s in on it, or strangers,” Mim said.

“If not for Ma, then you should stay for Hildie.”

Mim shook her head. “I have to go,” she said. “You stay.”

“Let her go,” Ma said. “And you go too. There’s not a thing that we can any of us do if they should come with their mind set otherwise.”

So Mim took Hildie by the hand and showed her the hay and the old quilts in the horse stall in the barn. “Show me how you’ll hide yourself when you hear a truck,” she said. “Hide good and don’t come out no matter who should call. Even if Ma should call. Not even if it’s your friends. Most especially, you hide good if its your friends.” She could not bring herself to mention in particular the auctioneer. “And keep a sharp ear out all day. Your grandma don’t hear as good as you.”

It was a gray day, the Saturday before Thanksgiving. The last leaves were browning in the gutter and the post office had a sheaf of Indian corn hanging on the door. There weren’t nearly as many people at the auction as there had been in high summer. No children at all. No balloons or sneakers with stars, and nothing resembling a red wagon. The people waiting were mostly leathery men in overalls, smoking, each alone.

“They’re comin’ from all over the state for that machinery,” Mim said.

Near the bandstand were three tractors, a small house trailer, three pickup trucks, four old station wagons, and a Volkswagen.

John took Mini’s arm just above the elbow and steered her where he wanted her to go, holding on a bit too tight. They passed two milking machines, three wood ranges, their own water pump, an oil furnace, four chain saws, and finally, neatly loaded in a sagging hayrack, a winter’s supply of firewood.

“Wood,” Mim said.

“Maybe they got heat,” John said.

Mim shook her head. “Stoves must be gone,” she said.

There was a haphazard but distinguishable circle of Harlowe men roaming like sheepdogs around the area of the auction. They moved tensely and startled easily. Most of them kept their hands in their pockets near the guns Mim knew were hidden under their jackets. John and Mim never caught anyone’s eye head on, but often they caught a deftly shifting glance.

“They’re on the squeamish side, the lot of them,” Mim said, rubbing at her raw face. “They want us home.”

“It’s a public auction,” John said.

Wouldnt you think, Mim murmured, “everyone would see that somethin’s mighty queer?”

“They see all right. You think they come all alone and stand so quiet because they find it comfortable? But the stuff is cheap.

“They know it’s cheap and cheap because there’s somethin’ not quite right.” John looked at the strangers so like himself. “They figure it couldn’t smell all that bad or the state would step in to stop it. It will too. It’s damn well got to.”

“Wish it’d hurry up,” Mim said.

The door to the old Fawkes place opened behind the high chain link fence Perly had erected. The auctioneer strode out of his gate and across the green with Dixie, followed at a tactful distance by Gore and Mudgett. He took the steps to the bandstand two at a time, then leaned over the railing of the bandstand sizing up the people spread out below him. Mim shuddered as the dark eyes raked across the place where they stood and followed through to where the deputies roamed at the edges of the crowd.

The wooden chairs were out, of course, but only a few couples sat down, some of them summer people Mim recognized. Most of the men stood around the edges, as if their presence there were tentative, or only incidental.

Perly climbed to his place and rapped his gavel. Dixie traced two circles near him and plopped herself down with a sigh. This was no crowd for banter or joviality. Perly read off the specifications in a grave voice and offered short-term guarantees on almost everything. He did not hurry. Nor did the farmers hurry. The auction moved at a subdued and orderly pace, even cautiously, without excitement. Ezra Stone and Ian James followed up each sale, negotiating with the new owners about papers and signatures and checks. By eleven-thirty, everything was sold except the oil furnace. “That’s it,” he said. “Though I am going to feel a personal sense of failure if I can’t interest a single soul in this prize oil furnace. What with all the craze round here for antiques, I can’t rightly figure why no one wants this genuine ancient article.” There was a ripple of laughter through the crowd. Perly looked out over them and smiled. “Thank you all for coming,” he said and walked quickly down the stairs and into the crowd, where he was immediately flanked by Gore and Mudgett.