The Auctioneer (16 page)

He headed, at a leisurely pace, toward his house, allowing himself to be stopped by various people who had bought things. When he passed the Moores, who were staring at him as if they themselves were invisible, he stopped so abruptly that Gore walked right into him.

“Nice to see you folks out,” he said. “Haven’t seen you in a dog’s age. How’s your mother?”

“Goods can be expected,” John said, glancing sideways at Perly.

Mim stepped back a pace and looked down past Dixie to the hard ground, her face flooding uncontrollably with color.

“Maybe I’ll be by next week to see for myself,” Perly said, waiting for Mim to glance up. When she did, he nodded seriously as if to confirm some carefully negotiated bargain. “Yes,” he said, “I’ve missed my friend Hildie. An old bachelor like me gets very attached to little girls.”

John and Mim waited in the truck. Even before the people from the morning auction had packed up their machinery and driven off, a new set of cars was pulling in around the green-foreign sports cars this time, polished hard-top convertibles, and family-sized station wagons. A big Travelall pulled up in front of the Moores’ truck. All four doors opened at once and four boys went tearing across the green toward the bandstand. A paunchy father trudged along after them, hugging a football to his chest and scowling at the sky.

At one o’clock exactly, by the clock on the half-finished church steeple, Perly reappeared on the porch of his house, paused to look over the situation, then headed across the empty Parade. He was wearing a black suit and a metallic gray tie that caught the wind and blew over his shoulder as he moved easily toward the bandstand. Gore ambled after him wearing a hunting jacket over his usual denims, and carrying a square black briefcase.

The cars began to empty out with a slamming of doors, and people filled up the green—families and older couples mostly, with a few clusters of young people in faded blue jeans and long hair. The strangers, many of them carrying blankets against the chill of the day, sat obediently on the chairs set out for them. Perly stood at the base of the bandstand watching until a fair crowd was assembled, then he climbed up onto the bandstand, opened the briefcase on the railing in front of him, and once again squinted out over the heads of the people as if searching the distance—for whales on the horizon, perhaps, or enemy ships, or help.

Then, as if he had found what he was looking for, he broke into a broad smile that swallowed up the disconcerting eyes and turned him into any big well-put-together deeply tanned American businessman. “This is one very special group,” he said, his voice deep and restrained. “A mighty fine-looking group of people. Take a look around you, my friends. See that couple next to you? That handsome happy well-heeled couple? Well, if you buy land today, your son may marry their daughter. Makes you stop and think, doesn’t it?”

Perly’s voice began to rise and fall in singsong cadences, and people stared at him, compelled, as if, before their very eyes, the strange dark man were taking on a gloss and brightness that they dared not turn away from. “I can see it,” he went on. “This crowd here has got the makings of a community you’ll be proud to be a part of. I can see it.” He paused and each person watching felt his own gaze reflected in the speaker’s eyes. “You,
you
are the first,” he said. “The very beginning. The pioneers. The bold ones. The grain of mustard seed from which the kingdom shall arise. And, within a year, I promise you, there will be a kingdom.”

Perly threw back his head on his strong neck and laughed. The crowd spread out on the green stirred as if with bad conscience. “Perly Acres is going to be known from Maine to Florida as the most desirable, the most exquisitely preserved, the best-regulated, the safest, the most-coveted little piece of paradise on the east coast of these United States of America.”

Perly took a breath and continued in a lower, more matter-of-fact voice. “Now I hope that each and every one of you was chalking up the mileage and measuring out the minutes it took you to get up here today. Why, we’re so close to Boston, you can just meander on up here for a swim and an hour or two of that friendly country feeling if a Sunday afternoon is all the freedom you allow yourself in a week. If you want to, you can leave the wife and kids up here for a week or a month or all year long.

You’re a free man. You’ll know they’re safe and healthy and well looked after in the country. And we’re so close you can check in any time you feel the need.

“I promise you. One year from today you’ll be toasting yourselves with champagne for being the first to get here. For being at the head of the line. For being the ones to cash in on the good old American way: first come, first served. In a year you’ll be laughing when the fat cats offer you twice what you pay today. Everyone knows there’s no investment like land. Any land. But this here is special land, Perly land. I promise you. The world will be your oyster. They’re going to put Perly Acres on the map and embroider it in gold.

“Now a lot of you are already chomping at the bit to buy—the ones who’ve been around with my agents to see the parcels. But, let me warn you. Don’t you buy unless you’re head over heels in love. Because, if you don’t fall in love this week, we promise you, you will next week, or the week after that. Because that’s the first thing we’re offering—though it’s only the beginning—a piece of land so sweet, so seductive, it’ll do things for you your first sweetheart wouldn’t.”

Again Perly stopped and centered himself on his toes, then began again in a deeper, more sober register. “If you want to see the site of the recreational facilities before you lay out cash, come back in a month. By that time, the present owners should be gone and the land freed up for us. But, believe me, my word is gold. And that is the prettiest piece of land of all. That’s why we’re saving it—so the entire community can partake of it together. It’s better than bread and wine. It’s right on a pond with a barn that’s going to make a dandy recreation center, a steep pasture behind will make you swoon if you’re a skier, and acres and acres of woods for snowmobiling and cross-country skiing. It’s even got an enchanted forest—pines big enough to keep you hidden if you want to see the fairies dance. In a few weeks too, we’ll have the roads bulldozed through all the parcels, and you’ll be able to drive right up to every single lot.

“But just keep this one hard fact in mind. The whole world is already waking up. Millions of people are realizing that they lost something priceless when they left the countryside. And they’re coming back in droves. Land around here has quadrupled in value in the last ten years. When people see what we’re up to here, when they smell that air, feel those rolling fields swelling beneath them, they’re going to quadruple the value again in as many weeks. If you wait, you may find yourself in a duel to the death with someone who’s fallen as hard as you have for that little homestead of your dreams. If you buy now, you’re just paying for the land. All the frills—the recreational facilities, the true old country community—they’ll all come along to you as a free bonus, a bonus because you were the ones who had the vision to be pioneers.

“And let me tell you something about what made our forefathers great. Until you’ve pioneered on a piece of land of your own, you don’t know what life is. You don’t know the rush of sap in the veins that comes of having roots. You don’t know the sense of power that comes from making your own mark. And when I say land, I don’t mean a naked quarter acre in suburbia. I mean wild land—land without a human mark, land where you still hear the fox’s mating call, land where you lose yourself without a compass, land that’s dark at noon. That’s land where anything can still happen—anything at all. Until you’ve taken up an ax and bent your back to marking the wilderness with your own name and labor, you don’t know what it feels like to be a man. And you don’t begin to understand what made America great. We have out here in the country a quality of life, something that money can’t buy, something more important than a new automobile or a new TV or something you’re trying to get for your house. Something we call freedom. We call it opportunity. And it’s a spirit we’ve had from the beginning.” Perly finished with his head thrown back and a high half smile on his face. He ran his hand through his dark hair and bowed his head a moment, collecting himself. The crowd barely stirred.

“And then there’s financing,” he said quietly. “Forget the bank. If you’ve tried to buy land, you know you can’t get a penny from the bank, not for land, and only a pittance for a second home. There’s one thing past for good, traded in for all our speed and luxury, and that’s the right to a homestead just for the working of it. But here’s what we’re offering you right here today—the chance to buy land, and even a ready-made house if you want, for just thirty percent down.”

Perly raised his right hand and brought his palm down on the railing of the bandstand with a thump that made the whole fragile edifice shudder. “And now for Parcel Number One,” he cried. “Are you ready? Who is it going to be? Number One. Numero Uno, the very first, the Christopher Columbus of Perly Acres. The beginning of a whole new way of life.”

He looked down into his briefcase. “Now this house—and I know some of you have already been up to look at it—is the quaint gabled authentic nineteenth-century house up on what we call Gable Ridge Road. The very road is named after the house that can be yours.”

“It’s Ward’s all right,” John said.

Perly looked up. “Now this comes complete with twenty-five acres, most of it in open fields and woods, alive all summer long with wild flowers and butterflies, so pretty it’ll take your breath away. This is a house that’ll do it. This is a house that’ll set your head to spinning like it hasn’t since your eighteenth birthday. If you want to spend all your time outdoors, this is for you. Unlike most of what we’ll be offering, this house is completely furnished. The living room and kitchen done over just this year. The owner had a hunch he was going to sell and wanted to get the best possible price. So now, folks, who’s it going to be?”

Bidding began. It moved slowly. Couples consulted with each other between bids, and several men had out pencils and paper. The contest narrowed, rather quickly, down to a swarthy young man in a checkered overcoat and muddy patent leather shoes, and a lean and nervous gray-haired couple.

The auctioneer paused to examine the two bidders, then he swung his eyes out over the crowd, looking for others. “The ones who buy the antique houses on the big old estates,” he said, “will be the aristocrats of Perly Acres. The lords of the manor. The squires. The true gentlemen. Once these houses are a part of our development, they’ll become a symbol—a symbol of the oldtime values we’re all working for.”

Finally, the young man gave up and the couple got the place for $53,500. The man whooped and hugged his wife, and the wind caught his soft felt hat and blew it across the green. Ezra Stone caught it and brought it back to him, along with a sheaf of documents.

Perly held an arm out to the man as he pulled a pair of plain rimmed glasses from his pocket to examine the papers. “Before you sign, maybe you want to bid on this too. I have a ten-acre parcel adjacent to what you just bought. It starts at the first stone wall below your pasture and runs down past the brook. Fine trout in that brook too. If you don’t want it, there’s others will. A level place up near the road is just made for a home site, or a person could run a road in and build with complete seclusion and a view of the brook.

“Now, for those who are worried about how to go about building a house, we have six different models you can contract with us to build for you. They run from ten to fifty thousand dollars. Or you can design and build yourself. Or you can cut down your own trees and do it the way our ancestors did.”

The young man in the checkered overcoat started bidding again and the man who had just bought Ward’s house looked distinctly uncomfortable. More people took part in the bidding now. The crowd had swelled to fifty or sixty people. The land sold finally for $5,800 to a young couple in blue jeans who looked very sober when their bid turned out to be the winning one. The new owner of Ward’s house instantly left Ezra Stone and made his way around the chairs to speak to them, while his wife stayed where she was, eying her husband’s conversation nervously.

“Five thousand dollars for ten acres,” murmured Mim.

“Five thousand, eight hundred,” corrected John.

The auctioneer sold one other ten-acre piece and then a number of smaller ones. Even the one-acre plots went for over a thousand dollars each. When he came to the other house,” he said, “Now this has some features you won’t find again in a hurry. It has the real old central chimney with four—I repeat, four—fireplaces. The one in the parlor has a priceless hand-carved mantel and hand-painted tiles. Somebody lavished a lot of love on that fireplace. Somebody knew that the hearth is the keystone that makes a strong family. And then there are some stone animal pens —a real curiosity. Wasn’t every farmer, even in those good old days, who bothered to keep his pigs and sheep in stone pens. But, here’s the best thing of all, for today’s recreation-minded families. There’s a watering hole for the cattle there—small to be sure—but plenty big enough to make a dandy swimming hole.”

“Prescott’s,” John said. “First I heard he was gone. He always cursed that chimney. Said it took up half the house.”

The auction went on. There were twenty-eight parcels sold from what were once two farms.

“Some of them must be swamp,” John said when they got to the lower parts of Prescott’s property.

“How will they know, this time of year?” Mim said.

Presently, Perly checked his papers and wound up the proceedings. “Well, now we’re all in this together, folks,” he said and looked slowly around at the intent crowd. Then, suddenly, he laughed, spreading out his arms to include the people before him. “You’re in the most exclusive company,” he cried. “I love you all and I congratulate you. Believe me, this town is going to be the biggest double-barreled front-page gilded rooster of a place you ever set foot in.”