The Auctioneer (18 page)

“A bit of temper shows a man’s got feelin’,” Ma said. “And selfrespect. It’s high time now he got hisself stirred up and movin’”

“You mean you see we have to go?” Mim asked in a small voice. “No!” Ma cried. “That ain’t what I mean at all. I mean its time and then some he moved hisself to put a stop to all this.”

Mim started to sob again. “It’s you is crazy, Ma,” she said.

“No ones stoppin’ you, girl. I see you jumpin’ up and down you’re so antsy. Well go, if go you must.”

“Oh, Ma,” Mim said, and turned her face to the stove, rocking over Hildie.

“Just leave me the shotgun,” Ma said, watching Mim, her eyes stormy underneath the spray of pale hair. “This land’s been Moore land since before the likes of us was born and it’ll go on bein’ Moore land after the likes of us is gone. John’s grandfather and his great-grandfather and his great-great-grandfather, they didn’t fight for this here land just to have—”

Mim lifted her head and shouted through her sobs at Ma. “Big talk, Ma. The shotgun’s gone.”

John did not come back until Hildie was in bed. When he appeared at the door, Mim left the room. His supper was on the table, though everything else was cleared, as if life had made its sweep and left him out. Ma watched him without speaking. He ate the cold pea soup and the baked potato, troubled by her silent attention. When he finished, he took his dishes to the sink, scooped up a dipper of water from the pail under the sink, and rinsed them. “Well?” he asked.

“She’s fearin’ for your mind,” Ma said. “With good reason, I say.”

John moved to the back door and looked at his reflection in the dark glass.

“That was a bad mistake about the money,” Ma said. “You got to feed a child somethin’ more than pea soup and potatoes.”

John leaned his forehead against the door and looked up through the dark toward the pasture. In the stove, the fire settled and a green stick gave a long high whistle of complaint as it hit the coals and burned.

“I’ll give you a hand to your couch, Ma,” he said.

“Take the lamp yourself,” Ma said. “I’ll manage. You go make your peace with her.”

In the bedroom, John felt Mim’s presence on the mattress, although she was so still he could not hear the rise and fall of her breath. But the sheets, when he moved between them, were warm with the heat of her body in the chill room. He lay beside her for a moment, hoping she would speak.

Then he said, the words piling high on each other with the difficulty of saying them, with the horror of having done it, “It was a bad mistake, burnin’ Mickey’s money.”

And his wife turned to him sobbing very suddenly, as though she had been crying all along and he had not been able to hear it.

9

On Tuesday at two-thirty, the Parade was deserted except for Cogswell and James, sitting on the edge of the bandstand smoking, with their feet dangling over the edge. Cogswell did not seem to notice John and Mim sitting in their truck, though James eyed them soberly. James had a thermos of something steaming. They passed the plastic cup back and forth and stared out over the empty green toward the post office. Cogswell drank from his flask and offered it to James who shook his head.

A red Mustang and an Oldsmobile were parked in front of the Moores’ truck, near the small church at the edge of the green. In each, a couple the Moores had never seen before sat waiting. After a few minutes, a station wagon with yet another couple pulled in behind them.

“Remember how we planned?” John said. “A flock of children, another barn for all the stock, more pasture clear, maybe a serious orchard. Pa would never listen.”

“There’s no need to do such things,” Mim said. “We’re all right the way we are.”

“You know your weddin’ dress?” John asked. “With the yellow flowers you embroidered on? You embroidered since?”

Mim shook her head. “Guess I’d rather be outdoors.”

“I’d like to live that long to see Hildie married in that dress,” John said. “Seemed so simple before the auctions started.”

“Not likely she’d want to wear my dress,” Mim said. “Anyhow, it was in the trunk—the one that was my mother’s. They took it with the others.”

“You just let it go?”

“It was me said let them take the attic stuff. And then to make a fuss...”

Three cars and station wagons at once pulled in around the Parade. In each, a man and a woman sat moving their lips in conversations silenced by rolled-up windows. They stared curiously at the post office and the houses ringing the Parade, and passed their muted judgment on to one another.

“Who are they, John?” Mim asked, somehow fighting tears. She had a need that was physical to touch her child and feel her land beneath her feet—as if she’d traveled a thousand miles and couldn’t get back. “What can be worse than Saturday?”

As it approached three, pickup trucks and dusty old American sedans began to join the newer cars of the strangers, bringing the Harlowe men who had been at the Saturday auctions—deputies most of them, without a doubt. James and Cogswell sat on the bandstand silently now, watching. A foreign station wagon pulled up. The door opened and let out a man in horn-rimmed glasses and a tweed topcoat. He walked around the car and opened the other door for his wife. As he did so, he perceived the dozens of eyes on him and looked up startled. His wife stepped out, a small woman in a beige cloth coat and a tidy felt hat. He said something to her and she glanced quickly at the other cars, then motioned to the church. The man put his hand on the small of her back and hurried her toward the church, hunching his shoulders against the gaze of the people in the cars. He pulled at the door, then leaned back against the knob and pulled harder. It was locked. For a long moment he and his wife stood staring at the blank door before them. Then slowly the man turned again toward the unlikely collection of people watching him.

But even as he hesitated, the door opened inward and Pulver and Stone stepped out and ushered the couple into the church.

Then, as if at a signal, the deputies and the strange couples got out of their cars and trucks with a great slamming of doors and moved toward the open door of the church—the deputies abruptly, looking straight ahead, and the couples tentative and clinging to each other.

Rather suddenly, Perly’s big yellow van backed out of his driveway, turned, bumped a hundred yards along the road, and backed into the church driveway, up to the side door of the church. Gore got out of the driver’s seat and climbed into the back of the van.

“It gives me a creepy feelin’,” Mim said, “havin’ to go inside walls with the likes of them.”

“With all that pile of outsiders,” John said, “what can happen?” So John and Mim climbed slowly down out of their truck and followed the couples up the walk toward the church. A woman in front of them was so fat she moved by rocking from side to side like a mechanical toy. She dropped a cigarette, still lit, and John stepped, out of habit, to grind it out, though it wouldn’t have set fire to anything there. The woman tapped another out of her purse, and her husband, who was only somewhat less fat, stopped and turned to cup a match against the wind. John and Mim passed them as they struggled to light the cigarette.

“We shouldn’t have come, Billy. I don’t think so.”

“What’re you goin’ to do?” the man said. “The agencies said no, didn’t they?”

“It’s not goin’ to be to his taste, findin’ us here,” Mim whispered. “I can’t tell no more what’s meant to be,” John said. “Could be he planned on us comin’.”

Inside the wide church doors, Pulver and Stone sat at the table like ticket takers at a church supper, asking the names of the people as they filed in, checking each couple off on a list, then letting them by. John and Mim simply walked by them. Tom Pulver’s eyes followed their progress across the foyer to the swinging doors that led to the sanctuary, but he said nothing.

There were no greeters and there was no organ, only the nervous shifting of the silent people on the horsehair cushions in the pews. The couples were scattered around the church, and evenly dispersed among them were the deputies. John and Mim took a pew near the back, and Ian James moved in immediately behind them with a stealth that set Mim’s scalp to prickling.

They sat for what seemed hours. Afraid to turn and look, they listened to the strangers rustling behind them, and focused with sharp-edged intensity on the slow motions of those in front of them.

At last the side door at the front of the church opened, and Perly began walking slowly toward the high central pulpit. His crisp black hair was combed back so tightly it barely curled, and the silver cuff links at his wrists glittered as he gestured to the crowd. Except for the gentle golden dog at his heels, he looked like the chairman of some important board of directors, or possibly a middle-of-the-road evangelist. He stepped into the high pulpit and Dixie disappeared behind its balustrade.

Perly scanned the assembled people, reducing them to perfect stillness. Mim thought his gaze caught on hers momentarily and had to pull away as if snagged. Without moving, she let the heat of embarrassment and anger wash over her and fade.

When Perly finally spoke, it was in the deepest range of his voice, a soft rumble like thunder that spread through the sanctuary and bound people together as if against a distant storm. “We will start with a moment of silent prayer,” he said, “asking God’s guidance and seeking God’s love that we may spread it to these innocent children. Let us pray.”

Mim’s hand tightened on John’s knee. Around them the strangers bowed their heads. Perly raised his eyes toward the rose window at the back of the church and the red and yellow bands of light stained his face. The deputies did not pray, but looked around them like errant boys. The woodwork in the old church snapped and clicked as if to mark off the passing seconds.

“Amen,” Perly said, releasing the people before him to stir and gaze back at him.

Perly shifted his weight and leaned forward on his elbows to look down on the people. “I’m Perly Dunsmore,” he said. I’ve talked to a good many of you on the telephone. For the others, let me explain. I am, by profession, an auctioneer and environment designer. In addition, I think it would be fair to say that I make a hobby of philanthropy. Altogether, I guess I’m one of Harlowe’s more notice- able businessmen, and as such, the town has approached me to serve as trustee and guardian for these children.

“Now I’ve been pondering the problem of these children. Clearly, as an old bachelor, I cant look after them myself. Now the traditional way to handle a problem in a small New England town it to get all the interested parties together and start thrashing out a solution.

“The exact problem in this instance is that we must provide the best possible homes for these children. Luckily for them, the world today seems to be full of wonderful folks like you who are willing and eager to open their hearts to homeless orphans. So now that we’ve brought you all together, our task boils down to the problem of choosing which of you will take the children.”

There was a long silence. A bare branch rasped back and forth against a windowpane in the wind.

“We have two children this week,” Perly went on.

The group in the church rustled as if a gust of wind had caught briefly in their vocal cords.

As I’ve told most of you, they come with complete adoption papers. After a year, you can go to the court in Concord and finalize the adoption. The children are in perfect health. If you’re worried on that score, rest assured. They are happy healthy rosy white pure-bred all-American children. Their only problem is that they need someone to love. If, within a month, you find anything medically wrong with them, you can bring them back to me and I will, of course, return every penny of the fees.

“Naturally, our social worker will have to come and look into your home a bit before the adoption is finalized. I’m sure that this will present no problem. Under normal circumstances, we’d want to have the home study completed before entrusting the child to you at all. But if we put the children into foster homes now, we’ll only have to move them again into their permanent homes. And that kind of double readjustment for the child seems more cruel than kind. So, since the children are available now, and since most of you are potentially very loving parents or you wouldn’t have come, we’re prepared to let you take the children home just as soon as all the fees are paid.”

Cogswell, sitting diagonally in front of the Moores, watching the fat couple who sat in front of him, leaned his elbows on his knees and covered his face with his hands.

“We have a three-year-old boy today and a newborn baby girl, just ten days old. Born a week ago Thursday.

The people stirred. For the first time, wives turned to their husbands and whispered.

“We’re going to offer the baby girl first. Now I don’t want to commit any indiscretions here, but I know you want to know what kind of genes she has and why she’s up for adoption. It’s the usual story. Her mother’s a lovely little woman only fifteen years old. Her blood was a little too strong, you might say.”

There was a pained silence in the church.

“Nobody’s supposed to know who the father is, but there’s some pretty good speculation it’s a doctor’s son,” Perly went on. A kid who stuck around just long enough to give the valedictory address at his boarding school graduation, then got hustled off to Europe to see the world. This whole affair could have turned out to be a tragedy for the young parents as well as for the child herself. When you adopt her, you’re giving the parents, as well as the child herself, a running chance at life. Believe you me, this child has the very best of genes. I know. And, as for her parents, I’m sure they’ve learned their lesson.

“Now I know you want to see her, but she’s awfully little, so if you could just quietly look and be fairly quick...

Mudgett came through the side door, carrying a car bed. Perly leaned over and picked up the pink bundle as expertly as any practiced father.

The wooden pews creaked as people strained to see, and a few couples pushed their heads close together to whisper.