The Auctioneer (2 page)

Gore shrugged. “He knows it don’t mean nothin’ one way or the other about what Harlowe’s really like.”

“So why Harlowe?” John asked. “Instead of Powlton, say, or over Peterborough way where it’s so much fancier?”

“Oh, Perly’s got ideas,” Gore said. “You should hear him talk.”

“You ought to bring him out,” Ma said.

“You’d like him,” Gore said. “He’s got that way about him women like. And he’d see the value of a well-kept farm like this.”

“That’s ’cause he don’t have to do the keepin’,” John said. “Is it him you’re plannin’ on for deputy?”

“I asked, but he ain’t interested,” Gore said.

“He’s just after tellin’ you what to do. He ain’t interested in the actual labor,” John said.

Gore frowned. “Red Mudgett’s back,” he said. “He’s lookin’ for somethin’, and you remember he was always so smart?”

“Bobby,” cried Ma. “You ain’t gone and hired Red Mudgett? Why you ain’t got no more sense than the rest of the Gores.”

“Perly thought he’d be good,” Gore said, fishing in his pocket for a cigarette.

Hildie had wiggled to the floor in front of Gore and sat with her arm around Lassie. She watched entranced as he lit a second cigarette from the end of the first.

“Why he’s the rottenest egg this town’s turned out since I was big enough to hear tell,” Ma said. “And if anyone knows, it’s me. I had him in my Sunday School class a good three years.”

“I figure Mudgett’s a reformed character,” Gore said.

“You figure, or this Dunsmore fellow figures?” John said.

“Well, he’s got a wife now,” Gore said. He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his brow. “Some wife too.” He gave Mim an appraising look. She smiled, a trace of color coming through the light freckles on the bridge of her nose. “I don’t know, Johnny, ’ he said. “If you and him can do so well, maybe there’s even hope for me.”

“Funny,” John said. “I pegged Red as one would never marry. Nor was I thinkin’, the way he always talked, he’d ever want to see the likes of Harlowe again.”

“Speakin’ of which,” Ma said, “don’t you think it a mite peculiar that this new auctioneer’d come here instead of back to his own town where everybody knows him?”

Gore let the question hang fire a moment. “It’s a pretty depressed area right now, northern New Hampshire,” he said.

“Guess you don’t call this depressed,” John said, gesturing toward the barn.

“There’s changes comin’ here,” Gore said. “Don’t forget the summer people. And all the new ones stayin’ the winter now too.

Gore leaned back in his chair. “Like I told you, Perly knows about land. And there’s big things brewin’ in Harlowe to do with land. It’s comin’, I tell you. You know them towns down near Massachusetts? They’ve got as bad as the city. Vandalism all the time and traffic and filth... . Perly figures he can help Harlowe get to growin’ right before it strikes us full on.”

“What if Harlowe don’t care to grow at all?” John said.

“You better go dynamite the interstate then,” Gore said, looking apologetically at Ma. “With Boston, and I guess everyplace, spreadin’ like gypsy moths in June...” He leaned forward in his chair. “Besides,” he said, “would
you
like to live in the city?”

“Not me,” John said.

“Course not.” Gore settled back. “Perly figures the only reason city folk make such a mess everywhere they go is that they need just what we got. They come here lookin’ for some good country values. A group of real people to feel part of. Some kind of connection. But we keep them at arm’s length now, never let them into things—”

“He just moved in,” John said. “He plannin’ to set up as a welcome committee already? Or is he goin’ to set you up at the edge of town to give out daisies—from your new cruiser maybe?”

“Damn it, John,” Gore said. “You was always such a one to mock. With all the new people comin’ in, how can it hurt to have someone around knows what he’s doin’?”

“What’s he got in mind for himself’s what I’d like to know,” John said.

“You ain’t got the picture of this Perly straight at all,” Gore said. “The thing is, he’s sort of a do-gooder. After me all the time to swear off beer and cigarettes. Like one of them old-fashioned preachers, ought to be wearin’ a black hat and a collar. He’s got this idea if we bring back auctions for a start, and square dances, and quiltin’ bees, and potluck suppers... Remember them spellin’ bees we used to have before they closed the old school?”

“Me and you,” John said, “we always used to go down near the first ones. You hankerin’ to go back to that?”

“Then he’s got this thing about farmin’, and well water, and firewood, and clear air. To his mind, all that’s part and parcel with Christian values.”

Mim chewed on the knuckle of her thumb uneasily.

Gore lit another cigarette and drew on it so that his whole front lifted six inches. He looked down at Hildie, then turned to gaze uncomfortably at the plastic daisies hanging between the front windows. “Fact, he was after me to ask who all would send their little ones if he started a Sunday School.”

“I taught Sunday School thirty-five years, for my part,” Ma said.

“Well I know it,” Gore said, nodding.

“Course Hildie’d go to Sunday School,” Ma said. “She’d love that. And she needs it bad.”

Hildie felt her grandmother’s complacent glance, caught her lip in her teeth, and scuttled to her mother.

There was a loud snap in the stove and the hollow sound of the fire momentarily blazing, not a comforting sound since the room was already too warm for everyone but Ma.

“That what you’re doin’ here?” John asked, starting to laugh. “Collectin’ kids for a Sunday School class?”

“Well, not exactly,” Gore said. “Thing is, we thought we’d give it another go next Saturday.”

“Another auction?” John asked, his laughter cut short.

Gore shrugged.

“I thought the one you had was fine,” John said.

“If one’s good, two’s better,” Gore said, resettling his bulk in the chair. “We’re thinkin’ we might hold even more.”

“For the police again?” John asked.

Gore rummaged in his back pocket for his handkerchief again. “If you wait till crime gets out of hand before you get around to more police...”

Ma nodded enthusiastically. “Why it’s just like Janice Pulver was sayin’ about how Farmer’s Mutual had to raise its prices because of payin’ so much on account of them hippies campin’ out all over the place. Never mind Amelia strangled like that.”

“Well, things are gettin’ more complicated,” Gore said, turning to Ma with gratitude. “That’s about all I know.”

“Why, we can give them that old buffet,” Ma said. “What’d we ever do with that anyway?”

On the days when nobody went to town, John walked the quarter of a mile to the mailbox as he had since he was barely bigger than Hildie. Usually it was empty. But on the Friday after Gore’s second visit, when he lifted Hildie to look, she pulled out a letter. She ran home ahead of him in the sunshine, so agile now that John could no longer keep up with her without breaking into a run himself, and he was some years past that. His boots crunched rhythmically in the sandy mud as he followed, his broad face content as his child widened the gap between them, waving the letter high over her head like a flag.

Hildie threw the letter triumphantly into Ma’s lap and waited for John to sit in the rocker so she could climb into his lap. Mim leaned against the piano in her apron. Ma read aloud:

Dear John, Miriam, Mrs. Moore, and Hildie:

The wheels you contributed to the policeman’s auction brought a surprisingly good price. I would like to remit some of the money to you as a recompense for your generosity.

Bob thinks the auction was a great success. I certainly hope it will contribute to Harlowe’s future safety.

As you no doubt know, I am the new owner of the former Fawkes place on the Parade and very much hope that we will meet as neighbors soon and see a lot of one another.

Sincerely,

Perly Dunsmore

Enclosed was a check for three dollars. “More than the firemen ever do,” John said, turning the check over and righting it again.

“He’s sure got Bob Gore all wrapped up and tied with a yellow ribbon,” Mim said.

“That’s nothin’ to sneeze at,” Ma said. “For all his talk, Bobby got the share of sense for the whole nineteen of them Gore kids. And if he’d a lit out of Harlowe like the rest, we’d have old Toby on the dole sure.”

“How ’bout the cows, Ma?” John said, winking at Mim. “We’d of had the cows on the dole too. Might’s well shoot Toby outright as take his cows away.”

“Crazy how that barn don’t fall on them,” Mim said.

“Everybody from Harlowe knows it’s goin to stand as long as Toby,” snapped Ma.

“Bob’s not the worst cop you could have,” John said. “He’s sure to be up in a flash if you call.”

“He’d be scared of missin’ somethin’,” Ma said.

“Kind of mean, ain’t it?” John said. “All these seven years he’s been dreamin’ of havin’ a real honest-to-gosh crime to solve. And now he’s got a whopper—a stranglin’—not to mention the break-in and the holdup. And poor old Bobby ain’t scared up so much as a suspect.”

“Fanny says he was so cross he wouldn’t even talk about it,” Mim said. “Not even when he’d had a few. Not that I blame him. Downright humiliatin’, right there in the biggest house in town like that.”

Ma turned to John. “Do you recall that spell back when old Nicholas Fawkes used the big barn for auctions? she asked. That makes a sort of a tradition, don’t it? Maybe this Perly Dunsmore ain’t such a fool after all. You ought to go on down to the store a bit more often. See what you can find out.”

John shook his head and grinned. “You’re workin’ up a powerful curiosity about this fellow, Ma,” he said.

“Can’t say I ever thought about it just like that before, did you, John?” Mim asked. “That what they’re really after is to get to be like us?”

“Who?” John asked.

“All the people movin’ from the city to the country,” she said.

John and Mim were climbing up the pasture to replace any fallen stones in the back wall so the cows wouldn’t stray into the woods. It was always a good hike to the top, but that morning there was a fog curtaining their progress, and it seemed a journey. The child walked between them, subdued, keeping their hands tight in her own. An invisible phoebe called over and over as if counting their quiet footsteps up and up on the steep brown island fading into whiteness, and occasionally crows cried in the distance.

Halfway up, they turned, as they always did, to look out over the pond, but it was lost completely in the fog. “Look at the house,” Hildie whispered.

“Looks nice,” Mim said.

What they saw was a white cape set into the side of the hill with a fence of tall hand-carved pickets across the back. The mist bleached away the weathering on the paint, the rusty tin over the woodshed, the missing bricks in the chimney, the plastic over the windows, even the tangle of last year’s morning-glory vines still clinging to the fence.

“Looks all polished up,” John said.

“Like summer folks had got their hands on it.” Mim laughed and turned to climb again.

Eventually, the small walled cemetery under the cherry tree emerged through the fog. “Look out,” Mim warned as they approached, catching Hildie before she stepped into the brown remains of last year’s poison ivy. “We ought to spray that,” she said, before it gets a hold this summer.”

“Before Ma goes,” John murmured. “Now there would be a pretty mess.”

“Might not suit your pa either and all the ones before him to be lyin’ like that in such a bed of poison.”

But the child had turned to look down again. “It’s gone!” she cried. “The house is gone!”

“No more than you’re gone from it.” John laughed. He caught her up to carry on his shoulders. “Look at the willows, pet. See that smudgy yellow? They’ll be greenin’ up and we’ll have spring before we’re halfway ready.” They headed toward the high back wall of the pasture, scanning it carefully for broken places. But most of the granite chunks remained in their accustomed places, fastened by a sinewy net of Concord grape vines.

“All things considered, I don’t half mind,” Mim said.

“What?” asked John.

“Bein’ the way we are,” she said.

2

As mud gave way to black flies and black flies to mosquitoes, Bob Gore came again, and yet again.

The Moores heard about the auctions at Linden’s store. Every week more people came, more people smitten with the romance of a country life, part of the same blind force that, since before Hildie was born, had been tearing up the hillsides with bulldozers and setting in the trailers and tiny modular houses designed to look traditional. Some of the new people drove halfway to Boston every day to work along the outer belt highway. Some manned the bright glass and steel factories going in along Route 37 as it made its way south. And more and more summer people poured in off the interstate every weekend, invading Linden’s store in flimsy striped and polka-dot clothes, complaining about the price of produce, and gobbling up the plastic balls and pinwheels and inflatable elephants that Hildie loved so.

When Gore came, John led him down under the barn to the cavernous area that housed a century’s collection of broken rockers, tables with legs missing, cracked mirrors, rusted cider presses, and outdated tools. “How long you figure you can get people to buy this rummage, Bobby? John asked one week.

“I wonder myself sometimes,” Gore admitted. He stopped to light a cigarette and watched the smoke curling up into the cobwebs overhead. “Perly’s like a magician, but still...