The Auctioneer Read online

  John stood in the middle of the room watching her, his green eyes half shut.

  She glanced at him. Then, skirting him widely, she walked out the back door of the kitchen, not stopping to pick up her jacket, though the day was chilly and spitting rain.

  John sat down on a chair to wait, feeling the pulse at his temple subside and his breathing slow to normal.

  “John?” called his mother.

  He didn’t answer. Hildie poked a head into the kitchen, then scuttled back to her grandmother. “He’s there,” she reported.

  “Johnny?” Ma called again. “You got no call to treat her like that.”

  “I just asked her a simple question,” he snapped.

  They let him be and he sat waiting. She didn’t come back until nearly three o’clock. When she did, she came in and went straight to the sink and continued emptying the dishes from the drainer, her blouse wet from the rain and sticking to her shoulders. “What are we goin’ to give?” she asked again.

  “Nothin’,” he said without moving.

  “Why should we stop?” she said. “There’s the whole attic yet.”

  “Old Caleb Tuttle ain’t allowed him so much as a broken chair for a month.”

  “Oh, Caleb Tuttle. Fanny says he meets them with a shotgun now. Can you just see it? Meetin’ Perly Dunsmore and Bob Gore with a shotgun? Caleb was always spoilin’ for a fight.”

  “I still say we done our share,” John said.

  “You wouldn’t rather have some cash than that junk in the attic we never use? And it’s a good cause. Don’t you like to think we have a real police force? They’d come right away if we had a need.”

  “For what? For what would you ever need a cop when you’d have time to call one?”

  Mim shrugged. “Well... you never know. The world’s gettin’ worse.”

  She went to the woodbox and picked out sticks of kindling to start a fire for supper. She lifted the lid of the stove and turned to John. “Say no if you like,” she said. “But I for one like to be part of what he’s doin’ for the town.

  “He’s just in love with his own palaver,” John said.

  But when Dunsmore and Gore arrived as they had promised, John and Hildie met them in the yard, led them to the attic, and let them take the painted-over rock maple chairs that needed gluing.

  Monday, John came in to lunch with the mail. “The check for the chairs only comes to a dollar seventy-five,” he said. “The note here from Perly don’t say nothin about that. Only says he was sorry he didn’t have time to come in and say hello to you and Ma.”

  “Well that was just junk,” Mim said.

  Ma settled herself at the table. “I feel some better knowin’ he sent a word to me,” she said.

  John washed his hands, then stuck his whole head under cold running water at the sink. The water pump started up underneath them and kept on churning after he turned off the water. He rubbed his head with a towel. “I don’t know,” he said. “I could do without the visits happy enough.”

  “I think you be a bit green, Johnny boy,” said Ma. “There’s a man can give you reason, too.”

  Mim turned toward the stove and hid her grin in the soup pot. “I am thinkin’ of some hard facts, Ma,” John said. “Like why nobody’s asked me to run the grader this year, not once, when the roads are graded all round by now.”

  “I keep tellin you,” Mim said. You ought to go down to Jimmy Ward and ask him outright.”

  “You hintin’ it could be an accident?” John asked. “An accident Ian James graded our road this year when ain’t nobody but me or Frank Lovelace done it these fifteen years?”

  “Most like,” said Mim.

  “I suppose you calculate what Gore said as accident too?”

  Bobby Gore? Ma said. “Ain’t nothin’ but mush in his head. Just like his daddy.”

  “Old Toby’s mean, Ma. Maybe Bobby takes after that too,” John said.

  Mean he is, she agreed. “Chased his own flesh and blood off the place every one by the time they was fifteen and told them not to come back. She reached out to caress Hildie’s arm, but Hildie was absorbed in blowing bubbles in a glass of milk with a straw. “Serves old Toby right if he ends up on the dole.”

  “It’s us endin’ up on the dole worries me,” John said.

  The houses around the Parade were two-story colonials painted white with black or green blinds, most of them with a rambling series of tacked-on porches, ells, and outbuildings. Lindens store was tucked away in a corner, though not as inconspicuously as some residents might have wished. It had been a stable until a Linden two generations back boarded up the windows, filled the long flat interior with merchandise, and opened it up as a general store. In his time, Ike Linden had covered it with gray asbestos siding crisscrossed with dark lines supposed to make it look like granite. Except for the addition of a small plate glass window and a line of bare light bulbs hanging at intervals from the ceiling, the store looked pretty much the way it always had—not so much old-fashioned as just cluttered and dim. Outside it was identified by two Amoco pumps, a tired Coca-Cola sign, and a random display of outdated posters.

  Nowadays, Harlowe people drove the seventeen miles down Route 37 to the shopping center when it was time to stock their shelves. Nevertheless, almost everyone in town had occasion to duck into Linden’s two or three times a week. They came for milk and bread, treats for the children, tomato paste for a half-cooked supper, the right-sized screw, stove black, birthday candles, the newspaper, home-made banana bread, and gasoline—not to mention library books, insurance, hunting licenses, and tickets to the New Hampshire sweepstakes.

  Part of old Ike Linden’s genius as a storekeeper, and as a selectman too, was his ability to hear volumes and say practically nothing. This, combined with his mastery over such an abundance of material goods, gave him a reputation for knowing a great deal. People had always brought him their questions about income tax, etiquette, unruly wives, and new strains of apples. And Ike did his laconic best to satisfy them without giving any distinct answers. These days, the old man sat in the back room smoking and pondering over the store’s accounts, and young Ike and his wife Fanny tended to the store.

  “Father-in-law around?” John asked Fanny when he stepped into the store that afternoon, ostensibly to buy some razor blades.

  She jerked her head in the direction of the back room.

  “I go in?” John asked.

  “Best you wait,” Fanny said. “He’s got company.”

  So John went and stood awkwardly in front of the shelves where the fertilizers were stored, reading the labels, and glancing over his shoulder when the door opened to see who might come in. Presently, after a number of summer people had been in and out chattering loudly as if he and Fanny weren’t there at all, Walter French shuffled in.

  He stood in front of Fanny. “I want some sponges,” he said.

  “That aisle,” she said, pointing.

  “Can’t find them,” he said, without looking. So Fanny got down off her stool and went and fetched him a forty-nine-cent package of sponges.

  French turned then and caught John’s eye. John hadn’t heard whether any new deputies had been appointed in the last few weeks. French had a hang-dog look built in and didn’t seem the kind anyone would want for a deputy. For an awkward moment, John stood with his mouth open to speak. Then he reflected that a man like French, with his hungry brood of children, might serve Perly’s purposes very well without being a deputy at all. He clamped his mouth shut, nodded distantly, and turned back to the fertilizers.

  The bells jingled as the door swung shut behind French, and John turned to consider him again as he retreated. Through the jumble of items hanging in the window, he caught a single glimpse of a uniformed state trooper fitting his Stetson to his head as he strode away from Ike Linden’s door. The deep smooth rumble of a car motor starting mixed with the cough of French’s truck. It was a blue Oldsmobile with New Hampshire plates. John had noticed it when he c
ame in.

  Inadvertently, he turned to Fanny, the question in his face.

  She stared back blankly. They were the only people left in the store.

  “Go on in and see the old man if you like,” she said.

  Ike was a dark outline where he sat in front of the window. As John’s eyes adjusted, he felt confused. The man he had planned to talk to was a strong man, but Ike was very old. He clutched a light blue sweater around his shoulders like a woman. His glasses hung on a chain around his neck, but he didn’t bother to put them on to look at John.

  “Trouble?” John asked, standing in the middle of the floor over the old man and nodding in the direction the trooper had taken.

  “Friendly visit,” Ike said, and rearranged the papers on the card table in front of him.

  John continued to stand. He heard the bells jingle in the outer store. “I came to see how come I been shut out of runnin the grader this year,” he blurted out.

  “Jimmy Ward runs the roads,” Ike said.

  “But Jimmy’s a deputy,” John said.

  Now Ike put his glasses on to peer up at John. “Still runs the roads,” he said.

  “Thought maybe that was why I been let out,” John said. “And you’re a selectman too.”

  “I’m a tired old man,” Ike said. “And I never was one for med-dlin’.”

  John flushed and leaned his hands on the back of an easy chair that stood in front of him. “Just thought maybe you could help,” he murmured.

  “What’s that?” shouted Ike, distinctly irritated.

  “Thought maybe you could get me work,” John said loudly.

  “That’s what I thought you said,” Ike said, turning back to his papers. “Can’t say’s I ever heard a Moore beggin’ before.

  John clutched the chair, watching as the old man picked up a paper and brought it close to his eyes.

  “I been gradin’ roads for fifteen years,” John said.

  The old man made no motion to indicate that he had heard.

  John turned and pushed through the curtain into the store and headed for the door.

  “Your razor blades,” Fanny said from the dimness.

  John backed up, swept the package of blades off the counter, and continued toward the door.

  “That’ll be a dollar twenty-one,” Fanny called after him.

  John gulped on air and stopped. He reached into his pocket, pulled out two crumpled dollar bills, and presented them at the counter.

  “Never mind,” Fanny said as she picked his change out of the register. He has all he can do to help hisself and us these days.”

  A lot of the stuff in the attic was disintegrating with heat and dust and age. The auctioneer took it away in great truckloads and the attic emptied out more quickly than they could have imagined. The only thing they got a decent check for was the trunkful of Mim’s mother’s letters and cards—thousands of them, gnawed at the corners by squirrels and sprinkled with the decaying lace from valentines. Mim’s mother had belonged to a quilting club, a flower club, a postcard club, and a matchcover club, and she had corresponded with members from all over the country. Every letter started with a flat chronicle of failures, deaths, and ailments. The letters her mother wrote back, Mim thought, must have been almost indistinguishable from those she received. A large energetic woman, who believed every promise she ever heard, Mim’s mother had chafed at reality right up until the day she died. Mim had been one more failure. She’d married young; she’d married a farmer; she’d turned her back on the promise of her young beauty -that beauty which, according to all her mother’s dreams, should have won her a doctor or a senator or a prince. The letters made Mim uncomfortable. She half believed it was the complaining itself, the act of putting it on paper, that had kept her mother so unhappy. Herself, Mim never put pen to paper if she could find any way to get around it.

  On June twenty-eighth, Perly and Gore took the three cartons of half-finished quilts, the only thing of any value left in the attic. After they left, John and Mim and Hildie climbed up and surveyed the debris: the gnawed bits of cardboard boxes, the rotted quilting scraps, the dust shoved up in scuffled ridges, the chewed corncobs of the red squirrels who lived up there all winter, and a heap of rusted smudge pots left over from the time John’s father had tried to grow peaches. Mim went down for a broom, and they spent a hot and dusty afternoon cleaning the big room.

  When they were finished, Mim folded her arms and watched Hildie run up and down on the wide loose boards. “Best spring cleaning we ever had,” she said. All that rummage was just an invitation to fire. I bet we never feel a need for one speck of it.

  “And that’s an end to it,” John said. “An end to it once and for all.”

  Mim didn’t answer until they were following Hildie down the path to the pond to bathe. Then she said, “Well, they got eyes in their head to see with. There’s just no point to pesterin’ us again.”

  John didn’t answer.

  “Do you think, John?” she asked.

  “If you’re so positive, why you askin’ me?” demanded John.

  4

  On Thursday, John and Mim were up in the garden picking the first of the peas and Hildie, squatting near the tangle of vines, was busy shelling and eating them. From time to time all day, in the course of their work, they had paused to listen. Gradually now the sound of a truck grew unmistakable, and one by one they all stood up and watched the road.

  “It’s just Cogswell,” breathed John.

  “Might be he needs a hand with a job,” Mim said!

  Cogswell jumped down from his battered green truck, waved, and started up the pasture to meet them. He was a tall rangy man with a looseness to the way he moved that was only partly related to his drinking. Like everyone who knew him, the Moores felt a kind of fond protectiveness for Cogswell, and at the same time a sense of awe, for he was a man who was always out of step.

  Nevertheless, the Moores moved toward him slowly. They met in the meadow, where the rank grass was up to Hildie’s shoulders, and faced each other as if they had met by accident.

  Will you look at Hildie? Cogswell said at last. “She’s spindled since I seen her. Pretty near big enough to milk a cow.”

  The child clung to the pocket of Mim’s jeans.

  Cogswell fished in the pocket of his shirt and pulled out a wad of tissue paper. “For you,” he said and held it out to Hildie.

  Hildie took the offering and unwrapped it. It was a small green plastic marine kneeling behind a gun. Hildie gave Cogswell a dazzling smile. “A hunter,” she said-.

  “That’s mighty nice, Mick,” Mim said.

  “One of the kids dropped it in the truck. Benjie got a whole bagful for his birthday.” Cogswell put his hands in his pockets and looked around at the pond and the house and the cows further up in the pasture. “Appears the crows got a fair amount of your corn,” he said.

  “Always do, the beggars,” John said, and they turned together and headed down toward the bridge over the stream. What’s the occasion, Mickey?” John asked. “You ain’t been down since your separator broke after that big snow.

  “Well, it’s the Fourth of July auction this time,” he said. “They had a meetin’ and Perly there convinced the firemen to split the profits from this here auction fifty-fifty with the police, instead of havin’ their own affair. You know, they voted, and it was the firemen that’s deputies against them that ain’t.”

  They moved through the stile between the barn and the shed. In the dooryard they stopped and Cogswell looked down over the pond.

  John stood with his arms folded.

  “Well, I think they already took the last scrap we care to part with,” Mim said.

  “Mighty nice place to be situated,” Cogswell said. “Always did think that. Right smack on Coon Pond like this. My kids think this is livin’. Set them loose here for a summer and I calculate they’d all turn into pickerel. I been takin’ them over to Deckers Pond, but the water ain’t half so sweet.”

/>   “Is this a good thing to be mixed into, Mick?” John asked.

  “You ought to sign up,” Cogswell said. “They’re still takin’ on deputies.”

  “How many big shots we got these days, Mick?” John asked.

  Mickey dug his hands into his pockets, then took them out and let them dangle at his sides. “Well, I’m not sure,” he said.

  “Not sure!” John said.

  “Well, they ain’t advertisin’ any more. It’s only us first ones left hangin’ out there for everyone to see.”

  “The rest’d rather hide in their closet,” John said. “Can’t say I blame them. The whole thing’s beginnin’ to give off a bad smell.”

  “Still,” Cogswell said, folding his arms, “I have it on Gore’s sayso they’re still takin on men. Course it’s got to end somewhere, and I think soon, but if I talk to them...”

  “We’ll take our chances,” Moore said.

  Cogswell leaned over them. They could smell the whiskey on his breath. “Listen,” he said. “I could get you off the hook maybe.” “Off the hook!” Mim said. “First I heard we was on it.”

  “But why you, Mickey?” John pressed.

  Cogswell shrugged and forced a chuckle. “Well, at first I liked the sound of what he said. Still do, I guess. But lately I been sayin to myself, ‘If you can’t lick ’em, better join ’em.’ Think about it, Johnny.”

  “Not me,” John said. “I can’t say as I feel no needs in that direction. Nor no attractions neither.”

  “Well, I ain’t sayin I can come back with the same chance later,” Cogswell said. He felt restlessly for the steel flask in his back pocket. “But maybe I’m shootin’ off my mouth again. None of my business, eh?”

  John folded his arms and didn’t answer.

  “I hear your mother’s doin’ poorly,” Cogswell said.

  “Not so poorly,” John said, and they stood in silence midway between the house and the truck. Hildie was off across the road aiming her hunter at brown and yellow butterflies.