The Auctioneer Read online

  “Now, Mickey,” Ma said. “You set right down here in front of me. Me and you’s goin’ to have a talk.”

  Cogswell hesitated a moment, glanced at Red Mudgett, then grinned at Ma and folded his long body up like an Indian on the lawn at Ma’s feet.

  “And you, Red,” Ma said to Mudgett. “You set too. You make me nervous jerkin around like that. Just as antsy now as you was at eight.”

  Mudgett laughed quickly, then squatted on his haunches. He was small and wiry. He watched the old woman with small black eyes that seemed to have no need to blink.

  “Now just suppose you tell me, Mickey, what you’re doin’ here,” Ma said.

  “Collectin’ for the auction, ma’am,” he said.

  She shook her head. “You been involved in some hare-brained schemes in your day, Mickey,” she said. “I keep expectin’ you to make good, everybody’s favorite like you be. How come you keep doin’ such crazy things?”

  “That’s what my wife keeps askin’,” Mickey said. “Must be I was born under the wrong star.”

  “What if I was to tell you we got nary a stick left we care to part with?”

  “I wouldn’t do that, ma’am, if I was you. You can give a little somethin’ this week, a little maybe next week.” Mickey picked up a stone and tossed it into the road, then looked up at Ma.

  “If this is Perly Dunsmore’s little project, how come he ain’t here hisself?”

  Mickey shrugged. “It’ll all be over pretty soon, Mrs. Moore. Why make trouble?”

  “Trouble,” Ma said. “It’s you that’s maltin’ trouble.”

  “I think I been a decent neighbor,” Mickey said, pulling at the grass between his knees. “I wouldn’t tell you what I didn’t think was right.”

  “Right!” cried Ma.

  “Well, smart then,” Mickey said.

  “Smart,” Ma said, making room for Hildie beside her in the broad chair. You tryin’ to tell me it’s smart to give away what’s mine? It ain’t even natural. And as for you, Red Mudgett, you was always playactin at somethin. Now tell me is it cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers with that gun—”

  “Mickey,” Mim said, stepping closer. “Take the extra bed in Hildie’s room.”

  Mudgett jumped up like a released jack-in-the-box. “Where’s that?” he asked.

  Cogswell followed more slowly. “That’ll make another week chalked off,” he said to Mim, nodding gravely.

  John turned abruptly and went into the barn, leaving Ma to watch the two men load the bed frame and spring into the back of Cogswell’s truck. They left the mattress behind, explaining that it was illegal to sell mattresses. Cogswell left Mudgett tying the bed into the truck, and went over to Ma. “Everything will work itself out, Mrs. Moore,” he said, touching her hand.

  “That’s the last thing,” she said, clutching the arms of the chair. “The very tail end of it. You hear me, Mickey Cogswell?”

  “Maybe,” Mickey said. “Try not to fret.” He turned away from Ma and went into the barn. John was sitting on a sawhorse in the corridor between the stalls.

  Cogswell said nothing. He stood waiting for John to turn.

  Finally John looked up and said, “I didn’t know you was so thick with Red.”

  Cogswell shrugged. “You think I take to it? It’s me has to ride around with him all day.” Cogswell kicked at a post as if to test it, then leaned against it, tipping his head back wearily. “Never mind,” he said, pulling the flask from his back pocket and offering it to John. “They’re goin’ to round us up one of these days real soon and put a bullet through our heads.”

  John shook his head. “Who is?”

  Cogswell shrugged again. “I don’t know, exactly,” he said. “If I knew I might just liquor up a bit and turn myself in. Oughta be the state troopers, but I don’t know. There was a trooper I didnt know at Mudgett’s when I picked him up this morning. And that same one and another one was comin’ out of the old Fawkes place, I think it was last Tuesday. Makes you wonder. There’s some money kickin’ around in this, and I for one ain’t seein all that much of it.”

  “Old Ike Linden, he in on it?” John asked.

  “Who knows?” said Mickey. “I don’t collect from him myself. But Perly has this big thing about privacy. We ain’t supposed to say who gave what, or even who we asked. I think there’s some he even leaves alone. Like Ike, maybe. He’s not one you’d want against you. But I can’t see him gettin’ into the kind of pickle I’m in neither.” Cogswell shook the liquor around in his flask. It was nearly empty. “It can’t go on. Somebody—some head guy some-where’s bound to catch on and put the lid on the whole thing.”

  John studied the flask in Cogswell’s hand. “The thing is,” he said slowly, “who?”

  “I wish I knew,” Cogswell said, his voice unsteady. “All I know is every blessed plan I get myself roped into turns out dumber than the last. This one’s like to be the end of me.”

  “Me too,” John said with a short laugh. “I can’t even get together with Mim on this one.”

  Cogswell cocked an eyebrow. “She’s smart,” he said. “Always was.”

  “What if I just tell you and Mudgett to get the hell off my property?”

  “Well,” said Cogswell, “if that snake out there don’t get you now, then...” He turned and started out of the barn. “Oh hell.”

  “Then what?” asked John, starting up after him.

  Cogswell stopped but didn’t turn. “Emily Carroll went out of control on Route 37 night before last,” he mumbled.

  “She had an accident?” John reached for Cogswell’s shoulder to hold him. “Bad?”

  “She’s on the danger list,” he said, turning. “Her back or something.”

  “Emily Carroll! She’s got four kids—”

  “Five,” Cogswell said. He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his face.

  John watched. “But these things happen,” he said quickly. “You make it out an accident, don’t you?”

  “I just wish it was someone... not Emmie,” Cogswell said. She’s just about Agnes’ best friend. The steering bust.”

  “She alone in the car?”

  Cogswell nodded. “Thing is, Carroll quit us two weeks ago. Let everybody know it too. And when they sent me and Mudgett round to collect from him last week,” he said nothin’ doin’.”

  It was an hour and a half before John could bring himself to face the women. When he did enter the kitchen, Mim whirled from the sink to face him, her normally soft features set hard in rebellion. “I don’t care,” she said. “You got to give it to him. You’re just wrong to think you can...” She stopped. “Oh my God, John,” she said. “What happened? Hildie...” But Hildie was sitting at the kitchen table facing her father, her dark blue eyes round with fear.

  “Somebody’s goin’ to kill him,” John muttered. “Somebody’s goin’ to kill him.”

  Mim caught her lower lip in her teeth and unconsciously grasped Hildie by the shoulders. “What did he do?” she whispered.

  5

  Now that regulations made it too complicated to sell milk, John churned what Hildie didn’t drink and sold the butter to Dr. and Mrs. Hastings. The doctor and his wife had only been in Harlowe since a little before Hildie was born. But they were educated people and came from the outside, facts which might, John thought, help them know how to deal with the situation.

  The doctor was a short bald man who wore glasses that magnified his eyes in such a way that he seemed to listen with them. He gave his patients—and everyone in town was his patient—the impression that he saw everything and probably understood it too, though he never said a word more than necessary. He asked what questions he had to, but never gave people any names for what was wrong with them. And when he wrote out an illegible prescription, he never said what it was for, only repeated the directions, usually the same ones: “Three times a day now, after breakfast, lunch, and supper, till the pills are gone.”

  The doctor had delivered Hildie, but John
himself had never had any reason to go to him for help, and when he took the butter down, the doctor only glanced at it, blinked at John nearsightedly, and paid him. Nevertheless, John was determined somehow to break through and talk to him.

  Thus, when he rang the back bell on Friday morning, he was distinctly disappointed when it was Mrs. Hastings and not the doctor who answered the door. She’d been to college, as everybody knew, and had friends up from the city almost every weekend. Her children, all but the youngest, went to boarding school. She talked enough to make up for the doctors silences. In fact, she was always as nice as could be, if anything a little too jolly, as if she were restraining an impulse to slap Johns flanks and cry, “Off with you, Bossy!”

  He waited on the far side of the kitchen table while she stood at the counter and weighed the butter on her scales.

  “Doctor home?” John asked.

  Mrs. Hastings looked up sharply. “You sick?” she asked.

  “No,” John said. “No, not me.”

  “Your children?”

  “No, Hildie’s well.”

  “Then what do you want to see the doctor for?

  “Something I wanted to talk to him about.’

  “The doctor doesn’t handle emotional problems, you know. He’s far too busy. If you just want to talk, his nurse will refer you to a psychiatrist in Concord.”

  John raised his shoulders and thrust his hands into his pockets. The butter, he noticed, weighed over. He took a breath. “Been attendin’ the auctions?” he asked.

  “A few,” she said, turning to face him. Her features were large, pointed, and subtly pockmarked. “Where on earth are they getting all that beautiful stuff week after week?”

  John paused. “People like me,” he said.

  “That so?” she said and laughed, her chest heaving. “Well, isn’t that generous of you. I, for one, wouldn’t care to part with my furniture.”

  “No,” John said slowly. “You wouldn’t.”

  She raised her chin suspiciously, no longer smiling. “Well, why do you do it?” she asked almost angrily.

  John flushed with embarrassment and didn’t move. He couldn’t go because she hadn’t given him his money. Everyone knew that Mrs. Hastings hated Harlowe and Harlowe people and, for that matter, everything about the country. Harlowe and Mrs. Hastings, in fact, tolerated each other only for the sake of the doctor. Clearly, she must find the auctioneer classier than the people she bought butter from. And, if she did, probably the doctor did too.

  “Well, why do you?” she repeated, her black eyes full of accusation. She reached over to the counter, picked up a half-empty wine glass, and drank.

  John took a step back, watching her. Then he held out a callused hand for the bills and change she had counted out for him.

  She plunked the money down on the table where he would have to reach for it. “I’ll just never understand you people,” she said.

  John tried to scoop the change off the edge of the table into his hand, but the three dimes stuck at the chrome edging.

  The doctor’s wife drank from her glass again, holding it gracefully, looking down her long nose at John’s hands as they fumbled after the dimes.

  When he was three steps down the outside walk, the back door slammed so hard the house shuddered. He paused, momentarily paralyzed by a flashing impulse to go back and tell the woman she was worthless. But the pause was no more than a hitch in his gait as he walked back to his truck and climbed in. The butter money was their only cash at the moment.

  It was full summer now. The borers drilled new rows of holes around the trunks and branches of the apple trees, and the coons and woodchucks, grown fat by now, moved slowly down the high pasture toward the garden every evening at dusk. Beetles turned the leaves on the tomato plants to lace despite a weekly dusting, and clusters of black-eyed susans showed where weeds had taken root even in the newly seeded hay. John and Mim accepted the signs of high summer the way they accepted the first warning cricket. There always ended up being enough hay for the cows, enough apples and corn and tomatoes for the family.

  And now, for weeks, they accepted the Thursday visitations. At first Ma fussed. She screamed the week that Mim pitched in to help Cogswell and Mudgett take the piano. But, by the time they took the rug from the front room and the good dishes Mim had packed, she said very little.

  John let Mim choose what should go, but he went to elaborate lengths not to mention the things that were gone. And every Thursday and Friday after the visits, he worked long hours in the fields, going back even after supper, until he could fall into bed exhausted.

  One week, Cogswell lingered by the door of his truck to speak to Mim. “Listen,” he said, swaying slightly so that she was engulfed in a mist of alcohol fumes. “Agnes says to tell you shed be mighty pleased if you and Hildie should see fit to visit. The raspberries are at their best this week up to the blueberry fields. And she ain’t been pickin’ once. She says it makes her nervous now, them big fields ringed all around with woods. He stared at Mim, then past her at the pond until he started to list toward it as if drawn. He caught at the mirror on the truck to steady himself. “Oh, Mim,” he said, “makes me nervous too, her and the kids up there...”

  Mim stood with her arms folded over her denim shirt. Mudgett leaned on the hood of the truck watching her.

  “Not that I’m tellin’ you you have to or anythin’. It’s just that generally you do. And Agnes is half crazy frettin’ over Emily. They was in the same year all through—”

  “How is Emily?” Mim murmured, glancing at Mudgett and turning away immediately from his baleful attention.

  “She’s paralyzed,” Cogswell answered, pushing the button in and out that worked the door of the truck. “She’ll be in the hospital for a long time, maybe always.” He met Mim’s eyes. ‘Makes a man feel so helpless,” he said softly, “a woman struck like that.”

  He climbed into the truck. Mudgett moved quickly around the front of the truck.

  Mim put a hand in the open window of the truck. “Drive careful, Mick,” she said. “You don’t seem strictly sober.”

  Cogswell leaned down and said, “They been takin things off Carroll like his place was a public dump.”

  The next morning Mim took the butter into town and stopped at Linden’s. After lunch, when John and Hildie went up to work in the garden, she stayed in, working on the doors with a drill and screwdriver. John came back to see where she was and found locks on two of the five doors, and Mim working on the third.

  “The only people locks keep out’s your friends,” he said.

  Mim dropped the screwdriver and hasp with a clatter. “Where’s Hildie?” she asked.

  “Up to the garden still.”

  Mim got up and rushed to the door to check.

  John came up behind her and they stood together at the back kitchen door looking up past the stream and the bridge to the garden, where, poking up between two rows of green, they could just see Hildie’s bright head catching the sunshine in the calm of midday. John touched Mim’s short hair and a tendril caught at his finger.

  “I’d a good deal rather do without,” she said.

  “We ought to meet them with a gun. They’re makin’ slaves of us,” he said.

  “John,” Mim said.

  “That’s all well and good for you,” he said. “You’re not a man.”

  But after Mim went up to get the child, John walked around the house and examined the locks, tightening the screws as he went, thinking that paying for them must have taken all the butter money and then some. Afterwards, carefully and methodically, he installed the remaining two locks on the shed and cellar doors.

  They gave the china cabinet, now that it was empty, then their own bureau, then Hildie’s. By the first week in August, it was hard to see what to give next.

  Ma had fallen into silence on the subject of the auctions, and on most other things as well. When she wasn’t watching her programs or playing with Hildie, she sat on her couch f
or long periods, her thin arms folded across her limp housecoat, looking out the window. She barely answered when she was spoken to, and for weeks she didn’t tell a story. Uneasy, John and Mim spoke, even to one another, only behind her back. The gloom at the supper table was such that Hildie put up a battle every night about sitting down.

  In town it wasn’t much better. When John or Mim ran into people they had known for decades, they smiled and chatted about the weather or the cost of living or the orneriness of machines. They talked exactly the way they always had, except that now the familiar conversations seemed to be built on a silence as deep as the one that prevailed at home.

  It was Mim’s idea that John go to the auction. “Just one man alone, John,” she said. “They won’t hardly notice you. Could be you’ll learn somethin’.”

  There were cars pulled up on the town hall lawn, on the church green, all around the firehouse. They were parked on Mill Street all the way down over the bridge and up around the corner again.

  Mudgett was selling balloons again. Next to him, a strange girl in a maternity smock sat on a bright beach towel moving nervously to the rhythm of a transistor radio. She was very young and her hair was long and dark and tangled as if it had not been combed. Something about the way she watched the people moving toward her to buy balloons made John think that she was hungry.

  There wasn’t a woman or a child Moore knew. Ward was there—Speare, Pulver, Janus, Stone, and a few others he knew. That didn’t mean they were all deputies, of course. They sat quietly here and there, distributed evenly among the crowd, sprawled on chairs, the edge of the bandstand, or the backs of trucks. John reflected that most of them were probably wondering whether he was a deputy. James and Cogswell, in denim overalls, were arranging the things to be auctioned off. Ezra Stone was selling popcorn, and Sonny Pike was selling Coke and beer.

  And there were people—plenty of them—people he didn’t know. They’d brought coolers and blankets to spread behind and beside the wooden chairs. They hailed their summer neighbors and the people they’d met the week before.