The Auctioneer Read online

  Moore wandered uneasily up toward the things for sale. A hard slender middle-aged woman in faded yellow jeans was saying to another in a white slack suit, “Isn’t it marvelous? Some of the stuff I’ve bought is so good I’ve taken it back to Weston. Can you just imagine what this stuff would sell for on Beacon Hill? Where do you suppose they get it week after week?”

  “Isnt it splendid?” said her friend. “I’ve been to auctions and auctions in seven summers up here, but never a set like these. Take a look at the rosewood highboy over there.”

  They were right. It was clearly no benefit auction. There wasn’t a thing to go into surprise packages to start at a quarter a lot. There were oversized wing chairs, hand-carved beds, solid cherry tables, walnut dressers, a big roll-top desk. Moore ran his hand across the top of Hildie’s low pine dresser—it had been his sister’s, and old then—and tried to remember where he’d seen the stenciled buffet.

  A man in a bulging Hawaiian shirt, Bermuda shorts, and slippers was saying, “Lotta good wood here.”

  And his wife was complaining, “But what I specially want is a butter churn for the rubber plant.”

  There was a long table surrounded by boxes of produce. They were selling tomatoes by the crate. Further on, there were two chain saws, a water pump, a milking machine, and four power mowers. And, almost hidden behind the bandstand, a tractor. Tractors have personalities, and this was a dark green John Deere made in the thirties sometime. Moore tried hard to think where he had seen it before. It could have been at Rouse’s, but he wasn’t sure.

  The auctioneer appeared, moving light and erect toward the bandstand, his dark head bare and gleaming in the sun. Dixie trotted obediently at his left heel.

  Quite a character, that Dunsmore fellow, wouldn’t you say, Moore? It was Tad Oakes. He had two greenhouses full of geraniums at the far corner of the Parade, and nowadays he did a bit of landscaping for the newcomers. He was also the chief of the volunteer fire department. “You helping?” he asked.

  “Not me,” Moore said.

  “Good,” Oakes said. “Me neither. Nothing from the old Oakes place up there this week either.”

  “How’d you manage that?”

  “Just said, ‘Sorry, boys, haven’t got a thing left.’ They said, ‘You’re sure?’ and I said, ‘Sure as shooting. And that was that. They took off without a word. First little thing that happens I call in the troopers.”

  “Cogswell figures the troopers must be in on it.”

  Oakes paused. “Hell. I’ll go to Concord. I’ll go to the goddamn President if I have to. This is ridiculous.”

  Moore nodded. He knew all about Tad Oakes, of course, but he didn’t know the man particularly, any more than he knew anybody who actually lived in town. But now he said, surprised to hear himself, “There’s a three-day calf up to our place. And the water’s nice enough if you ever happen to be round our way with your boys.”

  “Thanks,” Oakes said, clearly pleased. “I’ll make a point of it. Perly was starting the auction, talking in that deep singsong voice he saved for auctions.

  “It can’t go on like this,” Oakes said, “do you think?”

  Moore shook his head. “Two hundred years my people been on that land. They weathered shenanigans before.”

  “That’s what I say,” Oakes said grimly. “What’s a few auctions? I didn’t half mind getting the barn and cellar cleaned out. It’s just that you have to draw a line.”

  Moore looked up and Oakes followed his glance. From under the trees, Mudgett was staring at them, unblinking as a fish. Without another word, the two men turned away from each other.

  That week Mudgett arrived on Thursday driving a brand new Crew Cab International pickup truck, the kind every man in Harlowe admired whenever he passed Tucker’s new showroom up on Route 37.

  “What you got for us, Moore?” he asked, fixing John with his flat eyes, while Cogswell shambled around the truck.

  “What color’s yours?” John asked Cogswell.

  Cogswell shrugged. “There’s them as gets and them as don’t,” he said. “The big boy says I got to swear off the bottle first. He’s after makin’ preachers of us all.”

  “He dropped a bureau the other day, with me underneath,” Mudgett said. “Damn near killed me. Never mind the way he drives.”

  Cogswell laughed loosely. “You tell him, John,” he said. “Ain’t no use tryin’ to reform me. Agnes been tryin’ all these years. I keep tellin him if he d just join me in a daily bottle for a while, he might grow a head or two.”

  “He’s goin’ to get himself tossed out, if he ain’t careful,” Mudgett said. His tongue gets to flappin’ round in the breeze about this time of day.”

  John and Mim looked at Cogswell with alarm.

  “Well, what have you got?” Mudgett asked.

  “How long you plannin’ to keep this up?” John asked.

  Mudgett shrugged. “Have to ask the boss about that,” he said. By the by, saw you talkin’ to Tad Oakes Saturday. You a special buddy of his?”

  “Just passin the time of day,” Moore said. “Any law against that?”

  “You hear he sold out and moved to Manchester? Left yesterday.”

  “So quick?” Moore said.

  “You know that old dead elm, the one he should have took down some years back? Well, it fell over his two greenhouses and smashed them up pretty good. They was lucky, you ask me. Whole damn family was up to Concord at the time. But I guess Oakes got to feelin’ pretty discouraged.”

  “He sell his place already?”

  “Dunsmore gave him cash on the barrelhead.”

  “How much?”

  “How should I know? You know how people clam up when it comes to money.”

  John dug his hands into his overall pockets. “Whatever brought you back to Harlowe anyway, Red?” he asked.

  Mudgett shook himself with annoyance. “It’s all unreal out there,” he said. “Whole shitty world.”

  “So you came round to Harlowe.”

  “Naw,” said Mudgett. “I just hate the place more, that’s all. Good a reason’s any for comin back.” He grinned and John saw that his front teeth, leaning together as they always had, had been broken to sharp points.

  “You’re no favorite round here either,” John said.

  Mudgett continued to grin. “Never was,” he said. “Never want to be.”

  That night while Hildie sang herself to sleep, John and Mim sat down in front of Ma’s quiz program.

  The M.C. asked a man in a dark turtleneck what year the Cheerleaders’ Association of America was formed. Ma waited until he answered—in the twenties sometime—then she said, “Some things you got no right to. And my bureau’s one of them. And Pas chiffonier is another.”

  Mim and John looked at each other and the M.C. awarded two hundred dollars to a girl in leopard-skin tights who must have given a better answer.

  “A handout here and there, all right,” Ma went on. “But you don’t go givin’ up every stick you own. Your father would have chased them rascals off the place with a whip, I tell you. Your great-great-grandfather cleared that whole high pasture and then some, when the woods was still filled with Indians too—riddled with them.”

  “You got no use for that bureau, Ma,” John said.

  “You tellin’ me my time has come?”

  “Course not,” Mim said. “It’s just that maybe the bureau will fetch us through without an accident.”

  “Accidents,” Ma said. “You should hear the accidents used to happen in the old days. Look what happened to Pa. How about the accidents in the news? Hundreds of people in one fell.”

  “That don’t help if you happen to be one of the hundreds,” John said.

  “I got a feelin’ it’s Red Mudgett underneath all this,” Ma said. “Never had a speck of faith, least not in somethin’ so simple as right and wrong. It all comes from bein’ too bloomin’ smart. Pipsqueak as he was, he was always too big for his britches. Every year he won the prize
for memorizin’ the most scripture. Did it out of sheer spite because it come easier to him than to others. One year he got hisself elected president of his Sunday School class. I never did cotton on to how he did that. But it’s certain he found some wrong way or other, cause he never had a bona-fide friend. It galled me just to think about it. And the worst of it was, afterwards he’d be all over me, pullin’ at my sleeve like a little gypsy. ‘Ain’t you glad I won the prize, Mrs. Moore? Ain’t you glad I got elected?’ Must of come of not enough home trainin’. Plain and simple, I never took to him. Weren’t nobody I know of did. He was too smart. Nothin’ ever good enough for him. He never liked the Bible stories and he never liked the singin’. Why he even resisted bein’ a angel in the Christmas pageant.”

  Now the M.C. was making all the contestants twirl a baton, and a young woman in a sequined dress had just dropped the baton on her foot and was jumping up and down on the other.

  “What would you have us do, Ma?” Mim asked. “It’s not as if me and John was all that partial to givin’ our comforts away.”

  “I’d have you tell him where his business lies. That it ain’t here.” John exploded out of his chair. He glared at his mother. “There’s only just one way to get that message across, Ma,” he said. He paced the room from stove to window and back. Then he turned toward his mother again, grabbing the steel trim on the cold stove behind him and hanging on. “And the only thing keepin’ me from that, Ma, is I got three women on my hands.”

  Piece by piece they let the furniture go—the overstuffed chairs and the rocker from the front room, the old dropleaf table in the dining room, even the pine kitchen chairs. One week Cogswell settled for three crates of shell beans.

  Meanwhile, as if their decision to let the furniture go had bought some time, the Moores settled into the end of summer. The corn, what the crows had left, was ripe. And the cucumbers and tomatoes and squash and beans were in full season. They took Hildie swimming in the pond every day and tried to teach her to climb without stepping on loose stones or dead branches that might give way beneath her. They mowed and raked the hay, pitched it up into the old hayrack with forks, then pulled the hayrack to the barn with the tractor and unloaded the hay through the upper doors of the barn. Together in the late afternoons, complaining of the heat and listening to the crickets, they put up tomatoes and squash. It was a wonderful year for blackberries, and after supper John and Mim and Hildie roamed the edges of the pond in the last light picking blackberries and sometimes high-bush blueberries, eating what they could, and collecting more to can.

  The days grew shorter as their supply of furniture dwindled. While the weather was still nice, they would carry Ma out at mealtimes and settle her in the big wooden lawn chair with a tray, spreading their own plates and glasses out on the granite stoop. Afterwards they milked, squirting milk into Hildie’s mouth to make her laugh, then they scrubbed the bright steel pails in the kitchen with soap and water heated on the stove. Twice a week John churned butter. At lunchtime when the stoop was warm with sunshine, they drank the chilled buttermilk and watched for the first red stains to mark the swamp maples by the pond.

  They never mentioned the missing objects, but their lives changed. They did things they had never done before. They carried a picnic supper up to the top of the pasture. One still day at dusk, they loaded Ma onto the truck and took her down as close as they could get to the pond so that she could see the fish jump. John drove up to the gravel pit and got a load of sand to dump by the side of the barn so Hildie would not dig in the dirt of the road. One day, Mim, pulling carrots in the garden, leaned her elbows on her knees, looked out over the house toward the pond, and said, “Funny, I feel like it’s my own relations been here those generations back. I feel attached.” She sighed. “It is the prettiest place.”

  John did not stop working, but he glanced at her and at his child throwing a stick for the dog behind the house, then running to fetch it herself because the dog was too lazy. “We never sprayed the ivy,” he said. “It’s bad luck.”

  It seemed clear to Mim that Fanny Linden’s perch behind the counter of the store gave her a uniquely unobstructed view of the complex situation in the town. Despite her stinginess, Fanny was not unkind, and so, John’s experience with old Ike notwithstanding, Mim continued to hope that Fanny somehow knew what should be done and would let her know too.

  Thus, whenever she went into the store, she lingered, talking weather, labor pains, and ailments with Fanny the way she always had. Fanny went on and on, her voice as flat as the cheese she made, but Mim could glean few clues. Neither Fanny nor the store seemed changed in any way. She did learn that Collins up on the ridge had fallen under his bulldozer and had to have a leg amputated.

  “Course that don’t slow Jane down none,” Fanny said. “She’s in here just as often as ever, all gussied up like she thought we was New York.”

  “How could he fall under his own bulldozer?” Mim asked, wishing she could find out where the Collinses stood with the auctioneer.

  “Takes talent, don’t it?” Fanny said. “This has been one bad year for accidents.”

  Mim frowned.

  “Course there’s one good thing come of it.”

  “What’s that?” Mim asked cautiously.

  “You mean you ain’t heard about the ambulance? Why I thought everybody’d heard by now. They broadcast it loud enough. That happened last Tuesday after Collins got hurt. Some of the money came from the police budget. Guess they got some extra now on account of the auctions. Then Perly Dunsmore dona.ted what was missin’. He went hisself, Perly did, up to Boston and come back with a brand new ambulance. Everything the very best. They was showin’ it out there on the Parade all day Wednesday. Next time someone gets hurt, it’s nothin’ but twentieth-century care for them. That’s how Perly puts it.”

  “You think Perly had to donate much?”

  “He says so,” Fanny said. “Soft-like he says it, but plenty loud enough to hear.”

  “The auctions must be rakin’ in a pretty penny. Young Ike helpin’ with them?” Mim said, trembling at her bluntness.

  “Store’s open Saturdays,” Fanny said. “Always was. But we keep an eye on things from here. Don’t hurt our business none, all that flock of outsiders landin’ on our doorstep every Saturday—and all in a spendin’ mood too.”

  “Oh,” said Mim, abashed. “I don’t suppose. Do you... have you been donatin’ much?”

  “Nothin’,” Fanny said, sitting unnaturally still, even for her. “They ain’t asked and we ain’t volunteered.”

  Harlowe shared a preacher with eleven other towns. She spent one quarter in each area, preaching in three different towns every Sunday. It wasn’t a job with much appeal for men with families, and so for eight years they’d had a woman—Janet Solossen. Once a year she called on the Moores, rattling in over their road in an old Willys Jeep, always just when they least expected her. She wore men’s work boots and covered her large uncorseted frame any which way, usually with blue jeans and dark turtleneck sweaters. Before she came in, she always stood and talked cows and tractors with John in the yard, running nicotine-stained fingers through her cropped yellow-gray hair. In the front room, she smoked and talked babies with Mim, and quilts and television with Ma. Nobody thought she was particularly smart, since she always talked about what they knew, but they noticed that she usually had good answers when problems came up, and they had long since concluded that, woman or not, she had a line to God in the proper way of preachers. People had stopped calling her “that lady preacher.” She was just “the preacher” generally, and “Reverend Solossen” to her face. Except for the newcomers and the French Canadians, most of the people in Harlowe still got married and buried out of the Union Church, but there weren’t as many as there used to be who paid attention to it on any regular basis.

  “The first Sunday of the preacher’s quarter here’s comin’ up,” Mim said. “I don’t rightly see how she can come by and not notice.”

&
nbsp; “And when she asks,” John mocked, “I suppose you’ll say you gave it all away because an old man took a stroke, and an elm tree fell on a greenhouse?”

  “I expect the preacher could sit patient for the whole long tale.” And if we tell her and she thinks it’s us is wrong and passes on our tellin’?”

  “I’m goin’ to tell her anyhow.”

  Sunday was cold and bright, etched with the fresh hard energy of autumn. Ma was pleased to be going to church. Looking strange and fragile in her navy blue gabardine suit, she sat between Hildie and John on the hard seat of the pickup truck. After Pa died, John had taken her to church until she gave it up of her own accord. “It ain’t the same,” she said, “with you a twistin’ and turnin’ in the pew like a cat in a trap.”

  John and Mim said nothing as they drove slowly past the church with its half-finished steeple. John passed the four shiny new Crew Cab trucks in front, then pulled to a stop by the post office.

  “Don’t stop,” Mim said. “No point to goin’ now. We seen enough already.”

  “Not go!” Ma said. “Just on account of them trucks? They got as much right to the church as you. More. It would a been fittin’ when you took a Harlowe man if you’d a took his church as well. But you was always strong in your ways when it was any but Johnny doin’ the pushin’.”

  “Get out, get out,” sang Hildie, absorbed in the delight of wearing her party dress. “I want to twirl my twirly skirt.”

  And the child’s as wild as a Chinese, added Ma. “You send her to Sunday School once. Then she says no and you let her be.”

  “Look who’s teachin’ it, Ma,” Mim said.

  “Well Sunday School’s Sunday School. And anyway, I say it’s Mudgett’s behind all this.”

  John let the truck idle, staring out at the church. Ma reached over and patted Mim’s knee. “Not that I blame you,” she said. “It’s just you mustn’t let them stop you when you got a plan.”