The Auctioneer

“And I been tellin’ you all week,” Ma said, “you can’t blame Perly for Gore’s prattlin’. Anything said by a Gore, you can put right out of your head. That was ever a topsy-turvy household. Weren’t no one in it ever cared two whoops in thunder for the truth.”

On Thursday, John was restless. After he had milked the cows and put them out to pasture, he lingered over breakfast, drinking cup after cup of coffee, casting around for chores to do in the house. At every long sigh of wind through the pines, he expected Perly and Bob to burst through into their yard.

He finished patching a hole in the screen door and turned to speak to Mim. She was blacking the stove, holding her body away from the stove to protect her clothes. Hildie, catching him idle, took his hands and started to climb him like a tree. He sat down by the table and bounced her on his knee, watching Mim.

Mim turned from the stove and stood at the sink to wash her hands. Afterwards, she took her brush from the shelf and started to brush her hair. She brushed it and brushed it, staring at her image in the small mirror over the sink that John used for shaving every second or third day. Her light hair sprang back from the brush into fuzzy curls. Usually she only brushed it like that when she washed it Saturday mornings. Hildie slid down Johns legs and climbed up again. Mim put the brush down and leaned in closer to the mirror.

John pushed Hildie away. The heat rose slowly to his head. Ma’s judgment rang in his ears: “Shes a far sight too pretty to make a decent wife to a man.”

Mim had been seventeen when he married her and so lovely he ached when he touched her. If anyone had asked him why he married her, he’d surely have said that was the reason. But he was pleased when, after a couple of years alone with the fields and the trees, with only his eyes and those of his parents, she forgot she was pretty and didn’t bother with a mirror from the beginning of the week to the end. It was all for him. And he remembered thinking, from time to time, in those first years—when she was running down the pasture in summer, or diving into the pond, or coming into the kitchen in winter, rosy with the cold—that it showed a man’s worth to have a wife who looked like that.

He hadn’t thought of such things for years, but now he saw that she was no longer young. Her slender hands on the hairbrush had grown as tough as his own. The good fair skin, which had once stretched so cleanly over the straight features that her face completely hid her thoughts, was faintly patterned now so that laughter, mockery, and her quick characteristic squint of doubt seemed always there, ready to break through. Still, her body had filled out and gained confidence without losing its grace, and her eyes remained the deep clear blue of a winter sky.

So she had not overlooked the auctioneer’s eye for her. John got out of his chair and moved slowly toward her. She met his eyes in the mirror and stiffened with alarm. His two hands landed on her arms. She froze as she stood. He felt the power in his hands and closed his eyes to stop himself. She wouldn’t struggle. She never struggled. She had let him have his way the first time he tried, when she was fifteen. Sometimes she had run away first, into the darkness under the trees, but if he sat still, very still, she had always come back and let him have his way.

She bore the bruising grip on her arms with perfect stillness until he himself was trembling. He shoved himself away from her so that she staggered against the sink. “Why you brushin’ your hair?” he shouted.

Hildie screamed with surprise and ran to her grandmother in the front room, dodging between John and Mim.

Mim went pale beneath her freckles. “It’s only right to look decent when company’s comin’,” she said. Without moving away, she started taking the dishes from the drainer and putting them away in the shelves overhead. “What are we goin’ to give this week? she asked—a question she’d already asked too often.

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.