The Auctioneer

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.