The Auctioneer

“Perly ain’t the kind would of gone off with it, child, if you’d let him know.”

“He knows, Ma,” Mim said, her voice rising. “He knows. John told him. I told him. You just wait. He won’t stop.” She started out the front door, but banged back in to say, “All you can do is run, Ma. There are people like that. Either you give in or you run.”

Mim ran out and up the path to the garden to face John. He stopped work and stood grasping the shaft of the hoe tightly with both hands. He watched Mim come and thought about catching her at the waist and shaking her until her waywardness came loose like chaff. But when she was near, running the tips of her fingers over Hildie’s face and hair, watching him warily, he took his hoe to the soil again. He would have touched her then, for his comfort and hers, but it seemed a difficult thing to do.

Alone in the house, Ma sighed. “It’s that crazy streak comin’ straight down the line from her ma.” She settled back to catch the last wisps of her program. She had missed the whole scene where the doctor told Angela that Dirk had leukemia. And now, in the last few minutes, Angela was staring wildly, balling up a handkerchief, screaming, “No! Oh, no, no, no!”

“You’ll pay worse if you try to say no,” Mim said, scraping her chair back from the supper table and stamping to the sink.

“If I’d spent my life doin’ what other people had in mind for me, I wouldn’t be settin’ here right now and neither would you,” Ma said. Ain’t nobody goin’ to tell me to give away nothin’ I prize.”

“He’s not tellin’ you, Ma. He’s makin’ you.”

“He’s just doin’ his job. There’s never any harm in askin’. But you needn’t keep answerin’ the call. If you was a real Moore, you wouldn’t be so eager to give away our belongin’s.”

“I’m a Moore as much as you,” Mim said. “It’s you that’s on his side, refusin’ to see what he is.”

All week the women wrangled, while John sat, sometimes with his head buried in his arms. When he could stand it no longer he shouted and they sulked in silence.

At night, after they were alone in bed, he pressed himself on Mim. “What happened with him? What did he do?”

“It’s not the table, Johnny,” Mim said. “And it’s not the fact he took it. It’s what he is all through. He just made that clear as clear.”

“Well tell him no,” John said, “both of us—no bickerin’ this time to let him get his way.”

“You can’t, Johnny,” Mim said. “You can’t just tell him no. He’ll bring a world of trouble down on us.”

“I can tell him what I please.”

“Johnny, give him something. For me. Give him something. Hold him off. It can’t go on for long.”

“Funny how it’s all gone sour,” John said. “Even his way with Hildie. I hate it when he swings her up like that.”

Just give him something, John. The extra bed in Hildie’s room. Promise me. Just one thing every week to hold him off. Promise me.

But John made no promises. He touched his wife and when she clasped him harshly to her, hiding her face against his neck, the excitement rose in him quicker than his habits said it should. And nothing was clarified.

On Thursday, John checked the guns—the shotgun and the .30-’06—and the square steel box of ammunition. Dull with dust, they lay side by side in plain sight on the top shelf in the pantry back of the kitchen. He didn’t jar them. They looked as comfortable and natural as the tall glass jars of flour, sugar, corn meal, and dried beans. He turned away and went upstairs. From the doorway of Hildie’s room, he pondered the extra bed. It was a rather plain but pretty rock maple bed exactly like Hildie’s. The two beds used to belong to his parents. He must have been conceived on one of them.

Finally he went out to the barn and started the tractor. Up in the cornfield, he ran it back and forth cultivating between the rows under the hot morning sun until he was bathed in sweat. The hours of work had not helped him to any decisions when he saw Hildie race down the path from the back door and stand by the road watching.

It was not the bright yellow truck that he had expected that rolled down the hill and into the yard, but Cogswell’s dusty old Chevy pickup. John covered the field in long strides and joined Hildie.

Cogswell got out of the driver’s side and faced John without a smile or a word. Red Mudgett climbed out of the other side and came around to join the pair of neighbors. Mudgett was wearing the gun again.

Before any of them spoke, the front door opened and Ma appeared. Leaning on both canes, she began to struggle down the rough stone steps.

“I ain’t a goin’ to let you get away this time, Mickey Cogswell,” she called.

Cogswell and John jumped to help Ma out to the single wooden chair sitting in the middle of the lawn.

Hildie danced with delight to see her grandmother outside, and Mim came slowly down the path from the kitchen and stood by John.

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