The Auctioneer

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.