The Auctioneer

When he got to the barbed wire section that opened to release the cows, he stopped until Gore and Perly came up behind him and he could feel their breath swirling around his head. The stone was six feet ahead of them. He would wait until they were through the barbed wire. Perly came first, moving through as silent and effortless as a cat. Gore watched John as he went past, his small eyes cautious.

John noticed the empty holster first. Then he saw the gun. Gore wasn’t pointing it, just dangling it at his side, half hidden behind his broad thigh.

“Well,” said the auctioneer, “which of your pretty lasses will you part with?”

John stood staring down at the stone. If he bent to pick it up now, next week’s news would be that John Moore had had an accident cleaning up his guns for hunting season—never mind the fact the guns were gone.

And then the three women would be alone.

John held the fence post and looked past the men to the weathered house below to steady himself. It looked small with distance on the gray day. And in the yard, diminished too by distance, Mim stood where they had left her.

“Which ones did you say?” asked Perly.

Silently, John pointed to Moon. He leaned on the post for support as the auctioneer himself moved toward Moon, slapped her on the flank, and started her ambling easy down the field.

Gore kept watch, his feet planted wide apart, his gun tight in his hand, and his mouth half open, gasping for breath.

After that, Mudgett and Cogswell came again for a while. Mudgett led the way and Cogswell ambled after him like an enormous awkward pet. He was drinking heavily and had to be spoken to sometimes two or three times before he responded. They made two trips one week to take the entire crop of squash, and then they took the churn and separator and, finally, the rest of the cows, always a pair at a time. John and Mim worried about Hildie without the milk, but she went on thriving. They still had good vegetables, and they started eating the chickens as fast as they could, one or even two a day. “Guess they can’t take what’s already et,” Ma said.

They picked the last of the green tomatoes and hid them under the floorboards in their bedroom, then pulled up the bean and tomato stakes. They picked pumpkins and what few squash were late to ripen. They picked bushels of wormy apples. The cider press was gone, so Mim cut them up and made apple sauce from some and hung the others on strings from the rafters in the attic to dry. They put plastic over the windows of the front room and the kitchen. And every day they went into their woods and cut a load of firewood. John got up on the roof with a burlap sack full of bricks on the end of a rope and cleaned the chimneys, and together they emptied the traps behind the stoves.

It was too cold now to bathe in the pond. Instead, on Saturday afternoons, they heated three big kettles full of water and poured them into the galvanized tub. Ma got the first bath, than Hildie, and finally Mim and John. Mim heated a bowl of water and, scolding and coaxing, washed Hildie’s bright thin hair.

The leaves began to fall from the trees and everything seemed to move closer to the house—the pond, and the pines where the road opened up, and the edges of the pasture. Mim brought the old wooden lawn chair into the kitchen so that Ma could sit in the kitchen comfortably.

John went and told the doctor’s wife he didn’t have the cows any more.

“Why is everyone giving up cows?” Mrs. Hastings asked. I see Lovelace and Rouse don’t have theirs any more either. I hear they’re being sold at the auctions. You must be getting a fine price.”

John stood before her thinking of the check for five dollars he d gotten the week before for two good milkers.

“Well, I guess it wasn’t that much we paid you,” she said with a touch of irritation. “It was good butter, I’ll say, but I guess it just isn’t worthwhile any more.”

“The doctor,” John said, “he must know what’s going on. All the...”

“What?” said Mrs. Hastings. “Inflation? If it’s Harlowe and this auction business you mean, I have to tell you right out we never could understand what makes you people tick. How can anybody hope to understand people who won’t raise a finger to better themselves? It’s just like the butter problem. Nobody even wants to do an honest day’s work any more.”

The tall woman opened the back door and stood brooding at John, waiting for him to leave.

John paused in the doorway, meeting the contempt in her gaze.

“Ma’am,” he said, “for all your fancy schoolin’, ain’t much you do understand.”

After Hildie was in bed, John poured the money out of the crockery jar over the sink and counted it, as he did at least once a week. “A hundred seventy-three,” he said. “And a hundred in the bank.”

They had never been so low going into winter. “Six dollars a month for a phone what never rings,” he said. “Don’t suppose they’ll be askin’ me to run the snowplow neither.”

“What if there’s an accident?” Mim said.