The Auctioneer

The poison ivy in the cemetery was a deep shiny red. It lay like a flood halfway up the grave markers and sent out tentacles from under the stone wall into the pasture. It climbed around and around the trunks of the old cherry tree and coiled its way out along the branches, like snakes moving toward robins’ nests. There hadn’t been any ivy there at all when they buried Pa seven years ago. John had dug a proper grave six feet deep so the ground could never heave the coffin back. Afterward, they had taken Ma up in the tractor once a week and she had tried to get Mayflowers and sheep laurel growing on the new raw place. She knew as well as they that Mayflowers would never bloom in that high dry place, but it was a labor they could not talk her out of, as if she hoped that Pa, wherever he was, could breathe life into the flowers he had loved the best.

When, in the spring, they took Ma up to see if the Mayflowers were in bloom, they found that what had taken root was poison ivy. Ma never asked to go up again.

John didn’t care for poison ivy and wouldn’t take the scythe in there, the way Pa always had, to keep down the growth. And so the ivy and everything else ran free. Black clumps of juniper began for it to climb on, and poplar saplings took root the next spring and mixed their sticky gray-green leaves with the chartreuse of the spring ivy.

Mim had a sudden image of a new-dug grave with the ivy filling it like water in a muddy footprint. Filling it to overflowing so there was no room for the coffin. “Ma’s gettin’ old,” she murmured, but what she saw was the kind of small flat stone that said simply, “Child.”

She whirled around and examined the black verges of the forest that surrounded her on three sides. The woods on the edge of a pasture are like a window, easier to see out of than into, and she could only feel the presence of the hunters stalking silently, invisible within the dimness. High in the woods, near Cogswell’s field, there was a sheltered place between a huge seed hemlock and the flat face of a cliff, and every year the hunters left a bushel basket full of beer bottles under it. Sometimes too, working in the woods the following autumn, she and John would find a beer bottle upright on a rock, half full of rain water as if a hunter had put it down suddenly to lift the gun from across his knees and take his deer. Mim let her eyes fall down over the empty pasture toward the house and listened to the sweep of wind across the gray sky.

Then she turned and sank her gloved hands into the fiery sea of ivy, grasped all she could, and pulled it free. It snapped quite suddenly and sprang back around her body. She stepped away, leaving the ungainly mass in a heap outside the wall, and went back for more. She tore at the ivy, pulling tendrils of it sometimes twelve feet long. She pulled up the junipers and kicked at the poplars till they were bent and stripped of leaves. She worked until the ground around the gravestones was trampled and brown. Then, in three trips, she carried the pile of ivy over and dumped it in the woods. She stood over the broken brown twigs showing in the dirt. In spring they would send up wild new growth. The pruning would be like a tonic to the ivy. She stood over the cemetery too tired now to cry. All her effort, she knew full well, might ease her anger now, but it would all grow back in fresh red shoots in the renewal of spring.

Back at the house, she brought in four pails of extra water. Adding boiling water from the kettles, she washed her gloves, her wool shirt, her jeans, her socks, her jersey, and finally, with harsh yellow soap, herself.

By Thursday, when Mudgett and Gore came, the poison ivy was raging all over her arms and face. They took the water pump and roamed around looking for something more. Gore found the old wooden barrel of potatoes where Mim had hidden it in the cellar, heaved it onto his shoulder, and carried it out to the truck.

After they left, Mim stood at the sink with her back to the others in the room and indulged in the painful luxury of scratching at her face with her fingernails. Then she scrubbed her hands yet again with the yellow soap and a plastic brush. She was afraid to touch Hildie for fear of starting the plague on her, and John would not touch her even in their bed.

Finally Ma said, “Well, and just what do you plan for Christmas dinner now, missy?”

Mim turned. “There are more potatoes in the earth,” she snapped.

John sat with his feet on the fender of the stove as if the women weren’t there. The shavings he peeled from the stick fell to the floor beneath his feet. There was a long silence.

Mim stood at the sink scraping carrots. “Could we get ourselves on welfare, do you think?” she asked. “It’s hardly even shameful nowadays.”

“Since when?” Ma said. “Maybe not for folks who ain’t got sense enough to hang on to what’s theirs.”

“No one goin’ to put us on the dole when we got a stand of pine like that one east of the pasture,” John said.