The Auctioneer

“She’s okay,” Jerry said, standing by the door of the truck with his gun pointed at Mim, considering. Mim sat very still, aware that her face itched and she didn’t dare move to scratch it.

“I guess you can come on in,” he said. “Down, Rex. Here, Duke. Shut up now.”

The dogs cringed growling at his feet and Mim, moving very gingerly, climbed out of the truck and walked in at the rarely used front door ahead of the boy. Just inside the door, the five other children clustered on the bottom of the stairs. Mim tried to smile at them. She knew them all. She remembered sitting at the picnic table in the shade of the maples, letting them tumble around her. They would talk and talk, even the littlest ones— they got that talking streak from both sides—and whoop, running out onto the lawn to show her backwards somersaults and lopsided cartwheels. Now they were silent, and she looked at them in alarm. In the fading afternoon light of the front hall, it seemed to her they were peaked, and the youngest, Jonathan, a year older than Hildie, was sucking his thumb. They looked wary, the way Hildie did when she had just kicked over a pail of milk and expected to get a whack—five pairs of sky-blue eyes waiting for her to strike, and another behind her attached to the heavy shotgun. She didn’t ask them why they weren’t in school. She could tell by looking that they wouldn’t answer.

But Jerry had at least put the gun down in the corner. He nodded in the direction of the front room, and Mim opened the door and went in.

Agnes was a tall woman with big bones, who had grown blowzy with the birth of her children. She never had been quite in control —of her big body, of her sprawling house, of the garden Mick planted and left for her to tend, of her six children, of her affections or her tears. She reminded Mim of the peach trees Pa had planted that fell beneath the weight of their own fruit when they weren’t pruned. Agnes could never keep anything in place, least of all her tongue.

Leaning 011 the arm of a new maple rocker upholstered in a pattern of golden eagles and flatirons, she faced the door, waiting for Mim. Mim was startled at the way she looked. She had gained a lot more weight, and all of it showed in the blue jersey pantsuit she was wearing. The jacket was a mass of stains down the front as if she spilled everything she touched. And she had cut her gray-brown hair short and possibly given it a permanent, for now it stood on her head in an almost solid mat of tangles.

Mim put her hand to her face. “You’re looking a bit pale, Agnes,” she said. “Kids too. You been ailin’? And winter not come on yet?”

“Ain’t nothin’ I can do for the child,” Agnes said, her surprisingly high-pitched voice screwed down tight on the words. “I can’t think why you come to me.” She got up and walked heavily across the room. Her toe picked up a corner of the new hooked rug and she stooped to lay it down again. Then she went to the back window and stood with her back against it, and Mim noticed that she was leaning on a radiator.

“Central heat!” she said. “You sure done a lot with this room.”

“It’s bad luck,” Agnes said. “So don’t bother bein’ green. I got six to count every hour. I get up at night and count them.”

Agnes hugged herself as if for warmth, but Mim felt a prickly heat spreading from her wool jacket, making her face itch.

She giggled, ashamed that Agnes should think her jealous, embarrassed at Agnes’ strangeness. “You know, Agnes,” she said, “the foolish trick I pulled? You know the poison ivy’s been growin’ in on Pa’s grave these seven years now he’s gone?”

Agnes backed up and sat on the radiator. “He still sucks his thumb,” she said. “At night it makes a clickin’ sound. You hear it all over the house so you know he’s there. But Benjamin, there ain’t no way to tell about him, short of goin’ in there and feelin’ his head for warmth.”

“Well, I went up there,” Mim went on uneasily. “I was all in a flap, and I yanked it out by the roots, all that ivy. It kept jumpin back at me as if to say you shouldn’t tackle anythin’ head on like that. Now I’m all over ivy, worse than measles. Look at my poor face.”

“It ain’t so terrible,” Agnes said, examining Mim’s face. “They pay. They pay. Better that than what happened to Molly Tucker’s boy.”

Mim rubbed her face. Agnes had always talked a mile a minute and only half made sense—her words, like her feet, tripping over each other. She would have filled her house with company if there’d been anyone interested. Usually she had an oversized laugh she couldn’t hold in. And she loved to do favors as long as they didn’t require organization or too much money. Slowly and a bit too loudly, as if she were talking to someone who was deaf, Mim asked, “I was just wonderin’, could I borrow some calamine?”