The Auctioneer

Presently, Perly checked his papers and wound up the proceedings. “Well, now we’re all in this together, folks,” he said and looked slowly around at the intent crowd. Then, suddenly, he laughed, spreading out his arms to include the people before him. “You’re in the most exclusive company,” he cried. “I love you all and I congratulate you. Believe me, this town is going to be the biggest double-barreled front-page gilded rooster of a place you ever set foot in.”

John and Mim moved slowly in the babbling crowd back toward their truck. The wind had picked up and grown colder, so damp now that patches of water darkened the blacktop on the road. A dozen or so people surrounded the auctioneer in a chattering group as he moved toward his house. Dixie trotted at his left heel, shouldering people’s knees to keep her place, her tail waving just slightly in a suggestion of friendliness. Gore moved behind the group, squinting and nervous, his right hand poised near his hip pocket.

“They got a wicked surprise comin’,” John said, watching from the truck.

“Maybe it’s them and maybe it’s us’ll get a surprise,” Mim said. “For my money, Prescott and Jimmy Ward did a smart thing. We ought to clear out too.”

“Folks with cash to buy a farm or a hunk of land just to play games with, like it was a kid’s red wagon... It must take quite a dent to make them hurt.”

“They bought that land and now it’s theirs,” Mim said. “He’s not goin’ to stand for Prescott comin’ back and makin’ any claims.”

“I just know that nobody but a Moore’s goin’ to do with that authentic antique farm on the pond with the steep pasture up behind. He may think it, but he’s wrong.”

“He got the Wards to go,” Mim said, “for all they were such a big deal in town.”

“Ward’s a fool,” John said. He started the truck, then sat over the steering wheel watching the Parade ground empty out. “He may think the Moores are nobody, but he’s goin’ to find out different.”

Sunday morning was icy cold and still, a fragile day. The last oak leaves clinging to their twigs were like blown glass, jingling and shattering at a touch.

“Snow’s late,” Mim said.

John sat on the bench in front of the stove. He had shaved a maple kindling stick away to the size of a scallion, then chopped it into quarter-inch slices as if to add it to the soup. Finally he shoved aside the last shards of maple and his knife, and now he simply sat, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, staring through his fingers at his boots and the fender of the stove. Occasionally he rubbed his scalp until his thick gray-brown hair stood out from his head, reminding Mim that he needed a haircut.

In the front room, Ma sat alone on her couch. Now that the room was bare, it seemed wrapped in wallpaper. The paper had once been yellow behind some sort of bluish vine that had never existed, at least not in New Hampshire. Ma had chosen it because it was springlike, and John had approved because it was cheap. Now it was almost black behind the big parlor stove where fingers of smoke stroked it all winter. It was still a startling canary yellow in patches where the piano and sewing machine had stood, and where the pictures had hung, but everywhere else it had faded to a brownish cream. Mim had potted geraniums from the garden to fill the windowsills, and washed the windows, worrying that the putty was so far gone that even with the plastic they would rattle and perhaps crack in the winter wind. But today sunshine streamed in through the small rippled panes and marked out a warm gridwork on the unvarnished pine floor. Catching the tips of Ma’s gray hair, the light made them shine like milkweed as she sat—perfectly still and years away as she gazed out on the quiet day.

But Hildie had few memories and could not be still. She raced from the front room to the kitchen, and back to the front room, shaking the house with footsteps and jarring the air with shouts. Mim shook out Ma’s pillows, swept the floors, dusted the hot stoves, and fussed after Hildie. Finally she stopped in back of John, with Hildie still whirling around her.

“They’ll take the tractor this week, sure,” she said.

John neither moved nor answered, so Mim repeated her statement in a louder voice. This time John turned his head and looked up at her. She saw that he was trembling with anger.

She turned without a word and grabbed Hildie’s sweater and her own jacket from the hooks by the back door. She caught up the child and whisked her outside. Hildie huddled and held on to her hand, complaining of the cold.