The Auctioneer

Three cars and station wagons at once pulled in around the Parade. In each, a man and a woman sat moving their lips in conversations silenced by rolled-up windows. They stared curiously at the post office and the houses ringing the Parade, and passed their muted judgment on to one another.

“Who are they, John?” Mim asked, somehow fighting tears. She had a need that was physical to touch her child and feel her land beneath her feet—as if she’d traveled a thousand miles and couldn’t get back. “What can be worse than Saturday?”

As it approached three, pickup trucks and dusty old American sedans began to join the newer cars of the strangers, bringing the Harlowe men who had been at the Saturday auctions—deputies most of them, without a doubt. James and Cogswell sat on the bandstand silently now, watching. A foreign station wagon pulled up. The door opened and let out a man in horn-rimmed glasses and a tweed topcoat. He walked around the car and opened the other door for his wife. As he did so, he perceived the dozens of eyes on him and looked up startled. His wife stepped out, a small woman in a beige cloth coat and a tidy felt hat. He said something to her and she glanced quickly at the other cars, then motioned to the church. The man put his hand on the small of her back and hurried her toward the church, hunching his shoulders against the gaze of the people in the cars. He pulled at the door, then leaned back against the knob and pulled harder. It was locked. For a long moment he and his wife stood staring at the blank door before them. Then slowly the man turned again toward the unlikely collection of people watching him.

But even as he hesitated, the door opened inward and Pulver and Stone stepped out and ushered the couple into the church.

Then, as if at a signal, the deputies and the strange couples got out of their cars and trucks with a great slamming of doors and moved toward the open door of the church—the deputies abruptly, looking straight ahead, and the couples tentative and clinging to each other.

Rather suddenly, Perly’s big yellow van backed out of his driveway, turned, bumped a hundred yards along the road, and backed into the church driveway, up to the side door of the church. Gore got out of the driver’s seat and climbed into the back of the van.

“It gives me a creepy feelin’,” Mim said, “havin’ to go inside walls with the likes of them.”

“With all that pile of outsiders,” John said, “what can happen?” So John and Mim climbed slowly down out of their truck and followed the couples up the walk toward the church. A woman in front of them was so fat she moved by rocking from side to side like a mechanical toy. She dropped a cigarette, still lit, and John stepped, out of habit, to grind it out, though it wouldn’t have set fire to anything there. The woman tapped another out of her purse, and her husband, who was only somewhat less fat, stopped and turned to cup a match against the wind. John and Mim passed them as they struggled to light the cigarette.

“We shouldn’t have come, Billy. I don’t think so.”

“What’re you goin’ to do?” the man said. “The agencies said no, didn’t they?”

“It’s not goin’ to be to his taste, findin’ us here,” Mim whispered. “I can’t tell no more what’s meant to be,” John said. “Could be he planned on us comin’.”

Inside the wide church doors, Pulver and Stone sat at the table like ticket takers at a church supper, asking the names of the people as they filed in, checking each couple off on a list, then letting them by. John and Mim simply walked by them. Tom Pulver’s eyes followed their progress across the foyer to the swinging doors that led to the sanctuary, but he said nothing.

There were no greeters and there was no organ, only the nervous shifting of the silent people on the horsehair cushions in the pews. The couples were scattered around the church, and evenly dispersed among them were the deputies. John and Mim took a pew near the back, and Ian James moved in immediately behind them with a stealth that set Mim’s scalp to prickling.

They sat for what seemed hours. Afraid to turn and look, they listened to the strangers rustling behind them, and focused with sharp-edged intensity on the slow motions of those in front of them.

At last the side door at the front of the church opened, and Perly began walking slowly toward the high central pulpit. His crisp black hair was combed back so tightly it barely curled, and the silver cuff links at his wrists glittered as he gestured to the crowd. Except for the gentle golden dog at his heels, he looked like the chairman of some important board of directors, or possibly a middle-of-the-road evangelist. He stepped into the high pulpit and Dixie disappeared behind its balustrade.

Perly scanned the assembled people, reducing them to perfect stillness. Mim thought his gaze caught on hers momentarily and had to pull away as if snagged. Without moving, she let the heat of embarrassment and anger wash over her and fade.