The Auctioneer

“We will,” Mim screamed. “We will. We will.”

John looked down on her and began to laugh.

“Stop that,” Mim cried. She reached for him to make him stop, but he twisted away, laughing harder than ever, doubled over with the force of it.

Mim swung her fist out on the end of her arm and landed it against his shoulder, hard.

“Ow, ow,” John said, choking with laughter. “Cut it out.”

Mim stepped back and her eyes filled with tears. She stood crying, not covering her face, staring at John with disbelief.

“Don’t carry on now,” he said, rubbing his arm. “I’m goin’ out to buy us some Thanksgivin’ dinner.”

John threw the truck into gear and set it roaring up the road with a sense of purpose that made him slap the steering wheel in an exuberant rhythm. But instead of fading as he moved away from home, the image of the three pale faces grew more vivid, until he could almost feel the heaviness of their breath waiting on his own.

He did his errands in a hurry. At Linden’s he filled the truck with gas and bought a chicken, a bunch of bananas, and a gallon of milk. Fanny handed him change and bagged his items, dispensing information all the while in her usual bored monotone.

John did not answer, but he heard, and his own breath went short at the thought of his family sitting alone so far away.

As soon as he was out of sight of the Parade, he floored the old truck so that it skidded on the gravel at every turn. He pulled up almost to the door, jumped out of the cab and burst into the room. In the doorway he stopped short. Ma was peeling potatoes at the table, and Mim was sitting on the bench by the stove rocking Hildie in her arms, singing the alphabet song with her. He could see she would say no more about going for now. The lamp cast a cheerful glow in the gray afternoon, deepening the colors of the room.

“Everything’s okay!” he exclaimed, with an unfamiliar shock of pleasure.

“If you can call it that,” Ma said.

John unloaded his purchases onto the table. “For once we’ll eat decent,” he said. “After all, Thanksgivin’s still a holiday. You should a had a whiff of the smells from the kitchen down to Linden’s.” But Mim was counting what was left in the jar when he returned the change. “A hundred and thirty-two,” she said. “Fifteen dollars down in one week. A hundred and thirty-two’s not much to go on.”

“What the hell,” John said. “It’s somethin’.” He was high now. Home had never seemed so precious and so comfortable. “Damn fool Jim Carroll. First he let that child go, and now he’s gone and let his land go too. Him and the kids that’s left, they up and went. They moved Emmie up to that nursin’ home by the Circle, and took off. Even she don’t know where to.”

“That’s what she says,” Mim said. “She knows him and the kids are best off gone.”

“The Carroll place must have a hundred acres clear,” John said. “Dunsmore will make some hay on that.”

“How can you joke?” Mim said wearily.

But John talked nonstop through dinner, and afterwards crawled around on the floor with Hildie on his back, bucking and howling to add to her hilarity. Mim frowned uneasily and Ma took her canes and left the room.

After Hildie was asleep and Ma was settled in the front room, Mim brushed her teeth, wrapped the two remaining bricks on the range in towels to warm their bed and made her rounds, making sure that all the bolts she had installed were securely fastened. At that point, John came in carrying his suit and a white shirt. “I need a bath,” he said.

Mim stood before him with the bricks hugged to her.

John set the hanger with the suit on one of the hooks by the door, poured the water remaining in the pails under the sink into the big kettle on the range, took the empty pails, unlocked the back door, and headed out to the well.

When the cold gust of air from the door hit her, Mim moved. She returned the bricks to the stove, opened the damper so that the fire came up with a roar to warm the kitchen, and got the big galvanized tub down from the hook at the foot of the cellar stairs. She hung a clean towel on the line high over the range to warm.

When John came back with the water, she said, “Where you off to?”

“To blow the whistle on that Perly fellow,” John said. “Past high time someone did.”

John left at five in the morning, but his plans had changed somewhat. As it turned out, he was wearing the dark green work pants and red and black plaid jacket that he usually wore to town.

“Perly’s got friends in Concord, sure,” Mim had said. “If you happened on one, here we’d be—me and Hildie and Ma without a way of knowin’ or a truck to drive away in. You can say what you got to say just as clear on the telephone as goin in to see him.”