The Auctioneer

He stopped to top off the gas. Without getting out, he used the rearview mirror to watch the young boy standing jiggling to the sound of a radio as he waited for the tank to fill. He tried to decide whether it would be safe to ask him to fill the gas can. But when the moment came, he paid without a word and drove away with the gas can still empty.

Chilled at the thought of how long he’d been gone, he gave up the idea of waiting till night to return. Instead, he went past the Route 37 turnoff and circled around on back roads so that he approached Harlowe from the north instead of from the south as they would expect if they were looking. Through the last county to the north, he took fire roads all the way, rattling past old farms and a few new cottages, hoping nobody would report him. When he came to the bottom of the road past Cogswell’s, it was early afternoon, gray and wintry.

As the truck labored up the road fifteen feet from Cogswell’s front door, John’s face and neck twitched uneasily beneath the pressure of the eyes he knew were there—Jerry’s or Mickey’s— following his progress through the sights of the double-barreled shotgun. But Cogswell would have recognized his truck anyway, even at night.

Halfway down his own side of the hill, the road widened out where the drive into the old Wilder place had once begun. John pulled off. He got the gas can out of the bed of the truck, and a length of plastic tubing for a siphon. He put one end into the gas tank of the truck and, sitting on the ground, sucked on the other end, slowly, so as not to get a mouthful. When it was running, he led it into the can and listened as it filled, a sound like the finger of water trickling out of the spring halfway down the cliff behind the pasture. When the gas can was full, he stood up and lifted the end of the siphon over his head so that the gasoline in it ran back into the truck.

He carried the gas can through the overgrown drive, climbed down into the cellar hole, perfectly dry now in the autumn, but overgrown with raspberry brakes. He made his way to the cold recess in the stone foundation wall where the Wilders had kept their milk and butter. He pulled out a stuffing of blown leaves, placed the gasoline can in the recess, and shoved the leaves back so that the old red can was hidden.

Probably the Wilder place had burned. That was what usually happened to farmhouses. Whatever had happened, the land had been a part of the Moore place since the Civil War. The bridal maples some ancient Wilder had planted were so overwhelming now that they would have brushed the house had it been standing. They spread their branches over a natural clearing. All the land around had been scrub when John was a boy, but now the beech and maple were eight or nine inches through and the poplar thicker still and dying out. Ma could remember when the Wilder place was mostly pasture, with views from almost everywhere.

After a house burned, the chimnev stood alone awhile like a ‘ j child’s block tower. Then one year, the mortar completely gone, it would simply crumble in the spring thaw and the next summer there would be a heap of clean red bricks in the pit marked out by the cellar stones. He’d seen it happen. And presently the Virginia creeper and poison ivy would poke up through the bricks, and then, almost overnight, trees as thick as your wrist. Someday, someone would come and take the bricks to build a walk with, then everyone would forget—everything but the name. “The old Moore place. Whatever happened?” they would ask.

But no, that wasn’t what Perly had in mind. He had in mind to make it modern, expensive, a place for play, not work—ropes with colored floats to mark off where to swim, the barn tricked up with picture windows, hexes, and a sign for Perly Acres, ski tows running up the pasture, the dooryard paved for parking sports cars and foreign station wagons—a place no Moore could even visit.

He drove into his yard in the last light. The woods were dark already, but the pond was a pale pool of light and the pasture rose gray and wide behind the house. The soft yellow glow of the kerosene lamp shone from the kitchen windows, and from the kitchen chimney he could see a wisp of smoke, almost black against the sky. Mim was watching from the window, and came running down the path in her shirtsleeves to meet him. He caught her in his arms and held her to him in a way he seldom did. She pulled away laughing, and didn’t ask him questions. She turned, almost bashful, and led the way up the path to the kitchen.

Only when he was settled at the table with his supper did she ask, “Did you tell him?”

John shook his head. “They got it fixed so you can’t,” he said. “And the cops want you to come in and stick your head in a noose before they’ll listen. First one that let me get six words in sets right off tellin’ me how Perly Dunsmore’s the best thing ever happened to us.”

“John!” Mim said. “You didn’t let on who you were?”