The Auctioneer

John shook his head. “You got to consider, a fellow that just took a week to tie up a Harlowe boy like Gore—one that’s lived down the road from us all his life—probably wouldn’t find it much of a challenge at all to hogtie a bunch of strangers.”

They sat at the table in silence. Ma didn’t bother to eat. Hildie slipped away from the table and vanished into the front room and nobody called her back.

Finally Mim sighed. “Now you see how it is? There’s nothin’ to do but go.”

“Maybe not,” John conceded. “Maybe not.”

All weekend they worked on the truck. John found a rusty saw left on a high hook in the barn, and there were pots of rusty but perfectly adequate nails. Mim worked enthusiastically, planning details, asking for shelves, thinking about how it would be, worrying about keeping warm. Hildie was as excited as a summer child preparing for a camping trip. They closed in the back of the truck with walls and a peaked roof that let Mim stand almost upright. There were no windows except the one into the cab in front. But there was a small hinged door on the back.

Ma sat on her couch by the window in the front room, straining to see through the barn doors to what they were doing. She refused to ask how they were coming, although she no longer said she wouldn’t go.

On Monday morning, John said, “Tonight, late, late in the wee small hours sometime, we’ll go.”

They measured and found that the sofa cushions Ma was used to sleeping on would fit against the front wall of their new little house. Mim was pleased. “That’ll be like a piece of home for Ma and Hildie,” she said. They put the cooking utensils into the truck -the dishes, the pails, Lassie’s dish. They installed the kindling box and filled it with small logs to burn in the sheet metal stove they planned to buy as soon as they were safely far away. Their bedding. All the blankets, but only their own mattress. Hildie would sleep with them. They packed all the food they had, but kept it in the kitchen yet for fear of frost. Mim made bundles of their clothing and packed a box of odds and ends for Hildie to play with.

Rather suddenly, at about two in the afternoon, they found themselves finished and simply waiting in the warm kitchen for the hour to leave. John sat in his usual place on the bench in front of the kitchen range with Hildie in his lap and Lassie at his feet, moaning in her sleep. Mim stood at the back door looking up at the pasture. The wind blew with a cold whine, laying down silver furrows in the brown pasture, then riffling them upright again.

“A good northeast gale blowin’ up,” John said, almost with satisfaction. “Long’s it don’t rain now, we’ll be all set.”

“That has more the sound of a wind to bring on snow,” Mim said.

“Papa?” said Hildie. He rocked her. “Let’s stay home.”

“Yesterday you was jumpin’ up and down to go,” Mim said, turning to the two of them.

John could hear his mother stifling her sounds from the front room, passing the time before they could go, a stretch of time as bare and desolate as the empty house itself. Already the sounds the women made reminded him of the whimpering of the refugees hurrying across the face of the television set—mothers and grandmothers and little girls, brittle and distant as the blanched bones of birds on the forest floor.

“But why do we got to go?” Hildie asked.

John stood up abruptly, standing Hildie on her feet on the floor. “Ask Mama,” he said, and went to his own mother in the other room.

She was sitting on the couch looking out the front windows, across the orchard to the pond. She did not look up when he came in. Her hair was gray and the light was gray and her very cheeks seemed gray, as uneven and fragile as ash. She had an army blanket pulled up to her chin.

“Ma,” he said, and sat on her couch beside her. She dropped the blanket and pulled his head down against her shoulder. There was practically nothing left of her. There wasn’t room for his head on her shoulder any more.

“You know,” she said, and he felt rather than heard the catch in her breath. “When I was a youngster I had a hankerin’ to see the world. But then your pa came along and he says, ‘With this out your window, honey, ain’t nothin’ you could find wouldn’t be downhill.’ So we set right here and never budged.”

John sat up and looked at her.

“Funny, ain’t it, when you think on it,” she said, “how now, after all, I’m a goin’ to see my blessed world.”

“Ma,” he said. “I’m...” His face was flushed as if with sunburn, and his eyes were as deep and muddy as the pond in summer. “Give me time, Ma. It may look like I’m pullin’ out, but it’s not in the way of quittin’ quite, not like it seems.”

“Never mind, son, never mind,” she said. “There’s some things can’t be helped.” And John held her in his arms as if it were she who was the child.