The Auctioneer

Outside, John and Mim and Hildie stood in the dooryard looking out over the pond. The wind roughed it up so that the light fell deep into the troughs and left the surface dark as ink. “By mornin’,” John said, “I bet the pond’s caught.”

“It’ll skim over ragged if this wind keeps up, even if the snow don’t get it,” Mim said.

“Crummy skating,” John said.

“And how many years since you been skatin’, John Moore?” Mim teased.

“Hildie’s about of an age to learn,” he said.

Walking three abreast, John and Hildie and Mim headed into the dim pine forest and followed the old logging road that circled around and came out at the top of the pasture. Far overhead, a restless canopy of branches broke the sunshine into tiny dancing circles. Light-starved seedlings and brush had died back and rotted, leaving an open expanse of dead pine needles which gave beneath their boots, then sprang back silently behind them. The wind rushed at the green needles overhead and they flattened against one another with a high hissing sound. Occasionally the wind reached down to sing through the dead lower branches and lift the green tassels on Hildie’s stocking cap.

“He’ll cut the pine,” Mim said, “before he sells.”

“Who, Perly?” John said. “He won’t cut the pine nor sell neither.”

“You figure he’ll really save it for a playground?” Mim said.

“Nope,” John said.

They crossed over the bridge where the brook ran in the spring and headed up a steep incline out of the pine grove. Hildie rushed ahead and clattered nearly waist deep through maple and birch and poplar leaves. Crisp oak leaves still clinging to the high branches chattered in the wind. The smaller beech saplings held their leaves too, papery thin and yellow as daffodils. The wind and sun swooped down through the branches, dappling the woods with light and hustling the leaves up into pinwheels that spun and died, then spun again. They passed through a thicket beneath a seed hemlock and came out to the Christmas grove— dozens of wild white spruce, protected far overhead by spreading maples. Underfoot, princess pine and a spiky chartreuse creeper were so thick you couldn’t step without crushing them.

“Near time to cut a tree, and still no snow,” Mim said.

“Dry year,” John said.

“Will we come back for Christmas?” Hildie asked. She was pulling up greens by the handful. “Can I help make the wreaths this year?”

As they went on, the spruce gave way to juniper, and the creeper to the rusty orange of dried ferns. And then, quite suddenly, they stepped through the break in the stone wall and out into dazzling sunshine and the icy force of the wind. The cemetery was just as Mim had left it, except that the wind and sun had dried to gray the earth she had bared. A few curled tendrils of dead ivy still poked from the ground. “I sometimes breathe easier that nothin’ grows in winter,” Mim said.

Hildie stood gazing at the gravestones that she had never seen so clearly before. “My grandpa’s under there?” she asked.

“Don’t go no closer now,” Mim said. “That stuff is wicked poison even now.”

But John, whose father and grandfather and great-grandfather were there, wasn’t looking at the cemetery. He stood on the crest of the hill, looking down, past the sweep of pasture and the weatherbeaten house, toward the pond. Mim went and stood next to him so that her shoulder brushed his.

He shook himself with irritation and moved away from her. “Where do you have in mind to go?” he asked her. “Just where but here can you be thinkin’ there’s a place for us?”

“But you said,” Mim said.

“Oh we’ll move into the truck and play house if you like,” he said. “But nobody’s goin’ to cut that pine.”

“Like as not, he’ll keep the pine,” Mim said.

“I’m sayin’ I’ll keep the pine,” John said, his eyes the same color as the dead grass and the sandy soil.

Mim’s eyes were the color of the sky arching over the land and away as far as they could see. “We will go?” she prompted.

John nodded. He ran a hand through Mim’s short curls and picked up Hildie, who hid her face in his shoulder against the cold. Then the three of them started down the hill into the hard wind.

They ate, and Mim put the last dishes and bits of food into the cartons, even a bottle of leftover soup. Ma sat in the lawn chair with her hands clasped in her lap watching. John whittled on a stick, and Hildie and the dog watched warily, anxious at the preparations.