The Auctioneer

The pond was frozen in ridges to about four feet out. The wind-thrashed water gurgled and sucked at the lip of ice, keeping abreast of him, a familiar presence, as he made his way along the rough path at water’s edge. He stopped at the mouth of the brook. The night had unstrung him. The night and the weight of the gasoline can dragging on his shoulder. He could have clasped the pond in his arms. He put the can down and stood looking out over the pond once again, waiting for it to turn time aside for him the way it always had.

But finally, distracted, he turned and headed uncomforted into the dark woods, and followed the bed of rocks where, in spring, the brook rushed, and even now, beneath the high wind, a tongue of water rang against the scoured stones like the wooden clapper in a bell, warning that they were slippery. Twice he stepped on what looked like a windswept stretch of earth and crashed through ice up to his shin—both times with his right foot. Soon he had a cold foot and a warm foot as well as a free shoulder and a captive one, so that he felt unbalanced as he moved.

The distance was greater than he remembered, but eventually the bed of the brook grew indistinct. He worried about missing the stone wall, about turning off at the wrong wall, for walls, he knew too well, crisscrossed the woods like the paper chains on a Christmas tree. The right stone wall was the one that crested the hill and ended at the old logging road that would take him out behind the Parade. The road was bulldozed fresh the year he was in high school, but perhaps by now it would be so grown in he wouldn’t be able to follow it even if he found it. The water was gone completely from the creek bed now, and the woods were growing darker. If he turned on the flashlight, it would light a narrow path for his boots but black out everything around so that he would be more than ever likely to miss the wall.

Quite suddenly, a low branch reached out and caught in the handle of the gasoline can, yanking John off his feet. He fell full length on the ground. The can struck a rock with a loud clang, and the gasoline splashed around loudly inside. He lay listening until it was still, feeling his bruised knee. He got to his knees and felt for the can. A paddy bird roared up from almost underneath him, the squeaking of wings as loud as any motor. John let out a yell that startled him still more, and settled back on his heels trembling to listen for an answer. An owl hooted not far away, and then there was nothing again but the sporadic wailing of the wind.

He no longer felt alone. But it would not be a man, not here. Only, perhaps, a deer, or even a bear, more afraid of him than he of it. Or worse, a fisher cat or a big dog gone wild. John took the kitchen knife and the flashlight from his belt. He pushed the switch on the flashlight and the woods lit up in glistening black and white. Slowly he swung the light all around him, squinting to see beyond the end of its beam. He caught the lichen on the sides of trees, the heavy ridges of fungus on a broken branch, like tumors stretching skin. And then, almost beyond its reach, the light bounced off something pale and shiny and as big as a head, and after a gasp John remembered the great chunk of quartz that marked the wall he wanted. It was behind him. He had passed it. It was the marker stone he had felt as company.

He took up the gas can and, using the light now, headed out along the wall. He moved more quickly now. He would know the old road, when he came to it, by the break in the wall. And, if he could still follow the road at all, it would take him out where he wanted to be, or close enough.

The wind still howled from the northeast. It would be at his back once he swung around onto the old road. Hour after hour it had been blowing like that, and suddenly John was struck by the thought that it could not go on like that forever. He hurried, stumbling, beginning to be afraid.

In the dark and frozen woods, it seemed clear that setting fire to a few houses served no real purpose. It was only a way of turning the rage into something he could see and touch and measure, a way of setting it apart before it burst into flame within him and burned him out.