The Auctioneer

It grew dark, suppertime passed, Hildie was put to bed, and the heavy part of the night settled in for its long stay. The wind came up again. The branches on the trees in front of the house snapped free and thumped against the ground and the wind blew across the long vibrating reed of the pond, singing up and up to the pitch of sirens and screams. They listened, trying to block out the racket around them in order to detect sounds from town, or the whine of a car approaching, or the subtle rustle of footsteps in the yard.

John worked at a piece of kindling, whittling it away to nothing with his knife. Lassie snoozed on her blanket behind the stove. Ma sat wide awake in her chair. And Mim, at the table, gnawed on her fingers and did nothing.

“I keep wonderin’,” John said, “how far it spread. If they found the gloves.”

“Lassie’d bark if there was anyone about,” Mim said.

“You remember somethin’ about Gore?” John said. “True of all of them Gores. Dogs never bark at them. Never did.”

Ma picked at the fringe of her blanket.

At ten they let Lassie out, then in again, and, after some discussion, decided that the least suspicious thing they could do was go to bed. Hour after hour, John, so recently awakened, lay listening. All the tumult of the night outside the windows came to him as an echo of the smashing of dry woods around him in his long flight.

Suddenly, not knowing whether he’d been full awake, he sat up and shook Mim awake. “You hear sirens?”

She listened. He could feel her shivering, as much at being shaken out of her heavy nervous sleep as at anything. “I do,” she said.

But as they listened the sirens stopped and they were listening to the wind again in the tops of the bare maples.

“Sounded so close,” Mim said.

“Could it still be goin’?” John asked.

“Wrong direction for the Parade,” Mim said.

“The night twists things,” John said. “And the wind. Could of been Powlton fire engines on the way to the Parade—”

“Or Harlowe fire engines on the way to Powlton,” Mim said. “Just as like. Who knows what’s burnin’ where or why.”

The night passed and morning came again, with sunshine and Hildie. Curiosity grew as heavy on their shoulders as fear. At twelve o’clock, taking Hildie in case they came while she was gone, Mim went to Linden’s.

They rattled over the last familiar potholes in the dirt road and rolled onto the hardtop, sudden and smooth, starting abruptly in the middle of a stretch of unbroken woods like the hostile finger of the town probing the wilderness. In the blackness of the tar, she anticipated the charred ruins of the Parade. But the sunshine stretched in peaceful bands across the road, darkening the cracks and lighting up the bits of mica imbedded in it. Nothing could seem quite sinister in sunshine.

As she rounded the last clump of pines and found herself at the far corner of the Parade, she saw at once that there had been no fire. It was like waking up from a dream and finding everything the dream had upended settled back into place—restored. She tried to remember just how the dream had gone and found she couldn’t.

James’s house looked as empty as ever, the front blinds drawn as always and the dormers lopsided—one weathered to gray and one pink with new paint that was already peeling. Mudgett’s house sat unchanged in its clutter—the six-month-old pile of lath and plaster outside the parlor window, the same stock car in the front yard, missing fenders and wheels, the big 14 dripping white paint down the door. As she drove by, craning her neck, Mudgett’s wife paused with her mouth full of clothespins to peer back from her station behind the half-filled clothesline. Adeline Fayette herself stood under the American flag in front of the post office, chattering at some stranger. He was listening. He couldn’t have done much besides listen, since Adeline couldn’t hear.

Mim drove around the corner toward Linden’s. Her back set on the three solid houses, she glanced at the still green grass on her right, at the locked town hall, Stinson’s repair shop, the doctor’s house with its tidy sign, and the pair of greenhouses on her left, still caved in at the peaks like broken legs. The precise normality of the Parade fell over her like a dark blanket, and she tried to remember the story her husband had told her, the drama, the far-fetched sequence. Then she thought of Agnes Cogswell, of John pitching the money into the stove, of Ma banging her cane at the tale of her family name revenged.

At the far side of the Parade she backed into Linden’s parking lot and leaned on the steering wheel, gazing out across the green at the three untouched houses. No monsters, no armored tanks, no cross voices—only Harlowe Parade as she had known it ever since she could remember, glistening with sunshine at the time of year when autumn falls to winter. Hildie stood on the seat beside her, leaning on her shoulder, dreaming too, it seemed.