The Auctioneer

But in the brave light of morning, he stood at the door watching the wind feathering the needles across the tops of the enormous white pines lining the pond. They were twisted and scarred and halfway ruined, yet Ma always called them the “virgin pines.” A bunch of them had gone over like dominoes in the 1938 hurricane. He had climbed on a chair when he was smaller than Hildie and watched through the window. And even after that, the ones that still stood they called “virgin pines.” Maybe the point was that if you stood through enough you would come back to something like what you started from. If you lost everything but the main trunk itself, there was some mysterious return to sweetness. Hildie was telling Ma a story about tree frogs. That was sweetness—Hildie and the spring erupting every year the same, fed by the earth that had always kept them. He had always planned to die on his land, sooner or later.

“We’ll just sit tight and see if what you think’s goin’ to happen really happens,” he said, and turned to stand fast against Mim’s flaring temper.

But Mim wasn’t listening to him. She had stopped midway in one of her journeys across the kitchen and was standing, her eyes glazed, listening to something outside.

John and Ma caught their breath and listened too.

“Tractor comin’,” Ma said.

“No,” Mim said. “Somethin’ bigger.”

The high hard groan grew suddenly louder as the invisible machine crested the hill and began to move steadily down the road toward them.

The sound dulled momentarily, then burst forth anew in a harsher gear. There was a high whine, a lull, then a shuddering crash giving way again to the grumble of the motor.

“Jesus,” John said. He grabbed his jacket from the hook and set off down the lawn at a run.

That’s our woods,’ Mim gasped. She fixed Hildie with her eyes and said, “You stay here. I’m goin’ too.”

Mim caught up with John as he crossed the bridge over the stream. They ran together around the bend and started up the hill.

The bulldozer was smashing out the beginning of a new road where an old logging trail had been. It had knocked over a dozen spindly birches and was running a sizable pine off to one side.

“They can’t do that,” John cried, but his voice was sucked away by the commotion of the bulldozer. “They can’t do that!”

He started to run again. “John!” Mim called, and then ran after him. At the edge of the raw space, John stopped, insignificant as one more tree beside the huge yellow machine. The driver wasn’t anyone they knew. A sign stenciled on the door said, “Lynch, Inc., Concord.”

John signaled to the high cab, but the machine just backed up and made another rush.

John loosened Mim’s hold on his arm. When the buldozer moved again, he ran into the clearing in front of it and stood windmilling his arms at the driver.

“Johnny,” Mim screamed. She started after him, but stopped when she saw the ram of the machine bearing down on her. The bulldozer came to within eight feet of John, then stopped.

The driver rolled down his window. “Out of the way,” he shouted over the roar of the machine.

“It’s my land,” John shouted back. “You can’t do this.

The man was big and overweight and ordinary. He could have been from Harlowe, though he wasn’t. “Look,” he hollered. “You them characters squattin’ in that house down by the pond? I been warned about you. This is what they told me you’d do. Well give up, will you? You can’t argue with a bulldozer.”

“It’s my land,” John insisted. “I’ll get the law on you.”

“Look,” said the man, cutting the motor and leaning out further. “I got my orders from the president of the corporation. He wants a road in here and four house lots. And the guy he sent up here with me last week to mark it off’s a cop in Harlowe. If he dont know who the land belongs to—”

“What corporation?” John said. “President of what corporation?”

“Perly Acres?” said the man sarcastically.

“Perly Dunsmore’s a crook and so is every cop in town.”

“Oh yeah?” said the man. “Funny, they told me you’d say that too. You must a pulled this before, huh? The big cheese showed me his deed, Mac. The cop showed me his badge. Now whom I supposed to believe?”

John stood silent.

When it looked as though the man was about to start up again, Mim cried, “But it is our land.”

The man looked at her and at John. “Sorry you feel that way,” he said. He began to roll up his window.

Suddenly John came alive. He leaped onto the step leading to the cab. “You son of a bitch,” he screamed. “I’ll kill you!”

“You will, will you?” said the man, looking down at John from his high perch. “Guess I’ll worry about that when I see a gun. The cop claims you’re one of them peace types that don’t keep guns.”

The engine raced and the man eased it forward again, aiming at a large beech only a few feet from where Mim was standing. John jumped free of the machine, and he and Mim backed into the road.

The bulldozer made such a racket that they didn’t hear the car until it was practically upon them. It swept past without hesitating —a blue Dodge with two people in it.