The Auctioneer

“Hildie!” Mim cried. “She’s just settin’ there with Ma.” She started off down the hill toward the house at a hard run. At the bridge she had to stop, a pain knotting in her side with every breath. John pounded past her and she ran again, stumbling.

The Dodge had stopped in the dooryard, but the two people were still sitting in it. John stopped in back of the car and Mim joined him without speaking. Looking down into the low car, they watched a white-haired couple pass a thermos cup of something steamy back and forth, gazing around them as though they were parked to look at a Scenic Vista.

When the woman caught sight of John and Mim, she started slightly, then laughed and spoke to her husband. She opened the car door and stepped out a bit stiffly. “How do you do?” she said. “We’re the Larsons—Jim and Martha. We’re thinking of buying into Perly Acres, and we’re interested in the site of the recreation center. Is that the barn they plan to make over? Does that bulldozer up there mean they’re really on schedule? You know,” she said with a short laugh, “when you’re as old as we are, you can’t afford to...”

Mim’s face had gone taut with astonishment. She felt John stiffen beneath her hand, then expand gradually as he took a deep breath.

“Get off my land!” he roared, taking a step toward the woman. “I’ll wring his goddamn neck for sendin’ you up here.”

“Heavenly days,” murmured the woman, backing hastily into the car and pulling the door to after her. Her husband fumbled hurriedly with the car and managed to get it going with a jolt. He made a hazardous U-turn and rumbled off up the road.

John paced the kitchen as if it were a cage. Hildie retreated to a corner with a blanket and sucked her thumb. Ma sat in the chair, shivering and ignored. And Mim, determined that they must go— that nothing mattered now but that they go—silently arranged and rearranged the things they had to take, trying to make it possible for them to sweep everything into the truck and go in two minutes flat as soon as John said the word.

The caterwauling of the bulldozer filled the room. When they spoke, their voices were dimmed as if with distance and, although they could see the trees by the edge of the pond bending and straightening, they could hear the wind only in the pauses between the bulldozer’s assaults.

At about ten, a truck glided into the yard, materializing on the waves of sound as if it were perfectly silent. Mim swept Hildie into her arms, then paused. It was Mickey Cogswell, alone. “He wouldn’t be the one to...” she said.

John put his knife on the table and went out. Mim stuffed Hildie into the chair beside Ma. “Now don’t say a word, hear? Not one word.”

Hildie hid her face in her grandmother’s lap. “Stop tellin’ me. I know,” she cried, her shout muffled by the folds of Ma’s dressing gown.

Cogswell didn’t get out of the truck, just opened the door and waited. His flesh and clothes were stained dark gray. The lines on his face were traced in black and his eyes were rimmed with red.

“What on earth... ?” Mim asked as she approached. Then she smelled the smoke on him.

He shook his head. “God knows,” he said. “The whole town’s goin’ up in smoke. We been fightin’ a fire at Sonny Pike’s. Not enough he gets shot, but now forty acres of his pine are gone and his barn’s started. Seems like the house is a goner too. Then there was fire bustin’ through the roof of Pulver’s barn when I went by. They was wettin’ down the house, but it’s attached and the wind’s all wrong. Cogswell stopped and rubbed his face, pushing the soot into dark streaks.

The wail of the bulldozer rose and fell around them. Cogswell shook his head. “Perly sic that on you?”

John stood with his arms folded. He nodded.

“Couldn’t even wait...”

“We ain’t goin’,” John said. “Thought I told you that.”

Cogswell looked at John, his blue eyes more focused than they had been in months.

“What I want to know is what you’re doin’ here,” John said, “with your deputy buddies in all that trouble?”

“Well, you know, they got the Powlton fire department now, and Babylon and Walker comin’. Trouble is, we just heard that the Ward place they cut up and sold—that’s on fire too, in a couple of different places, and it’s way to the other side of town. That was about the last straw. Me and James and Stone and a bunch of other deputies with houses of their own to worry about took off. Poor Sonny was jumpin’ around screamin’ at us to help. But I got visions of my own dry fields. Half of them ain’t even cut this year. And some of them from Powlton quit workin’ too and got to arguin’ about whose town is it anyway, and why should they risk their necks with us takin’ off. Meantime, the fire’s runnin’ up the hill curlin’ up trees like leaves, workin’ its way up to the Geness place.”

John stood listening, his face grim.