The Auctioneer

by Joan Samson

“How’d you... I never seen such a...” Mim said. John leaned his face against the cool door as he closed it. John, that’s gasoline. It’s that you reek of.”

  “We can’t stop for talk,” he said. “They’ll be a good way after me by now.” His throat was dry now and his body throbbed so he could hardly stand. He looked down at the box of dishes coming in and out of focus through layers of red.

  He let Mim pull him to Ma’s lawn chair and push him into it. She handed him a glass of water from the pail. “Who?” she asked. “Him and the dog,” he said. “Dunsmore and that dog.”

  “John, what’ve you been up to?”

  “Best you not know,” John said.

  “Me and her got to know,” Ma said. “We’re in on it sure as you.” As she stood over him leaning on her canes, her face, lit from below by the lamp, was drawn in strong lines he had almost forgotten.

  Mim knelt in front of him with a wet rag. “Here,” she said. She touched his face with the warm water and the scratches started to sting.

  Unstrung not by the pain but by the care, John said, “I set them pines back of the Parade on fire. And the wind by now must a blowed it clear through Mudgett’s and James’s and maybe the post office too.”

  Mim dabbed at his face. “You got caught?”

  He shook his head.

  “Chased?”

  Again he shook his head.

  “You know that stretch of road where the fields run level on both sides?” Mim asked. “Gores could’ve seen you there, walkin’ along with the can.”

  “He was never near the road,” Ma said. “He cut through the woods like he done as a boy. Runnin’ scared through the woods in the pitch black. It’s the woods beat him up like that-no man.”

  “Woods never stopped a dog a minute,” John said.

  “You heard them after you?” Mim asked.

  He shook his head. The blue on the windowpanes was giving way to gray. When they went, they’d have to go out past Cogswell’s to avoid the Parade.

  “We might as well put our name to paper as go tonight,” Ma said.

  John sat in the chair, letting Mim take off his frozen boots.

  We’re so helpless here, he groaned. His body went limp as the truth of Ma’s comment exploded in his head. They would have to stay at least another day or two. Again they would have to sit home and wait. Now he could see the colors of the trees through the windows, and knew that the first day of waiting had begun.

  “You was ever a scared of dogs,” Ma said gently.

  Lassie banged her tail on the floor at the soothing words.

  Mim shook his arms. She began to unbutton his jacket. “Undress,” she said. “They mustn’t catch you like this.” She poured a pailful of water into the big kettle, and shoved a new log through the top of the big range.

  John stood up and looked around wildly. The great belching explosion of gasoline and his helter-skelter retreat were written all over the room. “Hurry!” he said. “Unload the truck.” He started to pull his boots on again. “Oh my God. Am I foul with the smell of it? If they find us awake and all the signs...” He got up and blew out the lamp.

  “Sit still,” Mim said. “Don’t be spreadin’ the smell all over. And you’re like to catch fire yourself, you take yourself too near the stove.”

  John pulled off his jacket, then his sweater. “My gloves!” he cried. He picked up the jacket and jammed an arm into the sleeve again.

  Mim clapped a hand over her mouth. “Your pockets,” she said. But they weren’t there.

  “Too late now,” Ma said. “The woods are half growed in the dust of lost gloves. And what good’s a glove if they find it? Ain’t like you had your name on it.”

  “Dogs, Ma,” John said, pulling his sweater back on and still searching his jacket for his gloves. Now we’ve got to go. Now I fixed it so we’ve got to go. The gloves is just settin out there in plain sight like a red flag.”

  “John,” Mim said. “Undress. It’s me as wants to go the worst. But now it’s clear enough we can’t. Not now. Now we got to just set and listen for the truck again.” She took up the pails. Not that I’m sayin’ I like what you did. Without a coat, she headed out the back door toward the well.

  Ma stood over John, barely leaning on her canes, and to John, looking up in the early light, it seemed that the terrible transformations of age dropped away for a moment. “Move, son, move,” she urged. “Get yourself cleaned up. I’m sayin’ I do like what you done. If they catch us out now, at least they’ll know that Moores don’t knuckle under like a pack of fools. She banged her cane with pleasure. “Nope. That’s a fact. I always did know it too, from the time I met your pa. Moores don’t knuckle under.

  13

  They put him to bed in his clothes, so that if they heard a car, they could wake him and no one would know he had been sleeping into the bright hours of morning. Mim had hauled the mattress from the truck back up to the bedroom and now he lay under Ma’s old quilts watching the first fuzzy stripes of sunshine spread like gauze across the floor toward Hildie. She lay curled in a ball with her head thrown back, her cheeks chapped to a bright pink, breathing noisily through her mouth. He lay awake and tense, tuned for trucks, sirens, state cars—the final visitation that would break up everything. But all he heard beneath the great lid of winter silence was the breathing of his daughter and Mim’s quick orderly steps below. Out the side door for more wood, out the front kitchen door to the barn. In again. Out again. The bars of sunshine grew shorter and more definite, tinted with blue as if filtered through ice. Wide-eyed he listened. The wind, he realized, had stopped. The wind was gone.

  Presently Hildie sneezed, and sneezed again. Then suddenly she erupted from her bed and rolled into his. “Where’s Mama?” she asked.

  “Downstairs,” he said.

  “Sure?” the child asked, sitting up in her faded blue pajamas. “She said we was goin away before I woke up.”

  “No, no,” he said. “Listen. That’s her downstairs.”

  Hildie listened until she heard the footsteps and the women’s voices, then she cuddled down close to John, her teeth chattering. “We didn’t go,” she said.

  “Nope,” he said.

  “I knew it,” she said happily. She put her arms around his neck and breathed into his stubby face. She was barely settled in before she said, “Time to get up.”

  “I know,” he said, and as he said it, the drowsiness came on him so strong he could scarcely respond to the child. By the time she crawled out of his bed and scampered down the stairs to the kitchen, he was nearly asleep.

  At first, as she worked, Mim trembled. She set the clothes to soak in a tubful of water, then went to the well for more water. She stoked the fire, then set the front kitchen door ajar to the icy weather so that she would be sure to hear them coming before they were upon her. Hopefully, too, the air would thin the gasoline smell in the kitchen. Ma was too excited to be shut up in the front room where it was warm. Mim wrapped her in a blanket in her chair and, glad for the company, moved her in close to the stove.

  Mim washed the clothes in three different tubs, waiting impatiently each time for the water in the kettle to heat. Then she wrung them out hard and hung them from the line over the roaring stove. She and Ma rehearsed as she worked what to do when they came. Hide the clothes. The quickest way would be to stuff them into the oven. Shut the outside door. Damp the stove. Run upstairs to warn John.

  Mim scrubbed the boots with a brush and yellow soap. And scrubbed them again, but couldn’t get rid of the smell of gasoline. Finally she ran out to the barn and rolled the wet boots in the dust of dried cow dung and hay that still covered the floor. Then she brushed them off and took them in and hid them in a closet.

  But still, with all the air and the washing, the kitchen smelled of gasoline. “The gas can, Mim,” said Ma and laughed. “What a pair of dolts we be.”

  Mim’s heart beat. She caught up the can and ran to the barn.

  She rubbed the bits of dried l
eaves and the sticky gas stains off with her hands and thrust it into the back of the truck where it belonged. Then, rubbing her hands clean on the frozen grass, she started and straightened, as she had six times that morning, thinking she heard a car. But the wind had died and the dawn was so still she could almost hear the faint crackle as the pond skimmed over with ice. A mallard cried and she first heard the beating of its wings on water, then saw it, dark and graceful against the gray sky of the new day.

  When she went inside, she stood at the door looking out over the pond as she had several times a day for twenty years. “Black ice comin’, after all,” she said to Ma. “And we’ll be gone.”

  “Never mind. She’ll make a pretty skater anywhere. Just like him.”

  Mim pictured her child grown tall, green stocking cap flying as she spun dizzily across the pond on a cloudless winter day. Was Ma remembering such an image of her own child? John a pretty skater? Those were the things you gave a child—the spirit and the pond and the memory.

  Mim put her hands to her face, stunned with happiness at the fullness of her world there on the edge of the pond.

  “Hey, Miriam,” Ma said softly, and reached out a hand to her. “You always was such a feelin’ girl.”

  Mim touched Ma’s hand, then roused herself and set to work again. Soon she was unloading the truck, unpacking each carton entirely and throwing it into the cellar before she went to the barn for the next. She had just come out of the barn carrying the fourth carton when she heard the car coming. She ran back into the barn with the carton still in her arms and found herself standing in the horse stall wondering what to do. The truck was only half unpacked and John was sound asleep and vulnerable upstairs. Mim held her breath and listened. She could hear the low hum of the car motor, but there was no sound of car doors opening or of footsteps in the gravel. She placed the carton noiselessly beneath the window and stepped up onto it to look out.

  An orange Datsun station wagon sat in the middle of their yard. Inside a bearded man, a youngish woman, and two small boys sat looking peacefully around at the barn, the pasture, the pond. They moved their lips and talked. Finally the man nodded and got out, and, with an easy smile of curiosity, strolled leisurely around the barn. Almost directly below Mim’s window, he stopped to kick at a sill. Then he went back to the car and revolved slowly, examining everything he could see. His eyes stopped at the kitchen window. He grinned and waved. Hildie, Mim thought. She must be right out in plain sight. Finally, the man climbed back into the car and said something. His wife and children started laughing and waving toward the house. Finally they went away, the two children staring from the back window until the car disappeared over the hill.

  Mim waited until the sound of the motor was altogether gone, then ran for the house. She dropped the carton just inside the door and stood over Ma. “How could you let Hildie stand up there in plain sight?” she demanded. “How could you?”

  “Just tourists,” Ma said. “Got to be. I never seen a bunch more like.”

  “In December?” Mim asked. “On a Tuesday? The next time that happens, you see she’s hid and hid good, you hear?”

  Ma held Hildie tight and didn’t answer.

  Mim went back to work, more frantically now. Before the sun was quite high, she took a breath and realized that, except for the wood superstructure on the truck—which indicated only that they were thinking of leaving sometime soon—things were back to normal. It no longer looked as if the Moores were poised to run. Clothes and food and cooking implements were all in place. Hildie sat with Ma under the blanket in the chair drawing pictures. Dirty cereal bowls and cups created a comforting litter on the table. Even John’s clothes were nearly dry enough to hang on the hooks in the bedroom where they belonged.

  Almost without transition, Mim found herself settled into the familiarity of everyday chores. She filled the woodbox, got in two pails of fresh water, swept the floor, and tidied up the breakfast dishes. She made herself a cup of chicory and heated up what was left of the oatmeal. Finally she closed the door so that the room began to warm up. Now there was nothing to do but wait.

  Mim sniffed. “I wonder, would a fresh nose still catch the gasoline?”

  “We got any onions left?” Ma asked.

  Mim stooped to the onion bin beneath the sink and came up with six small onions. “Enough for one more soup,” she said. Then she sighed. “I hope we get to eat it.”

  John woke up hungry. The bedroom looked dingy in the bleak last light that he momentarily mistook for dawn. Then he remembered and took up listening where he’d left off. Perhaps it was the sound of the auctioneer’s truck that had awakened him. He stumbled to the window dragging the quilts and looked down on the empty dooryard. There was no sound, even from the kitchen, and, like Hildie, he wondered if he’d been left behind. He dropped the blankets and ran downstairs.

  Mim was sweeping the kitchen for the third time. Ma and Hildie were playing cards. Hildie spilled her cards and ran to him. “You slept all day,” she said.

  “Shh,” Ma said. “That’s a secret. Now don’t forget.”

  John sat down at the table, unable to speak. For a moment he couldn’t remember why or how he could have risked it all.

  “We had some company,” Mim said, “though they seemed...”

  John clutched the edge of the table, quizzing Mim about the visitors. Finally he got up and went out into the dooryard in his stocking feet. He shivered with the cold and looked at the sky toward the town. It was cloudy and silent, and the air in his nostrils was as fresh as wet snow. He came back in. “Nothin’,” he said.

  Who knows? Mim said. “Harlowe’s a long way off.”

  She gave John a bowl of soup, Hildie climbed into his lap and he ate, swallowing too quickly as if he might be interrupted at any moment.

  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 a
gain, 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.