The Auctioneer

by Joan Samson

  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.

  It was the Thursdays that were hard to come to grips with. People came to visit—familiar people, people whose mothers and children she remembered—and they smiled, and they never did so very much. The auctioneer came and looked at her and filled her with guilt.

  Mim shook herself, and suddenly, like the hidden picture in a puzzle, what she should have seen immediately jumped out at her. In the space between Mudgett’s place and James’s, the line between orchard and sky was drawn in angry charcoal. Where the pines had been were brittle black stalks, some broken over and some pointing to the sky, like the rubble in a cornfield stripped and darkened by frost. The black extended out across the cut hay in the orchard to include half a dozen apple trees. In several places the dark river lapped at the edges of Mudgett’s yard then ran away again into the woods.

  Hildie pushed the door open and danced to the case which held the candy and plastic toys. She pressed her nose against it until her breath frosted up the glass and she couldn’t see. Then she pulled back and started to draw a face with her finger in the mist.

  “Get away from that case, Hildie,” Fanny said, sitting on her high stool behind the counter, so still she seemed only a voice in the dark store.

  Mim pulled the child away from the case. She had a comment planned, like the first line of a play. “Some weather for December,” she managed. “Can’t complain about this.” She moved shakily to the milk cabinet and took out a gallon in a glass bottle. Pulvers Dairy. Maybe milk from her own cows. She put the bottle on the worn pine counter.

  “That be all?” Fanny asked.

  “No. I’ll be needin’ some flour,” Mim said.

  “Takin’ a trip?” Fanny asked, nodding at the roof over the truck.

  “Just considerin’,” Mim said.

  “Hard to say about the weather,” Fanny said, writing down $1.41 for the milk on the back of a paper bag. “A good snow’d put an end to them fires.”

  Mim picked up a bag and found it was sugar instead of flour. She stooped to put it back.

  “If you want to put an end to them,” Fanny said.

  Mim turned, frowning. “Fires?” she repeated, feeling the heaviness of her motions, sensing she had answered too slowly, wondering if she had already given John away.

  “Ayyup,” Fanny said. “Some year for accidents, this one. Most beyond belief.”

  “You say you had a fire?” Mim asked, standing at the counter holding out three crumpled dollar bills. Hildie was whining and pulling on her hand, trying to drag her toward the candy case.

  “You mean you ain’t heard?” Fanny said.

  Mim shook her head.

  “Well, don’t know how you would, all alone up there. Guess you ain’t got no phone these days?”

  Mim shook her head again.

  “You stop that now, Hildie,” Fanny said, handing the child a Mars bar with a greasy wrapper. “These here are gettin’ kinda old. Now no more fussin’, hear?” She turned to Mim and took the money. “Comes of bein’ the only child. You always spare the rod when you got only the one. You put too high a value on them.”

  “What about the fire?” Mim asked softlv.

  ✓

  “Up to Gore’s.”

  “Gore’s!”

  “Yep. Funny thing. House burned to the ground. But that old barn ain’t touched. Got a charmed life, that barn of Toby’s.”

  “Anyone hurt?”

  “Hard to say at first.”

  Mim took the change without counting it to see whether Fanny had charged her for the candy bar. She stared at Fanny.

  Fanny chuckled. “They thought Bob was cooked, ’cause he weren’t nowhere to be found. Then they took note that that spiffy new truck with the sirene was gone too. And they found the old man in the barn. He just took a blanket and moved right in. His everlastin’ cows. All he ever cared about, his cows. That barn’s goin’ to collapse on him, first big snow. You wait.”

  Mim tried to think of something to say. “He’s gettin’ on the old side to be livin’ all alone,” she said.

  Fanny shrugged. “You don’t figure Bobby’ll be that eager to come back? Guess the old man’s goin’ to fall on the town after all. Nineteen kids and not a one worth a plugged nickel.”

  Mim smiled uneasily.

  “Or maybe that auctioneer there’ll do for him. Ought to, you ask me.

  Trying to sort out the pieces, to think how John’s fire could have burned down Gore’s place, Mim stood at the counter holding her bag of flour, and let the silence stretch too far. “I guess so,” she murmured. “Tough luck.”

  Fanny shoved the brown paper bag with the milk and flour across the counter toward Mim with a sharp look. “Breaks your heart, don’t it, dearie,” she said.

  Mim’s heart somersaulted. She took the bag in one arm and crowded Hildie toward the door with the other.

  “There’s a firebug loose, all right,” Fanny added. “Tried to set the whole Parade alight the night before.”

  Mim looked back. “What?” she said.

  “You heard me. Take a look up yonder past Mudgett’s. You mean that’s not what you was lookin’ at, sittin’ in the truck afore you come in?”

  Mim threw another look over her shoulder at Fanny, unable to answer. Outside, she stood by the gas pump openly squinting once again at the charred spikes of trees clinging to the hill beyond Mudgett’s.

  That night after Hildie was in bed, Mim sat at the table turning and turning a mug of birch tea. “We’ve got to go now,” she said. “Tomorrow’s Thursday.”

  “All my life, livin’ near forests, I never saw a forest fire,” John said. “Remember the fires in Bar Harbor? The 4H was ever after us about fire, like they figured we’d be trippin’ over fires every load of wood we cut.” He had his knife out and the bark peeled off a new maple stick, but he was stabbing at the table, leaving a circle of small raw marks. “A forest fire. I figured a forest fire ate up houses like kindlin’ sticks. I figured a forest fire went—”

  “John!” Mim cried. “Tomorrow’s Thursday. At the very least, they’ll be comin’ after the truck. Will you set your mind to that?” John looked at her absently and went on talking. “They got no dogs at Gore’s these days. No dogs to warn them...”

  Lassie, thinking she was summoned, struggled to her feet and waddled to the table wagging her tail. John ignored her.

  “John,” Mim asked suddenly, lowering her voice and leaning closer to him. “Was it you set that one too?”

  “What a question, Miriam,” Ma snapped. “Wasn’t you up there sleepin’ with him the whole night through?”

  “But, John,” Mim cried, “if they figure out you set the one, they’ll lay the blame on you for Gore’s as well. They’re like to come for you tomorrow, let alone the truck.”

  John got up, paced to the door and looked out into the darkness. “I didn’t set but one fire, and that one fizzled,” he said. “But, could be I set a good idea goin’. There’s plenty have the same reason’s us to want trouble for Gore.”

  “Sit down, for the love of God,” Mim cried, springing up herself, then sitting down again. “You make a perfect target there.” She pressed her palms to her eyes. “I wish we had some shades.”

  “Well, for myself, I’d rather burn up in my bed than be turned out like a tramp,” Ma said.

  “We plan to take your bed, Ma,” Mim said, “or at least the cushions. John, why can’t we go? Now. Tonight.”

  But John wasn’t listening. His eyes were bright. He was carving away at the kindling now.

  “John!” Mim cried. “Lord sake. You’re actin’
both of you like you lost your wits. Tomorrow they’ll take the truck for sure. And then we will be stuck. Stuck! And you keep settin’ like we had a world of time to kill.”

  John threw his knife on the table and stood up again. “We go and he’ll say, ‘Look, the Moores are runnin’. Must be them.’ Perly don’t give a damn who done it really. All he needs is a body to crucify.”

  “But if we go...” Mim started.

  “How far do you reckon we’d get with the truck lookin’ the way it looks? Lucky to make it to Powlton.”

  “If he’s goin’ to crucify a Moore,” Ma said, “I’d sooner he found us at home than runnin’ like so many hippies.”

  Mim slammed down her cup so that the tea leaped out and spattered on the table. “What about Hildie?” she cried. “You just sit here and wait when you know sooner or later... It’s her they’ll come for.” She dropped her forehead on the table. “At least in the truck, we’d stand a chance.”

  The wind blew hard all night, and John, listening as the hours passed, kept thinking he heard sirens and alarm bells, even the crackling of fire. Hildie, Mim, and Ma. He kept counting them over. He listened to Hildie’s labored mouth breathing and felt Mim’s warm foot resting against his knee as she slept. Ma, sleeping alone downstairs, made him uneasy. He wanted to bring her up into the little room with the rest of them so that he could count her life over too in the sound of her breath. He kept hearing cars in the dooryard, footsteps in the gravel, the sound of rifles being cocked. He remembered stories of people held prisoner in farmhouses—torture, rape, children tossed on bayonets. In the cities they shot people walking down the streets. In Vietnam they had shot whole villages.

  At some point, lying in his own sweat, he pulled Mim to him and said, “We’ll go, Mim. We’ll go. You’re right. We’ll go first thing tomorrow before thev come.”

  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.

  “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.