The Auctioneer (22 page)

“Money gets stole. It loses value. Banks go bust. But my baby will always have that land.”

Perhaps he should go and speak to Captain Sullivan. Perhaps Sullivan had only chanced to meet Perly hunting or visiting and didn’t know him at all. After all, everybody who met Perly was impressed with him. But when he tried to picture Captain Sullivan, he saw Perly bending over Hildie, his face shining with promises of magic. Promises.

At the thought of Hildie, he lifted his head and looked around himself nervously. At this very moment, Gore and his deputies could be fanning out on all the roads from Concord, watching to see who it was that had made the phone calls-watching through rifle sights. If they had read his voice, they could be bearing down even now on Ma and Mim and Hildie as they went about their chores on the farm, alone. He had been gone almost six hours.

He headed out of Concord toward the turnpike, his stomach churning with hunger and impatience with the traffic. Once he was on the turnpike, the old truck hit sixty and the sense of rapid movement and direction and of perfect insulation from the rest of the world brought John to a sudden understanding of what he must do.

He stopped to top off the gas. Without getting out, he used the rearview mirror to watch the young boy standing jiggling to the sound of a radio as he waited for the tank to fill. He tried to decide whether it would be safe to ask him to fill the gas can. But when the moment came, he paid without a word and drove away with the gas can still empty.

Chilled at the thought of how long he’d been gone, he gave up the idea of waiting till night to return. Instead, he went past the Route 37 turnoff and circled around on back roads so that he approached Harlowe from the north instead of from the south as they would expect if they were looking. Through the last county to the north, he took fire roads all the way, rattling past old farms and a few new cottages, hoping nobody would report him. When he came to the bottom of the road past Cogswell’s, it was early afternoon, gray and wintry.

As the truck labored up the road fifteen feet from Cogswell’s front door, John’s face and neck twitched uneasily beneath the pressure of the eyes he knew were there—Jerry’s or Mickey’s— following his progress through the sights of the double-barreled shotgun. But Cogswell would have recognized his truck anyway, even at night.

Halfway down his own side of the hill, the road widened out where the drive into the old Wilder place had once begun. John pulled off. He got the gas can out of the bed of the truck, and a length of plastic tubing for a siphon. He put one end into the gas tank of the truck and, sitting on the ground, sucked on the other end, slowly, so as not to get a mouthful. When it was running, he led it into the can and listened as it filled, a sound like the finger of water trickling out of the spring halfway down the cliff behind the pasture. When the gas can was full, he stood up and lifted the end of the siphon over his head so that the gasoline in it ran back into the truck.

He carried the gas can through the overgrown drive, climbed down into the cellar hole, perfectly dry now in the autumn, but overgrown with raspberry brakes. He made his way to the cold recess in the stone foundation wall where the Wilders had kept their milk and butter. He pulled out a stuffing of blown leaves, placed the gasoline can in the recess, and shoved the leaves back so that the old red can was hidden.

Probably the Wilder place had burned. That was what usually happened to farmhouses. Whatever had happened, the land had been a part of the Moore place since the Civil War. The bridal maples some ancient Wilder had planted were so overwhelming now that they would have brushed the house had it been standing. They spread their branches over a natural clearing. All the land around had been scrub when John was a boy, but now the beech and maple were eight or nine inches through and the poplar thicker still and dying out. Ma could remember when the Wilder place was mostly pasture, with views from almost everywhere.

After a house burned, the chimnev stood alone awhile like a ‘
j
child’s block tower. Then one year, the mortar completely gone, it would simply crumble in the spring thaw and the next summer there would be a heap of clean red bricks in the pit marked out by the cellar stones. He’d seen it happen. And presently the Virginia creeper and poison ivy would poke up through the bricks, and then, almost overnight, trees as thick as your wrist. Someday, someone would come and take the bricks to build a walk with, then everyone would forget—everything but the name. “The old Moore place. Whatever happened?” they would ask.

But no, that wasn’t what Perly had in mind. He had in mind to make it modern, expensive, a place for play, not work—ropes with colored floats to mark off where to swim, the barn tricked up with picture windows, hexes, and a sign for Perly Acres, ski tows running up the pasture, the dooryard paved for parking sports cars and foreign station wagons—a place no Moore could even visit.

He drove into his yard in the last light. The woods were dark already, but the pond was a pale pool of light and the pasture rose gray and wide behind the house. The soft yellow glow of the kerosene lamp shone from the kitchen windows, and from the kitchen chimney he could see a wisp of smoke, almost black against the sky. Mim was watching from the window, and came running down the path in her shirtsleeves to meet him. He caught her in his arms and held her to him in a way he seldom did. She pulled away laughing, and didn’t ask him questions. She turned, almost bashful, and led the way up the path to the kitchen.

Only when he was settled at the table with his supper did she ask, “Did you tell him?”

John shook his head. “They got it fixed so you can’t,” he said. “And the cops want you to come in and stick your head in a noose before they’ll listen. First one that let me get six words in sets right off tellin’ me how Perly Dunsmore’s the best thing ever happened to us.”

“John!” Mim said. “You didn’t let on who you were?”

John shook his head. “You got to consider, a fellow that just took a week to tie up a Harlowe boy like Gore—one that’s lived down the road from us all his life—probably wouldn’t find it much of a challenge at all to hogtie a bunch of strangers.”

They sat at the table in silence. Ma didn’t bother to eat. Hildie slipped away from the table and vanished into the front room and nobody called her back.

Finally Mim sighed. “Now you see how it is? There’s nothin’ to do but go.”

“Maybe not,” John conceded. “Maybe not.”

All weekend they worked on the truck. John found a rusty saw left on a high hook in the barn, and there were pots of rusty but perfectly adequate nails. Mim worked enthusiastically, planning details, asking for shelves, thinking about how it would be, worrying about keeping warm. Hildie was as excited as a summer child preparing for a camping trip. They closed in the back of the truck with walls and a peaked roof that let Mim stand almost upright. There were no windows except the one into the cab in front. But there was a small hinged door on the back.

Ma sat on her couch by the window in the front room, straining to see through the barn doors to what they were doing. She refused to ask how they were coming, although she no longer said she wouldn’t go.

On Monday morning, John said, “Tonight, late, late in the wee small hours sometime, we’ll go.”

They measured and found that the sofa cushions Ma was used to sleeping on would fit against the front wall of their new little house. Mim was pleased. “That’ll be like a piece of home for Ma and Hildie,” she said. They put the cooking utensils into the truck -the dishes, the pails, Lassie’s dish. They installed the kindling box and filled it with small logs to burn in the sheet metal stove they planned to buy as soon as they were safely far away. Their bedding. All the blankets, but only their own mattress. Hildie would sleep with them. They packed all the food they had, but kept it in the kitchen yet for fear of frost. Mim made bundles of their clothing and packed a box of odds and ends for Hildie to play with.

Rather suddenly, at about two in the afternoon, they found themselves finished and simply waiting in the warm kitchen for the hour to leave. John sat in his usual place on the bench in front of the kitchen range with Hildie in his lap and Lassie at his feet, moaning in her sleep. Mim stood at the back door looking up at the pasture. The wind blew with a cold whine, laying down silver furrows in the brown pasture, then riffling them upright again.

“A good northeast gale blowin’ up,” John said, almost with satisfaction. “Long’s it don’t rain now, we’ll be all set.”

“That has more the sound of a wind to bring on snow,” Mim said.

“Papa?” said Hildie. He rocked her. “Let’s stay home.”

“Yesterday you was jumpin’ up and down to go,” Mim said, turning to the two of them.

John could hear his mother stifling her sounds from the front room, passing the time before they could go, a stretch of time as bare and desolate as the empty house itself. Already the sounds the women made reminded him of the whimpering of the refugees hurrying across the face of the television set—mothers and grandmothers and little girls, brittle and distant as the blanched bones of birds on the forest floor.

“But why do we got to go?” Hildie asked.

John stood up abruptly, standing Hildie on her feet on the floor. “Ask Mama,” he said, and went to his own mother in the other room.

She was sitting on the couch looking out the front windows, across the orchard to the pond. She did not look up when he came in. Her hair was gray and the light was gray and her very cheeks seemed gray, as uneven and fragile as ash. She had an army blanket pulled up to her chin.

“Ma,” he said, and sat on her couch beside her. She dropped the blanket and pulled his head down against her shoulder. There was practically nothing left of her. There wasn’t room for his head on her shoulder any more.

“You know,” she said, and he felt rather than heard the catch in her breath. “When I was a youngster I had a hankerin’ to see the world. But then your pa came along and he says, ‘With this out your window, honey, ain’t nothin’ you could find wouldn’t be downhill.’ So we set right here and never budged.”

John sat up and looked at her.

“Funny, ain’t it, when you think on it,” she said, “how now, after all, I’m a goin’ to see my blessed world.”

“Ma,” he said. “I’m...” His face was flushed as if with sunburn, and his eyes were as deep and muddy as the pond in summer. “Give me time, Ma. It may look like I’m pullin’ out, but it’s not in the way of quittin’ quite, not like it seems.”

“Never mind, son, never mind,” she said. “There’s some things can’t be helped.” And John held her in his arms as if it were she who was the child.

Outside, John and Mim and Hildie stood in the dooryard looking out over the pond. The wind roughed it up so that the light fell deep into the troughs and left the surface dark as ink. “By mornin’,” John said, “I bet the pond’s caught.”

“It’ll skim over ragged if this wind keeps up, even if the snow don’t get it,” Mim said.

“Crummy skating,” John said.

“And how many years since you been skatin’, John Moore?” Mim teased.

“Hildie’s about of an age to learn,” he said.

Walking three abreast, John and Hildie and Mim headed into the dim pine forest and followed the old logging road that circled around and came out at the top of the pasture. Far overhead, a restless canopy of branches broke the sunshine into tiny dancing circles. Light-starved seedlings and brush had died back and rotted, leaving an open expanse of dead pine needles which gave beneath their boots, then sprang back silently behind them. The wind rushed at the green needles overhead and they flattened against one another with a high hissing sound. Occasionally the wind reached down to sing through the dead lower branches and lift the green tassels on Hildie’s stocking cap.

“He’ll cut the pine,” Mim said, “before he sells.”

“Who, Perly?” John said. “He won’t cut the pine nor sell neither.”

“You figure he’ll really save it for a playground?” Mim said.

“Nope,” John said.

They crossed over the bridge where the brook ran in the spring and headed up a steep incline out of the pine grove. Hildie rushed ahead and clattered nearly waist deep through maple and birch and poplar leaves. Crisp oak leaves still clinging to the high branches chattered in the wind. The smaller beech saplings held their leaves too, papery thin and yellow as daffodils. The wind and sun swooped down through the branches, dappling the woods with light and hustling the leaves up into pinwheels that spun and died, then spun again. They passed through a thicket beneath a seed hemlock and came out to the Christmas grove— dozens of wild white spruce, protected far overhead by spreading maples. Underfoot, princess pine and a spiky chartreuse creeper were so thick you couldn’t step without crushing them.

“Near time to cut a tree, and still no snow,” Mim said.

“Dry year,” John said.

“Will we come back for Christmas?” Hildie asked. She was pulling up greens by the handful. “Can I help make the wreaths this year?”

As they went on, the spruce gave way to juniper, and the creeper to the rusty orange of dried ferns. And then, quite suddenly, they stepped through the break in the stone wall and out into dazzling sunshine and the icy force of the wind. The cemetery was just as Mim had left it, except that the wind and sun had dried to gray the earth she had bared. A few curled tendrils of dead ivy still poked from the ground. “I sometimes breathe easier that nothin’ grows in winter,” Mim said.

Hildie stood gazing at the gravestones that she had never seen so clearly before. “My grandpa’s under there?” she asked.

“Don’t go no closer now,” Mim said. “That stuff is wicked poison even now.”

But John, whose father and grandfather and great-grandfather were there, wasn’t looking at the cemetery. He stood on the crest of the hill, looking down, past the sweep of pasture and the weatherbeaten house, toward the pond. Mim went and stood next to him so that her shoulder brushed his.

He shook himself with irritation and moved away from her. “Where do you have in mind to go?” he asked her. “Just where but here can you be thinkin’ there’s a place for us?”