No particular love was lost between the brothers, after they’d been trying to shave dollars off of each other every Tuesday for all these years, and that caused some fun and fireworks. “Keep it honest, keep it honest,” Al would mutter kiddingly, in the bidding at the bullpen, if Roger seemed to be pulling imaginary bids out of the empty air to boost the price. But he was never heard to tell Roger the same thing during the card game after the sale, if Rog had inveigled one of the farmers who had some cash in his back pocket into his office, where the Seagrams was. He’d play, himself, for a little while before hitting the highway. And Al had a reputation as a lady’s man (as a dry-cleaner had more opportunity to be), like their father before him. Rupert, though seventyish, was still going strong on his Sugarbush Farm, horse-trading and all, with a penniless widow tucked into a trailer behind the barn to service him, as well as his wife in the house. Rupert had been the auctioneer before Rog, wilder in style, but less crooked by repute.
Besides the sellers and buyers, a considerable sprinkling of people sat in the bleachers just for something to do—people who didn’t have cars and lived downtown in an apartment that Welfare paid for. One of them might bring a box of kittens or a litter of puppies to give away. You’d see neighbors you might never encounter at church, and perhaps in genuine distress—selling a yoke of oxen for meat that had been the man’s hobby for the last dozen years, and now he was either too old to work them or too poor to feed them anymore. Or he was selling a big bull that had come damn near injuring somebody and everyone was visibly afraid of, but too valuable as steaks to just shoot. What also made it interesting for the Clarks was observing how the cattle were graded: as top commercial beef paying fifty cents a pound live-weight, or as cutters and canners, ten cents lower. A three-teated cow might sell not just for hamburger, whereas a veteran prime milker wasn’t going to be so tender. There might be a handful of pretty good producers mixed in with the culled cows that if you could write a check for about six hundred dollars without fretting and had a spare stanchion at home would give you fifty pounds of milk a day or better for the next couple of years, and then resell for meat. The trick was to figure out which was which, during that brisk minute each cow, scared, mooing, was goaded around the ring—udder swinging, knees knocking, head lunging—and how much you could afford to risk on a lady that might be a loser, or a real pleasure to have in the barn.
The Clarks had a summer person living next door, named Press, who had a pasture he wanted to keep open; his family liked to see cows out the window. Or, rather (with summer people it was always complicated), he was going blind, so he couldn’t see them, and was getting divorced, so his family wasn’t coming up. But he had loaned the field to Clarence and Helen for heifers, and Clarence might buy four or five at Rog’s sale before Memorial Day and see what price they brought in October, when the grass gave out and the first snow flew. Every acre of his own farm was at work for them, meanwhile, as hayfield, night pasture, or for growing firewood, maple sugar, or else feed corn. Helen had gone to the Athol school with Rog—a stocky, short man with sweat on his upper lip and a harsh voice and jeering eyes, as he’d always had, in fact, even in junior high, though she fancied she could have snagged him instead of Clarence if she’d wanted to. He had made more money, for sure, but it was scarcely a choice she regretted. With the poker, you could never have felt secure financially, and a betting man liked other risks, plus the brutality of the work (selling horses for dog food, on the side, and dragging downed cows half-dead out of people’s pastures with a tractor to hack up for the mink farm) must slop over into his domestic life. She knew she and Clarence erred sometimes on the stingy side, which contradicted their Christian doctrine, but they were respectable citizens, unlike Al and Rog—with that horse-trader father, Rupert, who had the wide-hipped widow living free of charge under his wife’s nose in that trailer, even if he was a good farmer. Rupert had once even brought in a freight car load of Western cayuses (courtesy of widow, Melba, who had lived there) to auction here at what had been Rupert’s dad’s livery business; and Al had been known to return from Massachusetts with a strange young woman in the cab of his truck, who either joined the Hippie commune down the road or ended up waitressing at the Busy Bee. Till she left him, nobody had ever asked Al’s wife if she knew.
• • •
It was exasperating to Rog that he wasn’t a better salesman, that his voice wasn’t melodious and he hadn’t a glibber gift for gab. He stared straight at people, without the softening technique of looking to one side and introducing a joke at the tippy-tippy moment when they wanted a gentler encouragement to buy. One on one, he was quite a trader, remembering the figures, doing quick math in his head, and a judge of men as well as of flesh. And the old-time summer families had liked him because he was as good as his word. If they asked him to check on their places in the winter, he would, or at least send a guy, especially during deer season, when summer cottages got broken into by idle hunters. He understood, too, their special sense of urgency about “quality time,” as most of Athol didn’t. These were busy, successful, professional people from the city with only a few weeks’ vacation every year, and they weren’t worried over spending a few bucks; their priority was wanting to crowd in as much country experience for their children as they possibly could. So he would procure a lamb or a goat for them on short notice, or a lively puppy, or even a Shetland pony with hair hanging over in its eyes, or a tame old saddle horse, promising to try to find a considerate berth for it somewhere after Labor Day, or else board it, if he hadn’t simply rented it or borrowed it from somebody his customer didn’t know about. As an auctioneer, he valued time, as well, and as a guy who had grown up hard-scrabble and looked down on by the snobbier folks in town, he rather liked chatting with summer people, if only to spite the locals, who looked down on them also. But he was certain he lost thousands of dollars a year in auction commissions and side-sale fees because he couldn’t spiel to a crowd with soft soap and sweet blarney like his father had. Rupert, a slipperier fellow, a drinker, was honest enough, but had caromed about, was absent a lot. Rog had done a creditable job with his own offspring by comparison to how he had been raised—had educated them to find better work than helping him, and so was forced to employ two fatherless nephews of his, who were not as bright as his own boys and made him lose his temper.
Rog had had a hernia for a number of years—was afraid to go under the knife—so even with the truss he couldn’t lift much, or jump into the stock trucks that backed up to his ramp and heft the calves or shoulder the cows out when they arrived, the way he’d always used to do, and get up and in there again when they left. He depended on the nephews for that, which was frustrating, just as he did on his wife Juliette for the computer and written work, and upon that eldest kid, a slick-haired boy in fluorescent shirts and black jeans who played the electric guitar in a roadhouse group, to do some of the microphone patter because Rog’s voice broadcast so bluntly and harshly. Besides, he liked to be handling the goods and animals: oddities like a wheelchair, a rocking chair, a hand-whittled cane, after somebody died, or a freak llama or whatever. And he knew cows like his father knew horses.
“Awful nice place to gradually build a herd, here, boys, because you get some disposal sales. People build up a real careful quality succession and then have to sell it,” Rog told the crowd. But Helen Clark whispered to Clarence with a laugh that because of all the bloated bellies and blown-out faces in the stands, there were a lot of “disposed” individuals also, who’d never been off of the dole. Except for bingo on Friday nights at the Catholic church, it was the only live entertainment left in Athol. Not that the Town Hall hadn’t doubled as an opera house, where concert pianists, barbershop quartets, Chautauqua lecturers, and mezzo sopranos performed till probably the 1920s. After that they had had theater groups and talent nights, “until the satellite dish became the state flower,” as Clarence said, and poker was an alternative to being born again.
• • •
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Karl and Dorothy Swinnerton were sitting in the front, along with the killing-house buyers and gambling-minded farmers, although, like the Clarks, they were not what Rog would call “closers,” and would need some tickling to bid at all, and anyhow owed some small debts to him. They had Press, that blind summer person with them—which was kind—and liked to bring home a wholesale carton of garden seeds, or a packet of flashlight batteries, or a trio of mallards, mysteriously squirming in a feed sack tied at the neck, or a fat Belgian rabbit, ready to be either somebody’s meal or a child’s pet, or a wheelbarrow, or a black pig. A collie with silky hair and tricolor markings was fastened to the leg of the grandstand nearby, too awestruck to yowl, in need of new owners, and Dorothy did miss the presence of a dog. They’d lost a litter to distemper and the grieving mother had wandered onto the road and got killed. This bitch was too old to tempt people with children, but might suit them if Karl could be persuaded that it wasn’t too mild to chase after their thieving fox. Dogs had been part of his livelihood. He’d meat-hunted and fur-hunted with them, trained and sold puppies, guided a little with coon and bear hounds, and to have none at all underfoot was depressing, although his cough was so bad that they’d sold off their livestock and he couldn’t work regularly as a housepainter. He was the son of a farmer, but glad to have given up that confining labor for intermittent painting, where you could move into contact with other people but also had time for hunting and fishing. Nevertheless, he and Dorothy lived back in the woods on a patch of the old family property—forty acres and the hired man’s house that they had bought from the other heirs when his parents had died. They ran a few cows on it occasionally, and still had three Herefords tripping over tree roots, which they would butcher when the price of beef went up. But in the meantime Dorothy was worried about Karl’s emphysema, and that the money to pay for it might take their house, if the V.A. doctors couldn’t help. She was cooking for a price for this summer person who had bought the rest of the land and the main house—at least had bought it from the people who had originally bought it, and was loaning the Clarks the big pasture—but was now unfortunately going blind and talking of staying past the summer, a puzzling sort of decent, lonely fellow of fifty, younger than Karl and herself, but divorcing. He had some money, but who knew what would happen to him?
This weekly gabble and ruckus at Rog’s was an outing, and served to let Karl and Dorothy see how many of the people they had known for years were now living in trailers or else apartments in town, eating starch with their feet propped up in front of the Box, and not seeming to mind too much. Both of them had spells of dreading that they were going to end up in a dab of space rented by the month, eating government peanut butter and government rice and waiting in line to have their tickets punched whenever they needed something. Karl’s only town activity was the American Legion—meetings every month on the second floor of Memorial Hall and marching in the parade on the Fourth of July and a roulette booth at the county fair in August to raise money for the Legion’s annual college scholarship for a high school graduate. But more importantly, he judged a man’s character by what he had done in the war—meaning mostly his own war, the Second one—or might have done if he had been in it. The World War I vets, grumpy and reticent and dying off now, were also favorites of his, or Darryl Curley, for example, who owned the construction company and was a Korean vet who hadn’t even joined the Legion when he came home. Yet when the National Guard unit over in Chelsea had auctioned off its Sherman tank, after acquiring a newer model, he was the local who had bid for it, against gun collectors from as far downcountry as Georgia, and hauled it to park it in front of the Quonset hut where he garaged his equipment. That told you something more than whether he drank six-packs in the Legion hall. And he wasn’t a stick-in-the-mud like his father, who had got out of serving in the Second War on a farmer’s deferment; or a goof-off like his brother, Randy, who sometimes helped the Hippies run drugs. Thousands of bucks had gone into that tank, and Karl stopped once to look at it. Although a lot of the Korean War had not been fought on tank terrain, Darryl, an impatient man who made money hand over fist and seldom gave Karl the time of day, strolled out of his office with a certain chesty pride. “Just a glorified steamroller, isn’t it?” he said companionably, silent otherwise, as was Karl.
Now, Helen Clark and Dorothy Swinnerton were friends from playing pinochle together and cooking church suppers, when they’d gone regularly, whereas Clarence and Karl were more gingerly when they nodded, although they had also known each other for forty years, from school and then playing football on the Athol Loggers town team in their twenties, both being linemen and dependable. But Clarence, who paid his bills by return mail, and was now a Fundamentalist deacon—read the recitations, looked over the budget, and carried the collection plate—took apostasy as seriously as Karl took not serving your country in wartime, “right or wrong.” Yet you had to look at a man’s kids, beyond his churchgoing, Karl thought. The two families had been on the phone chattily like neighbors on Grange matters at one stage, when the Clarks’ son and Karl and Dorothy’s dear daughter, Margie, started going out together, riding Bill’s motorcycle around. And one night Bill rode it right off an embankment, on the Border Road, with Margie holding onto him from behind. He had a helmet; she didn’t—can you believe it?—and they each seemed at first to have got off okay. But then when her seizures started, he lost interest fast. Made no bones about it. Told her he wanted to have kids, which entirely unnecessarily hurt her. Now he had two kids and a snow-fencing business, two franchises, selling Vermont cedar to Springfield, Massachusetts and Hartford, Connecticut. And where does their churchgoing fit there? Karl had said to Dorothy—until they stopped mentioning it—who was more forgiving, and suggested that that might be part of why they went—although bumping into Helen a lot less, herself.
But with Rog, somehow you had good kids. Educated; good cars, when you saw them; white-collar, out of the town and part of the larger economy, so to speak; and with well-spoken grandchildren for Rog, when you met them, petting a billy goat on a visit to his auction barn—though Rog was a subspecies of crook, actually, if you thought about it. Not so much the poker games, which were between adults, and not so sleazy as you might think, because he’d let you owe him money without a fuss. He liked cash, not bookkeeping. He wanted you to pay him in hundred dollar bills when you could. But he had fallen in with the Hippies, too—like Darryl’s off-base son, Randy Curley, who was said to be shuttling marijuana to Boston or New York City in his pickup sometimes, packed underneath a load of maple syrup or Christmas trees—but worse. The Hippies showed up at auction night occasionally, to pick up some cheap chickens, if they’d built a coop, or a pregnant ewe that they might want to milk for some health craze of theirs, or maybe motor oil in bulk, or car parts that Rog had got from a supply store going bankrupt. Rog had learned to call, if his foraging at clearance sales turned up items that he guessed might fit their habits, which he saw included endless tinkering on their junker cars. They didn’t do card games, as a rule (that must have seemed tame compared to tripping out on acid), but in due course he met a bearded kid from Brooklyn, who, after slapping together a two-story, peaked-roof board house on four acres in a weed-tree woods—the whole lay-out had probably cost him a thousand bucks—for his wife and kids, and, not buying into the peace-and-love claptrap completely, was looking for some action. Rog—who, once again, had raised his own kids to be more trustworthy than him—took on this twenty-something-year-old hustler whose father drove a subway train and put him to work on a rough commission, going around to families whose head-of-household had just died, looking for stuff that might look antique if you trucked it to a place called Hudson Street in Greenwich Village in New York. Not that Rog had ever been to New York, or this kid knew antiques, but between them, and Rog’s connection as a fellow Woodchuck to the bereaved families, they got a pretty good thing up and running. And Rog was not above pulling a gun on the kid—it being perfectly legal
to carry a concealed weapon in Vermont—to show him the danger of not coming clean on the money he was being paid for this old stuff by the dealers in the big city. But this kid had grown up in a tougher neighborhood than Athol ever was, and the next day he came back to Rog with the proposal that he, the kid, fork over a hundred dollars apiece for any functional handgun Rog produced, and then he’d sell it for what he could get for it in Brooklyn’s gangland, with no questions asked at this end. So Rog practically vacuumed northeastern Vermont for loose, second-hand, shootable pistols of blurry provenance (not only that practically any man who died had had one), and paid his youngest son’s college tuition thus. And the Brooklyn police would call the Vermont state police when a murder weapon was found to have been shipped new by the manufacturer to Vermont: where the trail swiftly petered out.
Rog had told the story to Karl in deer camp one November night, after the kid and his family had left Hippiedom in Athol for somewhere else, but couldn’t be persuaded to feel guilty, drunk or sober, about anything that might have resulted from those business transactions, once the guns were whisked down to New York. His children were a priority, and he’d also invested in a few farms bought lately from old people who wanted to go to Florida in a hurry, afraid they might die first, but were intimidated by the notion of turning either to a bank or to a real estate broker—signing the papers for Rog by kerosene lamp right there on the kitchen table. And he did mail them their payments regularly, although he usually had shed the farms at a profit in a matter of months. If you owed him money from some ill-considered poker game, he might show up at your place quite pleasantly around dinnertime, eat with you and your wife, and, without haggling, suggest either the hay tedder or the dishwasher would do, or that more-white-than-black, broad-withered cow. He would put any of the three in his stake-side and maybe deliver it to a farm that he was in the process of buying, and come back for mashed potatoes and pie the next night, if your wife wasn’t too mad at you and him. His brother, Al, the livestock trucker, might have tried to get a blow job thrown in—but that was dangerous fun, like running cocaine, as that Brooklyn tiger had also done on his return trips from peddling guns, and as Al was sometimes rumored to do. Rog believed in what he called “the logic of moderation,” such as his father, Rupert, the horse trader—like Al—had eschewed.
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