The Auctioneer

by Joan Samson

  Mim moved up the pasture alone, working back tears and the vision of the three sets of Moore eyes accusing her—Ma’s and John’s the color of storm clouds, John’s only more bruised.

  The poison ivy in the cemetery was a deep shiny red. It lay like a flood halfway up the grave markers and sent out tentacles from under the stone wall into the pasture. It climbed around and around the trunks of the old cherry tree and coiled its way out along the branches, like snakes moving toward robins’ nests. There hadn’t been any ivy there at all when they buried Pa seven years ago. John had dug a proper grave six feet deep so the ground could never heave the coffin back. Afterward, they had taken Ma up in the tractor once a week and she had tried to get Mayflowers and sheep laurel growing on the new raw place. She knew as well as they that Mayflowers would never bloom in that high dry place, but it was a labor they could not talk her out of, as if she hoped that Pa, wherever he was, could breathe life into the flowers he had loved the best.

  When, in the spring, they took Ma up to see if the Mayflowers were in bloom, they found that what had taken root was poison ivy. Ma never asked to go up again.

  John didn’t care for poison ivy and wouldn’t take the scythe in there, the way Pa always had, to keep down the growth. And so the ivy and everything else ran free. Black clumps of juniper began for it to climb on, and poplar saplings took root the next spring and mixed their sticky gray-green leaves with the chartreuse of the spring ivy.

  Mim had a sudden image of a new-dug grave with the ivy filling it like water in a muddy footprint. Filling it to overflowing so there was no room for the coffin. “Ma’s gettin’ old,” she murmured, but what she saw was the kind of small flat stone that said simply, “Child.”

  She whirled around and examined the black verges of the forest that surrounded her on three sides. The woods on the edge of a pasture are like a window, easier to see out of than into, and she could only feel the presence of the hunters stalking silently, invisible within the dimness. High in the woods, near Cogswell’s field, there was a sheltered place between a huge seed hemlock and the flat face of a cliff, and every year the hunters left a bushel basket full of beer bottles under it. Sometimes too, working in the woods the following autumn, she and John would find a beer bottle upright on a rock, half full of rain water as if a hunter had put it down suddenly to lift the gun from across his knees and take his deer. Mim let her eyes fall down over the empty pasture toward the house and listened to the sweep of wind across the gray sky.

  Then she turned and sank her gloved hands into the fiery sea of ivy, grasped all she could, and pulled it free. It snapped quite suddenly and sprang back around her body. She stepped away, leaving the ungainly mass in a heap outside the wall, and went back for more. She tore at the ivy, pulling tendrils of it sometimes twelve feet long. She pulled up the junipers and kicked at the poplars till they were bent and stripped of leaves. She worked until the ground around the gravestones was trampled and brown. Then, in three trips, she carried the pile of ivy over and dumped it in the woods. She stood over the broken brown twigs showing in the dirt. In spring they would send up wild new growth. The pruning would be like a tonic to the ivy. She stood over the cemetery too tired now to cry. All her effort, she knew full well, might ease her anger now, but it would all grow back in fresh red shoots in the renewal of spring.

  Back at the house, she brought in four pails of extra water. Adding boiling water from the kettles, she washed her gloves, her wool shirt, her jeans, her socks, her jersey, and finally, with harsh yellow soap, herself.

  By Thursday, when Mudgett and Gore came, the poison ivy was raging all over her arms and face. They took the water pump and roamed around looking for something more. Gore found the old wooden barrel of potatoes where Mim had hidden it in the cellar, heaved it onto his shoulder, and carried it out to the truck.

  After they left, Mim stood at the sink with her back to the others in the room and indulged in the painful luxury of scratching at her face with her fingernails. Then she scrubbed her hands yet again with the yellow soap and a plastic brush. She was afraid to touch Hildie for fear of starting the plague on her, and John would not touch her even in their bed.

  Finally Ma said, “Well, and just what do you plan for Christmas dinner now, missy?”

  Mim turned. “There are more potatoes in the earth,” she snapped.

  John sat with his feet on the fender of the stove as if the women weren’t there. The shavings he peeled from the stick fell to the floor beneath his feet. There was a long silence.

  Mim stood at the sink scraping carrots. “Could we get ourselves on welfare, do you think?” she asked. “It’s hardly even shameful nowadays.”

  “Since when?” Ma said. “Maybe not for folks who ain’t got sense enough to hang on to what’s theirs.”

  “No one goin’ to put us on the dole when we got a stand of pine like that one east of the pasture,” John said.

  “But what good is that?” Mim said. “Soon’s we make it movable, they’ll cart it off.”

  “If you let them,” Ma said.

  “Well, what would you do? You with all the answers,” Mim asked Ma. Then she turned on John, rubbing her face again. “And you?”

  John didn’t look up. He had whittled the stick in his hands to a point like an enormous pencil, and now he kept on peeling away at it, sharpening it more and more so that, like a pencil, it diminished as the pile of shavings on the floor accumulated.

  Mim stood in the middle of the room, their silence swelling around her in stifling clouds.

  Suddenly Hildie flung herself into her grandmother’s lap, away from Mim.

  Mim smashed out the swinging kitchen door so that it rocked on its hinges as she pounded up the stairs.

  Their room was cold, and the mattresses on the floor smelled of damp. She grabbed John’s brown sweater off a hook and crushed it against her face, rubbing and rubbing until she started tiny flecks of blood.

  The next day Mim announced that she was going up to Cogswell’s to see Agnes before the road was snowed in. “I’ve a mind to borrow some calamine,” she said.

  John went over to the cookie jar over the sink and brought back a dollar bill which he laid out on the board tabletop.

  Mim rubbed her cheeks, looking at the dollar. “It’s really that I want to see Agnes,” she said.

  He shrugged and she put the money in her jacket. Hildie was following Mim so closely that every time Mim moved she nearly tripped over the child. “You’re not comin’,” she said. “So just get your big self out of my way!”

  John scooped up the child and held her like a vise while she howled to be free.

  The road over Constance Hill that connected Moore’s place and Cogswell’s had once been the main post road, two carefully leveled lanes terraced into the steep grade of the hill. But now the lower lane was grown up in trees already a foot thick, and the upper lane, the one they used, was deeply rutted from the rushes of spring storms. Thus, in summer it was less than a mile over the hill to Cogswell’s, whereas in winter, when the snow cut off the road, they had to travel seven miles around the foot of the hill. Mim drove carefully, one wheel up on the high center hump and the other way up on the edge so that the saplings crowding the road scraped the panels of the truck with a sound like fingernails on slate. At the crest of the hill, she looked past the stone wall into Cogswell’s blueberries. They spread in a scrubby growth around boulders and burned stumps, skipping bald patches of ledge and clusters of raspberry canes, and stopping only where the hill dipped down and vanished into forest. Unlike Moores pasture, which looked down on the pond and the flat green stretch of Freedom Ridge to the south, Cogswell’s field faced north and, on a clear day, the view stretched past the Heskett Hills to the mountains. It was the first time in fourteen years that Mim hadn’t been up to glean what berries were left after the rakers were finished.

  It would have been easier to call when Cogswell had asked her to. Now she turned over excuses in her mind. She had
come empty-handed. It was the season for pumpkin bread, but she could hardly afford the butter and sugar. It didn’t make sense to rattle over the hill to borrow something that only cost a dollar. She should have brought some chrysanthemums. They weren’t worth anything now that Mudgett ran the church.

  Cogswell’s house, which would have been a center-entrance colonial if the windows on one side hadn’t been slightly askew, had new sash and a new coat of gray paint. The lawn had been let go toward the end of the season, so there were wilted dandelions and daisies mixed in with the battered green growth.

  Two Doberman pinschers came bounding out and leaped against the doors of the truck, their paws scratching at the windows. As if they fed on neighbors, Mim thought and made sure the doors were firmly fastened. She waited in the truck for someone to come out and rescue her.

  The inside front door opened and Cogswell’s oldest child, thirteen-year-old Jerry, stood behind the storm door cradling a heavy shotgun in his arms.

  Mim waved to him and waited. He continued to watch her warily over the din of the dogs.

  Finally she rolled down her window a little and the dogs leaped up eagerly as if in hopes of a finger or two. “It’s just me, Miriam,” she shouted. “Can I see your ma?”

  The boy kicked open the door ahead of him and came toward her, still pointing the gun. “Put your hands up on your head so I can see them,” he called.

  Mim put her hands on her head with a sense that this was play. Before Hildie was born, she used to come over sometimes, especially in the summer, to spell Agnes. She felt that this was not the first time she had responded to a command from small imperious Jerry to “Stick ’em up.”

  “Dad said once to let you in, but that was a while back,” the boy said. “You after somethin’?”

  “I heard your ma’s feelin’ mean,” Mim said. “And I always did come callin’ every year.”

  “She’s okay,” Jerry said, standing by the door of the truck with his gun pointed at Mim, considering. Mim sat very still, aware that her face itched and she didn’t dare move to scratch it.

  “I guess you can come on in,” he said. “Down, Rex. Here, Duke. Shut up now.”

  The dogs cringed growling at his feet and Mim, moving very gingerly, climbed out of the truck and walked in at the rarely used front door ahead of the boy. Just inside the door, the five other children clustered on the bottom of the stairs. Mim tried to smile at them. She knew them all. She remembered sitting at the picnic table in the shade of the maples, letting them tumble around her. They would talk and talk, even the littlest ones— they got that talking streak from both sides—and whoop, running out onto the lawn to show her backwards somersaults and lopsided cartwheels. Now they were silent, and she looked at them in alarm. In the fading afternoon light of the front hall, it seemed to her they were peaked, and the youngest, Jonathan, a year older than Hildie, was sucking his thumb. They looked wary, the way Hildie did when she had just kicked over a pail of milk and expected to get a whack—five pairs of sky-blue eyes waiting for her to strike, and another behind her attached to the heavy shotgun. She didn’t ask them why they weren’t in school. She could tell by looking that they wouldn’t answer.

  But Jerry had at least put the gun down in the corner. He nodded in the direction of the front room, and Mim opened the door and went in.

  Agnes was a tall woman with big bones, who had grown blowzy with the birth of her children. She never had been quite in control —of her big body, of her sprawling house, of the garden Mick planted and left for her to tend, of her six children, of her affections or her tears. She reminded Mim of the peach trees Pa had planted that fell beneath the weight of their own fruit when they weren’t pruned. Agnes could never keep anything in place, least of all her tongue.

  Leaning 011 the arm of a new maple rocker upholstered in a pattern of golden eagles and flatirons, she faced the door, waiting for Mim. Mim was startled at the way she looked. She had gained a lot more weight, and all of it showed in the blue jersey pantsuit she was wearing. The jacket was a mass of stains down the front as if she spilled everything she touched. And she had cut her gray-brown hair short and possibly given it a permanent, for now it stood on her head in an almost solid mat of tangles.

  Mim put her hand to her face. “You’re looking a bit pale, Agnes,” she said. “Kids too. You been ailin’? And winter not come on yet?”

  “Ain’t nothin’ I can do for the child,” Agnes said, her surprisingly high-pitched voice screwed down tight on the words. “I can’t think why you come to me.” She got up and walked heavily across the room. Her toe picked up a corner of the new hooked rug and she stooped to lay it down again. Then she went to the back window and stood with her back against it, and Mim noticed that she was leaning on a radiator.

  “Central heat!” she said. “You sure done a lot with this room.”

  “It’s bad luck,” Agnes said. “So don’t bother bein’ green. I got six to count every hour. I get up at night and count them.”

  Agnes hugged herself as if for warmth, but Mim felt a prickly heat spreading from her wool jacket, making her face itch.

  She giggled, ashamed that Agnes should think her jealous, embarrassed at Agnes’ strangeness. “You know, Agnes,” she said, “the foolish trick I pulled? You know the poison ivy’s been growin’ in on Pa’s grave these seven years now he’s gone?”

  Agnes backed up and sat on the radiator. “He still sucks his thumb,” she said. “At night it makes a clickin’ sound. You hear it all over the house so you know he’s there. But Benjamin, there ain’t no way to tell about him, short of goin’ in there and feelin’ his head for warmth.”

  “Well, I went up there,” Mim went on uneasily. “I was all in a flap, and I yanked it out by the roots, all that ivy. It kept jumpin back at me as if to say you shouldn’t tackle anythin’ head on like that. Now I’m all over ivy, worse than measles. Look at my poor face.”

  “It ain’t so terrible,” Agnes said, examining Mim’s face. “They pay. They pay. Better that than what happened to Molly Tucker’s boy.”

  Mim rubbed her face. Agnes had always talked a mile a minute and only half made sense—her words, like her feet, tripping over each other. She would have filled her house with company if there’d been anyone interested. Usually she had an oversized laugh she couldn’t hold in. And she loved to do favors as long as they didn’t require organization or too much money. Slowly and a bit too loudly, as if she were talking to someone who was deaf, Mim asked, “I was just wonderin’, could I borrow some calamine?”

  “They’ll go to good homes. That’s what he says. ‘Good homes. Anyone willin’ to buy them must really want them. Mostly they can’t have them.” Agnes laughed. “Think of that. And here I am. Half buried in them. But you’d never be bothered countin’ someone else’s all night long. You couldn’t care like that but for your flesh and blood. Not when the floors get cold. And you wouldn’t put up with the clickin’. It ain’t regular like a clock and it always catches you the hardest when you want to sleep.”

  “Agnes?” Mim asked, rubbing her hand across the back of the new rock maple sofa. The colors were all very bright, though the blinds were down and the room was in shadow. Then, as if she weren’t thinking right herself, she found she had no words for the question pressing on her throat. She said instead, “The room is done over real nice. Did you fix it yourself?

  “This ain’t such a bed of roses that I can see,” Agnes said, her big jaw drooping. “Now there’s Jimmy Ward. He just up and left. Mick don’t know I know, but I heard it from my Joanie. Joan’s the only one tells me what’s goin’ on. She says he just up and went. Not all that deputy business and bein’ a selectman and a deacon both at once could keep him.”

  “You don’t mean he left Liza after all this time?”

  “No, no. All of them in the truck, with what all they could carry. Not a soul knew they was gone till next day when one of the Pulvers noticed the cows bellowin’ in the field near crazy. Sevente
en he’d got too, with the extras, though he never took much interest in stock.”

  “Where’d they go?” Mim asked.

  “They ain’t leavin’ tracks.” Agnes paced across the room to the front window, fitted one eye to a small hole in the shade, and looked out. “He was pickup man for Carroll and Carroll’s pretty itchy. You can’t hardly blame him. Then his boy, Ward’s boy, took a bullet in the leg up huntin’, and Ward, he don’t think it was no accident. He must have got to thinkin’ the way I been thinkin’. There’s two ways most anythin’ can fly.”

  “Jimmy Ward’s boy took a bullet in his leg?” Mim asked. She was still standing just inside the door in her coat, leaning on the wall.

  Suddenly Agnes straightened up again and came toward her. Her eyes were wide and her face blotched with color. Mim straightened up, expecting the weight of the other woman to land on her. “Where’s Hildie?” cried Agnes. “Oh my God, where’s little Hildie?”

  “She’s home,” Mim said.

  Agnes retreated. “You hadn’t ought to leave her out of sight. You got to hang on for dear life, Mick’s never gone a minute I don’t expect him back in a coffin. And then what? Ain’t like I could drive. You’re real smart the way you can do for yourself. And I always thought you was so queer.”

  Mim rubbed her face and the backs of her hands on the rough wool of her jacket. She felt as though everything had frozen in place, and the question had to come up from somewhere very, very far away. “What happened to Tucker’s boy?”

  “If I had my way,” Agnes said, “we’d pile the kids in the truck just like Ward done, and load in what we can take, cash out whatever... Jimmy Ward’s nobody’s fool. But Mick... He’s never been a tight man except when it comes to his land. Like there was some kind of spell on those particular acres.”

  “What happened to Molly Tucker’s boy?” Mim asked again, her voice grown hoarse.

  “The land. Never a speck of sense, my Mick. Now it’s the land. I left the land all right where I was reared. Never a backward glance. He says, ‘You don’t do that. Up and leave your land.’ And I say, ‘You’ll get killed, all for the sake of your precious land.’ And he says, Six kids, Agnes. Six kids.’ And I say, ‘You think they love that piece of rock and sand—that never grew nothin’ right but weeds and berries? You think that’s better than a livin’ breathin’ father?’” Suddenly Agnes was gulping on big sobs, haphazardly.