The Auctioneer

by Joan Samson

  “What on earth... ?” Mim asked as she approached. Then she smelled the smoke on him.

  He shook his head. “God knows,” he said. “The whole town’s goin’ up in smoke. We been fightin’ a fire at Sonny Pike’s. Not enough he gets shot, but now forty acres of his pine are gone and his barn’s started. Seems like the house is a goner too. Then there was fire bustin’ through the roof of Pulver’s barn when I went by. They was wettin’ down the house, but it’s attached and the wind’s all wrong. Cogswell stopped and rubbed his face, pushing the soot into dark streaks.

  The wail of the bulldozer rose and fell around them. Cogswell shook his head. “Perly sic that on you?”

  John stood with his arms folded. He nodded.

  “Couldn’t even wait...”

  “We ain’t goin’,” John said. “Thought I told you that.”

  Cogswell looked at John, his blue eyes more focused than they had been in months.

  “What I want to know is what you’re doin’ here,” John said, “with your deputy buddies in all that trouble?”

  “Well, you know, they got the Powlton fire department now, and Babylon and Walker comin’. Trouble is, we just heard that the Ward place they cut up and sold—that’s on fire too, in a couple of different places, and it’s way to the other side of town. That was about the last straw. Me and James and Stone and a bunch of other deputies with houses of their own to worry about took off. Poor Sonny was jumpin’ around screamin’ at us to help. But I got visions of my own dry fields. Half of them ain’t even cut this year. And some of them from Powlton quit workin’ too and got to arguin’ about whose town is it anyway, and why should they risk their necks with us takin’ off. Meantime, the fire’s runnin’ up the hill curlin’ up trees like leaves, workin’ its way up to the Geness place.”

  John stood listening, his face grim.

  Cogswell ran his hands through his hair. “If I shoot off the shotgun three times, will you come give me a hand?” He glanced at Mim, then at John. “Look,” he said, swallowing, “I know it’s your side settin’ them fires. And I don’t say my side ain’t got it comin’, but does that mean you and me got to be at war?” He reached for John and touched his sleeve. “What can I do, Johnny? There’s no fire department left to come.”

  John looked up the road toward the sound of the bulldozer, considering. “So, half the town’s on fire,” he said slowly.

  Cogswell pulled himself wearily around behind the wheel. “Maybe you’re right, Johnny,” he said, slamming the door. “We don’t any of us deserve to live till mornin’.”

  As he headed up the road, Mim ran past John to the truck and pulled the door open, running to keep up with it. “Why don’t you all leave, Mickey?” she cried.

  “I can’t, Mim,” he said, braking to a stop. “Agnes keeps askin’ till I can’t hardly stand it. But I can’t. How can I? It’s just another way of dyin’.”

  John came up behind Mim and leaned past her to grasp Cogswell’s arm. “You hear that fellow up there knockin’ over my woods?” he asked. “You think you can do somethin’ about that?”

  Cogswell looked startled. Then he fingered the gun in his holster and took a deep breath. “Yeah,” he said. “Guess maybe I can. I can try anyhow.” And, instead of going home, Cogswell turned around and went back up the hill toward the bulldozer.

  John and Mim stood together in the yard, listening. The bulldozer stopped work almost immediately. There were no shots and they were too far away to hear voices. Presently, the big motor roared again, then gradually began to recede.

  Mim looked at John. “He was only up there an hour,” she said.

  “This time,” John said.

  Mickey drove past them with a grin. John returned his salute with a shout of reassurance.

  The wind curled around the chimney and slid off the steep roof with a whine. It rattled the doors and worried the plastic over the windows. In the room that had been Hildie’s, splinters of glass continued to pull away from around the bullet hole and sift to the floor. The rest of the day passed somehow and no one else came.

  “Thursday gone,” Mim said in their bedroom that night, “and no one from Perly except that bulldozer.”

  “Fires are keepin’ them busy,” John said. “But you can bet Perly’s already switchin’ and schemin’ how to have us dead and buried one way or the other, all of us, deputies included. And him left to sell off the whole empty town.”

  It was so cold they took Hildie into their bed and piled her quilts over their own for warmth. Impatiently, they waited for the long night to pass. Finally, the dawn appeared over the frost line on the windows and they could see gray clouds blowing like dust balls over a dead-white morning sky.

  “Snow up there,” Mim said. “We ought to go this mornin’ quick, before we get snowed in.”

  “Back of that truck’d be cold as the bottom of a well,” John said.

  “Well get a stove in Concord. You said yourself he’s goin’ to bury us all, and we’re the first ones in his path.” She was pleading now. “Johnny, please.”

  John got up without answering, pulled on his overalls and jacket and went down to see to the stoves. After breakfast, he took up a stick and his knife. Hildie climbed up next to him and watched, wide-eyed and still, as one by one the chips fell away and the stick disappeared.

  Mim pulled on her jacket and went out to the well for water.

  “That snow won’t wait,” she insisted when she came back. “It’s comin any minute and here we’ll be.” She was fretful and peevish. She kept making work for herself in the kitchen, then abandoning it halfway through. “Were gettin’ this one last chance,” she kept saying. “And you two won’t budge.”

  “Go then,” said Ma. “You and the child.”

  “How can I, Ma?” moaned Mim. “And leave you and Johnny here?”

  The clouds piled up overhead thick as pudding. They waited all morning for the next move. But nothing happened. Even the snow held off.

  Four o’clock was already darkening into another night. They heard the motor and said nothing. Mim swept up Hildie, lifted their coats off their hooks, and moved to the door.

  It was the yellow truck. She stared, half believing that what she saw was only one more repetition of the vision she had suffered so often during the long days of waiting. It was not until the truck was so close that she could pick out the features of Dunsmore and Mudgett that she took Hildie’s arm and rushed her out the back door.

  Ma made her way into the kitchen and stood by the sink, upright between her canes. John stood behind the closed door waiting.

  Perly led the way up the walk, unarmed as always, moving with big-boned ease. He was a perfect target for a sniper hiding, say, behind the unmended upstairs window. As if he read John’s thought, Mudgett, following warily behind the auctioneer, his hand near his gun, glanced upward at the second-story windows, then with a quick darting motion, turned to his left to check the dark opening to the barn.

  John opened the door himself and the two men stepped inside and stopped with their backs to the door, the cold spreading from them.

  “Where are Mim and Hildie?” Perly asked.

  “Gone,” John said.

  Perly raised an eyebrow and considered. “Harlowe’s filled with trouble lately,” he said.

  “Guess you heard about the fires all right, seven of them in a week and a couple more that never got goin’ good,” Mudgett said in his quick high voice. “And that bloody fool of a Gore took off.”

  John said nothing. He stood perfectly still with his hands in his pockets.

  “That makes Red here, as first deputy, the acting police chief,” Perly said, looking Mudgett over as if for the first time.

  Mudgett stood rocking nervously on his toes as if to the rhythms of a transistor radio in his head. “Relax, Johnny,” he said. “We ain’t collectin’.” He gave a short laugh. “Unless collectin’ people counts.”

  Both John and Ma listened impassively.

&nbs
p; “People are getting panicky,” Perly said. “With good reason. We have to do something to keep the town safe. Somebody clearly has to take some initiative to straighten things out. And I’ve grown so attached to this town...”

  “We want to know who’s settin’ them fires,” Mudgett said. “I hear tell you been lettin’ your temper hang out lately, Johnny. You got any idea who it could be?”

  “Who, me?” John said.

  “It’s the lightning strikin’, Red Mudgett,” Ma said, turning on Mudgett almost with relief, her voice confident against the man she had known as a child. “It’s the lightning strikin’, and it’s a goin’ to come after you too. Just you wait.”

  “Mrs. Moore,” Perly said reproachfully. “Red lost the ell on his house last night.”

  “And it ain’t lightning neither, Mrs. Moore. It’s some twolegged skunk. One that ain’t long for this world, I promise you.”

  “We haven’t decided yet what to do,” Perly said. “We’ve called a meeting for tonight in the town hall to talk things over. We really need you as one of the old families. All of you,” he added, looking around, “if Mim and Hildie come back.”

  Ma took a step toward Red Mudgett. “Goin’ to set fire to the whole lot of us at once, that’s what,” she said. “I wouldn’t put it past you.”

  Mudgett snapped his fingers. “Maybe we oughta take the truck after all, Perly.” he said, watching Ma.

  Perly turned half-hooded eyes on Mudgett. “We can’t do a thing for the town till we get it back to normal,” he said. “Just keep that in mind.” He kept looking around the kitchen as if he half expected to find Mim and Hildie hidden in some corner—at Ma in her flannel robe leaning on her nicked canes, at the mutilated kindling stick on the table, at Hildie’s hair ribbon and rag doll in Mas lawn chair. “You will come?” he asked John. “We need all the input we can get. And what we don’t need is more trouble.”

  John took his knife from his pocket and began absently stabbing at the table with it.

  Mudgett gathered himself together and stood still, but Perly, his eyes on John’s face, continued to wait for an answer.

  “I’ll think about it,” John said without looking up.

  “Good enough,” Perly said, showing his teeth in a smile. He turned back toward the door. “See you there.”

  “If not...” Mudgett said, and flicked the gun in its holster with his trigger finger so that John reflexively stepped back. Mudgett grinned.

  Perly moved quickly down the path without a backward glance. Mudgett danced behind him, side-stepping and wheeling to keep a constant eye on John.

  14

  The Parade was so crowded they had to park the truck half a block away. Hildie danced on ahead, but not too far, excited and a little awed by the experience of being out after dark. Mim and John, one on each side, helped Ma as she limped down the road and up the long sidewalk toward the door of the town hall.

  “I got a feelin’ there’ll be nothin’ but cinders left to go home to,” Mim said.

  John said nothing.

  “That there’s a man thinks he’s God. Thinks he can move the mountains and dry up the seas,” Ma said. “And there’s them as believes him too.”

  “Not me, Ma,” John said. “But you might’s well sign a confession as stay home.”

  Ma snorted. “He thinks we’re nought but a passel of witless ninnies, and we ain’t done nothin’ to show him otherwise.”

  They moved slowly. People piled up behind them and stepped around them. A number stopped to say, “Why, Mrs. Moore, how you doin’?” as if they were half surprised to find her still alive. The men she had taught as boys in Sunday School, and the women she had made bridal bouquets for—some were deputies and some were not, but they all greeted Ma as if she were part of some prior life, before the town had been drawn off into parties.

  The town hall served also as the theater and the movie house and the gymnasium and the selectmen’s office. It was heated by a crackling wood stove with a bright stainless steel exhaust pipe that ran glittering half the length of the room before it turned into the cinderblock chimney. The folding wooden chairs, the same ones they used for auctions, were set up in rows facing the stage.

  They settled Ma in the middle of the hall. She took off her kerchief, unbuttoned her coat, and settled her canes between her knees. Then she peered nearsightedly around her, looking for Hildie.

  Hildie had found the French children and tagged after them as they clambered up the stairs of the stage and jumped off of it. The Frenches looked unkempt. The smallest boy had a large rip in the knee of his overalls and his black boots were mended with adhesive tape. The doctor’s daughter, a tall shy child about ten, walked slowly toward the other children, sucking the end of her pigtail. Finally, with a grand burst, Cogswell’s three youngest joined the fray.

  Mim fretted. “Fetch her back,” she said to John.

  “Let her be,” Ma said. “What harm can come to her here?” Ma hadn’t been to town since the day they’d gone to church. She kept recognizing people and asking about others. And now and then someone would lean over her to ask in a whisper about her health. It seemed to comfort them to find her there. She sat up stiffly in her chair. “Everyone’s here,” she said, “just like always.”

  Mim nodded. “Whatever they have in mind, we won’t be alone.”

  The adults were subdued, and the shouts of the children stood out in sharp relief. Presently, Walter French approached his children and herded them to their seats on the side, watching the back door from the corner of his eye.

  Mim turned her head to see what he was looking at. What she saw was a proper city policeman in a navy blue uniform with a light blue shirt, a peaked cap, and a badge.

  John snickered beside her. “Red Mudgett playin’ dressups,” he said. “Bobby had more sense.”

  Mim looked again. The policeman was rocking just slightly on his feet and chewing gum. She stumbled into the aisle and ran to the front to catch up Hildie.

  With Hildie safely in her lap, Mim felt the strength in her own body. She still had that. She could still run. She felt she had the energy to run for miles—away from everything. As a girl, when she had first known John, she used to run across the fields, through the woods, around the pond. She remembered the way the long muscles had obeyed her. She had known that in some way it would come to this—to the old woman and the child, John and his land, nailing her in place like a deerskin stretched on a wall. And yet she had always come back.

  Mudgett stepped quickly up the stairs and onto the stage. His glance flickered from side to side. He moved precisely to the center of the stage and stood on the line where the maroon curtain closed when it was pulled, under the big painted plaster town shield that Linden’s grandfather had designed and donated in the days when the store did a good business and he was one of the richest men in town. To his left was the American flag, to his right the flag of New Hampshire.

  His blank-eyed contemplation of the townspeople snuffed out the last noise in the hall so that even the chairs barely creaked. Mim noticed suddenly that Perly Dunsmore was sitting three rows in front of them, way over to the right. He sat as still as the others, his eyes resting easily on Mudgett as though he were watching images on a screen.

  When Mudgett spoke, the people of Harlowe found that the man before them was no longer an old schoolmate or neighbor, but a tough vice-squad cop—anonymous, steely, professionally mean—a figure familiar to everyone from the late movie reruns.

  “The Harlowe Police Department has called this special town meeting because there’s an arsonist loose in this town,” he began in correct, snarling, radio-announcer English, his usual quick tenor speech lost entirely. “Well, we’re planning to catch him, but we need your help.”

  John crossed and uncrossed his legs uncomfortably, and Mim glanced sideways at him in a warning to be still.

  “For a start,” Mudgett said, “you’ve got to stop wandering around at night. That way everyone can sleep saf
e—at least everyone who doesn’t happen to be on the police force. If we find anybody more than fifty yards from home after dark, we’re going to assume he’s up to no good. Until we stop these fires, you’re not going to be in any mood for partying anyhow. So just stay home after sunset. We’ll send someone round every night to make sure you all got home all right.”

  Mudgett chewed on his gum for a moment and glanced around the room, touching only on the familiar faces of his fellow deputies. “The other thing we’re going to do is keep track of the people coming in and out of Harlowe. We’re going to put roadblocks on the seven roads out of Harlowe. So try to stay in Harlowe. If you really have to go somewhere, give us a call and we’ll be expecting you.” He paused. “Can’t think why you need to go anywhere though. Linden’s got most everything a body needs.” Mudgett waited as if he expected some response.

  There was none. The people in the hall barely stirred.

  “So that’s the deal,” he said, almost lapsing into his normal voice. “And just to show we mean business, Perly’s got a gift for the town. So, uh...” Mudgett scowled at Perly.

  Perly stood and side-stepped out along the row, excusing himself to the people he moved past. Wearing his everyday green work clothes, he climbed the stairs up to the stage, with Dixie trotting prettily at his heel. He took over Mudgett’s place in the center of the stage, and Dixie traced out a circle beside him and lay down with a sigh. Mudgett moved over and stood in the lee of the American flag. Perly frowned as he squinted out over the people.

  “Some of you have sunk so low, you’ve been setting fire to your own town,” Perly announced sternly, his voice cutting through the stillness in the hall and making everyone sit up a little straighter. Perly looked out into the watching faces, absorbing their expressions as if the proper degree of guilt would register by setting off an alarm in his head.

  “Isn’t that right, Paul?” he said.