They gave the china cabinet, now that it was empty, then their own bureau, then Hildie’s. By the first week in August, it was hard to see what to give next.
Ma had fallen into silence on the subject of the auctions, and on most other things as well. When she wasn’t watching her programs or playing with Hildie, she sat on her couch for long periods, her thin arms folded across her limp housecoat, looking out the window. She barely answered when she was spoken to, and for weeks she didn’t tell a story. Uneasy, John and Mim spoke, even to one another, only behind her back. The gloom at the supper table was such that Hildie put up a battle every night about sitting down.
In town it wasn’t much better. When John or Mim ran into people they had known for decades, they smiled and chatted about the weather or the cost of living or the orneriness of machines. They talked exactly the way they always had, except that now the familiar conversations seemed to be built on a silence as deep as the one that prevailed at home.
It was Mim’s idea that John go to the auction. “Just one man alone, John,” she said. “They won’t hardly notice you. Could be you’ll learn somethin’.”
There were cars pulled up on the town hall lawn, on the church green, all around the firehouse. They were parked on Mill Street all the way down over the bridge and up around the corner again.
Mudgett was selling balloons again. Next to him, a strange girl in a maternity smock sat on a bright beach towel moving nervously to the rhythm of a transistor radio. She was very young and her hair was long and dark and tangled as if it had not been combed. Something about the way she watched the people moving toward her to buy balloons made John think that she was hungry.
There wasn’t a woman or a child Moore knew. Ward was there—Speare, Pulver, Janus, Stone, and a few others he knew. That didn’t mean they were all deputies, of course. They sat quietly here and there, distributed evenly among the crowd, sprawled on chairs, the edge of the bandstand, or the backs of trucks. John reflected that most of them were probably wondering whether he was a deputy. James and Cogswell, in denim overalls, were arranging the things to be auctioned off. Ezra Stone was selling popcorn, and Sonny Pike was selling Coke and beer.
And there were people—plenty of them—people he didn’t know. They’d brought coolers and blankets to spread behind and beside the wooden chairs. They hailed their summer neighbors and the people they’d met the week before.
Moore wandered uneasily up toward the things for sale. A hard slender middle-aged woman in faded yellow jeans was saying to another in a white slack suit, “Isn’t it marvelous? Some of the stuff I’ve bought is so good I’ve taken it back to Weston. Can you just imagine what this stuff would sell for on Beacon Hill? Where do you suppose they get it week after week?”
“Isnt it splendid?” said her friend. “I’ve been to auctions and auctions in seven summers up here, but never a set like these. Take a look at the rosewood highboy over there.”
They were right. It was clearly no benefit auction. There wasn’t a thing to go into surprise packages to start at a quarter a lot. There were oversized wing chairs, hand-carved beds, solid cherry tables, walnut dressers, a big roll-top desk. Moore ran his hand across the top of Hildie’s low pine dresser—it had been his sister’s, and old then—and tried to remember where he’d seen the stenciled buffet.
A man in a bulging Hawaiian shirt, Bermuda shorts, and slippers was saying, “Lotta good wood here.”
And his wife was complaining, “But what I specially want is a butter churn for the rubber plant.”
There was a long table surrounded by boxes of produce. They were selling tomatoes by the crate. Further on, there were two chain saws, a water pump, a milking machine, and four power mowers. And, almost hidden behind the bandstand, a tractor. Tractors have personalities, and this was a dark green John Deere made in the thirties sometime. Moore tried hard to think where he had seen it before. It could have been at Rouse’s, but he wasn’t sure.
The auctioneer appeared, moving light and erect toward the bandstand, his dark head bare and gleaming in the sun. Dixie trotted obediently at his left heel.
Quite a character, that Dunsmore fellow, wouldn’t you say, Moore? It was Tad Oakes. He had two greenhouses full of geraniums at the far corner of the Parade, and nowadays he did a bit of landscaping for the newcomers. He was also the chief of the volunteer fire department. “You helping?” he asked.
“Not me,” Moore said.
“Good,” Oakes said. “Me neither. Nothing from the old Oakes place up there this week either.”
“How’d you manage that?”
“Just said, ‘Sorry, boys, haven’t got a thing left.’ They said, ‘You’re sure?’ and I said, ‘Sure as shooting. And that was that. They took off without a word. First little thing that happens I call in the troopers.”
“Cogswell figures the troopers must be in on it.”
