Free The Auctioneer by Joan Samson Page B

let him get his way.”
    “You can’t, Johnny,” Mim said. “You can’t just tell him no. He’ll bring a world of trouble down on us.”
    “I can tell him what I please.”
    “Johnny, give him something. For me. Give him something. Hold him off. It can’t go on for long.”
    “Funny how it’s all gone sour,” John said. “Even his way with Hildie. I hate it when he swings her up like that.”
    Just give him something, John. The extra bed in Hildie’s room. Promise me. Just one thing every week to hold him off. Promise me.
    But John made no promises. He touched his wife and when she clasped him harshly to her, hiding her face against his neck, the excitement rose in him quicker than his habits said it should. And nothing was clarified.
     
    On Thursday, John checked the guns—the shotgun and the .30-’06—and the square steel box of ammunition. Dull with dust, they lay side by side in plain sight on the top shelf in the pantry back of the kitchen. He didn’t jar them. They looked as comfortable and natural as the tall glass jars of flour, sugar, corn meal, and dried beans. He turned away and went upstairs. From the doorway of Hildie’s room, he pondered the extra bed. It was a rather plain but pretty rock maple bed exactly like Hildie’s. The two beds used to belong to his parents. He must have been conceived on one of them.
    Finally he went out to the barn and started the tractor. Up in the cornfield, he ran it back and forth cultivating between the rows under the hot morning sun until he was bathed in sweat. The hours of work had not helped him to any decisions when he saw Hildie race down the path from the back door and stand by the road watching.
    It was not the bright yellow truck that he had expected that rolled down the hill and into the yard, but Cogswell’s dusty old Chevy pickup. John covered the field in long strides and joined Hildie.
    Cogswell got out of the driver’s side and faced John without a smile or a word. Red Mudgett climbed out of the other side and came around to join the pair of neighbors. Mudgett was wearing the gun again.
    Before any of them spoke, the front door opened and Ma appeared. Leaning on both canes, she began to struggle down the rough stone steps.
    “I ain’t a goin’ to let you get away this time, Mickey Cogswell,” she called.
    Cogswell and John jumped to help Ma out to the single wooden chair sitting in the middle of the lawn.
    Hildie danced with delight to see her grandmother outside, and Mim came slowly down the path from the kitchen and stood by John.
    “Now, Mickey,” Ma said. “You set right down here in front of me. Me and you’s goin’ to have a talk.”
    Cogswell hesitated a moment, glanced at Red Mudgett, then grinned at Ma and folded his long body up like an Indian on the lawn at Ma’s feet.
    “And you, Red,” Ma said to Mudgett. “You set too. You make me nervous jerkin around like that. Just as antsy now as you was at eight.”
    Mudgett laughed quickly, then squatted on his haunches. He was small and wiry. He watched the old woman with small black eyes that seemed to have no need to blink.
    “Now just suppose you tell me, Mickey, what you’re doin’ here,” Ma said.
    “Collectin’ for the auction, ma’am,” he said.
    She shook her head. “You been involved in some hare-brained schemes in your day, Mickey,” she said. “I keep expectin’ you to make good, everybody’s favorite like you be. How come you keep doin’ such crazy things?”
    “That’s what my wife keeps askin’,” Mickey said. “Must be I was born under the wrong star.”
    “What if I was to tell you we got nary a stick left we care to part with?”
    “I wouldn’t do that, ma’am, if I was you. You can give a little somethin’ this week, a little maybe next week.” Mickey picked up a stone and tossed it into the road, then looked up at Ma.
    “If this is Perly Dunsmore’s little project, how come he ain’t here hisself?”
    Mickey shrugged. “It’ll