The Auctioneer by Joan Samson

don’t go givin’ up every stick you own. Your father would have chased them rascals off the place with a whip, I tell you. Your great-great-grandfather cleared that whole high pasture and then some, when the woods was still filled with Indians too—riddled with them.”
    “You got no use for that bureau, Ma,” John said.
    “You tellin’ me my time has come?”
    “Course not,” Mim said. “It’s just that maybe the bureau will fetch us through without an accident.”
    “Accidents,” Ma said. “You should hear the accidents used to happen in the old days. Look what happened to Pa. How about the accidents in the news? Hundreds of people in one fell.”
    “That don’t help if you happen to be one of the hundreds,” John said.
    “I got a feelin’ it’s Red Mudgett underneath all this,” Ma said. “Never had a speck of faith, least not in somethin’ so simple as right and wrong. It all comes from bein’ too bloomin’ smart. Pipsqueak as he was, he was always too big for his britches. Every year he won the prize for memorizin’ the most scripture. Did it out of sheer spite because it come easier to him than to others. One year he got hisself elected president of his Sunday School class. I never did cotton on to how he did that. But it’s certain he found some wrong way or other, cause he never had a bona-fide friend. It galled me just to think about it. And the worst of it was, afterwards he’d be all over me, pullin’ at my sleeve like a little gypsy. ‘Ain’t you glad I won the prize, Mrs. Moore? Ain’t you glad I got elected?’ Must of come of not enough home trainin’. Plain and simple, I never took to him. Weren’t nobody I know of did. He was too smart. Nothin’ ever good enough for him. He never liked the Bible stories and he never liked the singin’. Why he even resisted bein’ a angel in the Christmas pageant.”
    Now the M.C. was making all the contestants twirl a baton, and a young woman in a sequined dress had just dropped the baton on her foot and was jumping up and down on the other.
    “What would you have us do, Ma?” Mim asked. “It’s not as if me and John was all that partial to givin’ our comforts away.”
    “I’d have you tell him where his business lies. That it ain’t here.” John exploded out of his chair. He glared at his mother. “There’s only just one way to get that message across, Ma,” he said. He paced the room from stove to window and back. Then he turned toward his mother again, grabbing the steel trim on the cold stove behind him and hanging on. “And the only thing keepin’ me from that, Ma, is I got three women on my hands.”
     
    Piece by piece they let the furniture go—the overstuffed chairs and the rocker from the front room, the old dropleaf table in the dining room, even the pine kitchen chairs. One week Cogswell settled for three crates of shell beans.
    Meanwhile, as if their decision to let the furniture go had bought some time, the Moores settled into the end of summer. The corn, what the crows had left, was ripe. And the cucumbers and tomatoes and squash and beans were in full season. They took Hildie swimming in the pond every day and tried to teach her to climb without stepping on loose stones or dead branches that might give way beneath her. They mowed and raked the hay, pitched it up into the old hayrack with forks, then pulled the hayrack to the barn with the tractor and unloaded the hay through the upper doors of the barn. Together in the late afternoons, complaining of the heat and listening to the crickets, they put up tomatoes and squash. It was a wonderful year for blackberries, and after supper John and Mim and Hildie roamed the edges of the pond in the last light picking blackberries and sometimes high-bush blueberries, eating what they could, and collecting more to can.
    The days grew shorter as their supply of furniture dwindled. While the weather was still nice, they would carry Ma out at mealtimes and settle her in