The Auctioneer by Joan Samson Read Free Book Online Page B

pasture in summer, or diving into the pond, or coming into the kitchen in winter, rosy with the cold—that it showed a man’s worth to have a wife who looked like that.
    He hadn’t thought of such things for years, but now he saw that she was no longer young. Her slender hands on the hairbrush had grown as tough as his own. The good fair skin, which had once stretched so cleanly over the straight features that her face completely hid her thoughts, was faintly patterned now so that laughter, mockery, and her quick characteristic squint of doubt seemed always there, ready to break through. Still, her body had filled out and gained confidence without losing its grace, and her eyes remained the deep clear blue of a winter sky.
    So she had not overlooked the auctioneer’s eye for her. John got out of his chair and moved slowly toward her. She met his eyes in the mirror and stiffened with alarm. His two hands landed on her arms. She froze as she stood. He felt the power in his hands and closed his eyes to stop himself. She wouldn’t struggle. She never struggled. She had let him have his way the first time he tried, when she was fifteen. Sometimes she had run away first, into the darkness under the trees, but if he sat still, very still, she had always come back and let him have his way.
    She bore the bruising grip on her arms with perfect stillness until he himself was trembling. He shoved himself away from her so that she staggered against the sink. “Why you brushin’ your hair?” he shouted.
    Hildie screamed with surprise and ran to her grandmother in the front room, dodging between John and Mim.
    Mim went pale beneath her freckles. “It’s only right to look decent when company’s comin’,” she said. Without moving away, she started taking the dishes from the drainer and putting them away in the shelves overhead. “What are we goin’ to give this week? she asked—a question she’d already asked too often.
    John stood in the middle of the room watching her, his green eyes half shut.
    She glanced at him. Then, skirting him widely, she walked out the back door of the kitchen, not stopping to pick up her jacket, though the day was chilly and spitting rain.
    John sat down on a chair to wait, feeling the pulse at his temple subside and his breathing slow to normal.
    “John?” called his mother.
    He didn’t answer. Hildie poked a head into the kitchen, then scuttled back to her grandmother. “He’s there,” she reported.
    “Johnny?” Ma called again. “You got no call to treat her like that.”
    “I just asked her a simple question,” he snapped.
    They let him be and he sat waiting. She didn’t come back until nearly three o’clock. When she did, she came in and went straight to the sink and continued emptying the dishes from the drainer, her blouse wet from the rain and sticking to her shoulders. “What are we goin’ to give?” she asked again.
    “Nothin’,” he said without moving.
    “Why should we stop?” she said. “There’s the whole attic yet.”
    “Old Caleb Tuttle ain’t allowed him so much as a broken chair for a month.”
    “Oh, Caleb Tuttle. Fanny says he meets them with a shotgun now. Can you just see it? Meetin’ Perly Dunsmore and Bob Gore with a shotgun? Caleb was always spoilin’ for a fight.”
    “I still say we done our share,” John said.
    “You wouldn’t rather have some cash than that junk in the attic we never use? And it’s a good cause. Don’t you like to think we have a real police force? They’d come right away if we had a need.”
    “For what? For what would you ever need a cop when you’d have time to call one?”
    Mim shrugged. “Well... you never know. The world’s gettin’ worse.”
    She went to the woodbox and picked out sticks of kindling to start a fire for supper. She lifted the lid of the stove and turned to John. “Say no if you like,” she said. “But I for one like to be part of what he’s doin’ for the town.
    “He’s just in love