The Auctioneer by Joan Samson

with his own palaver,” John said.
    But when Dunsmore and Gore arrived as they had promised, John and Hildie met them in the yard, led them to the attic, and let them take the painted-over rock maple chairs that needed gluing.
     
    Monday, John came in to lunch with the mail. “The check for the chairs only comes to a dollar seventy-five,” he said. “The note here from Perly don’t say nothin about that. Only says he was sorry he didn’t have time to come in and say hello to you and Ma.”
    “Well that was just junk,” Mim said.
    Ma settled herself at the table. “I feel some better knowin’ he sent a word to me,” she said.
    John washed his hands, then stuck his whole head under cold running water at the sink. The water pump started up underneath them and kept on churning after he turned off the water. He rubbed his head with a towel. “I don’t know,” he said. “I could do without the visits happy enough.”
    “I think you be a bit green, Johnny boy,” said Ma. “There’s a man can give you reason, too.”
    Mim turned toward the stove and hid her grin in the soup pot. “I am thinkin’ of some hard facts, Ma,” John said. “Like why nobody’s asked me to run the grader this year, not once, when the roads are graded all round by now.”
    “I keep tellin you,” Mim said. You ought to go down to Jimmy Ward and ask him outright.”
    “You hintin’ it could be an accident?” John asked. “An accident Ian James graded our road this year when ain’t nobody but me or Frank Lovelace done it these fifteen years?”
    “Most like,” said Mim.
    “I suppose you calculate what Gore said as accident too?”
    Bobby Gore? Ma said. “Ain’t nothin’ but mush in his head. Just like his daddy.”
    “Old Toby’s mean, Ma. Maybe Bobby takes after that too,” John said.
    Mean he is, she agreed. “Chased his own flesh and blood off the place every one by the time they was fifteen and told them not to come back. She reached out to caress Hildie’s arm, but Hildie was absorbed in blowing bubbles in a glass of milk with a straw. “Serves old Toby right if he ends up on the dole.”
    “It’s us endin’ up on the dole worries me,” John said.
     
    The houses around the Parade were two-story colonials painted white with black or green blinds, most of them with a rambling series of tacked-on porches, ells, and outbuildings. Lindens store was tucked away in a corner, though not as inconspicuously as some residents might have wished. It had been a stable until a Linden two generations back boarded up the windows, filled the long flat interior with merchandise, and opened it up as a general store. In his time, Ike Linden had covered it with gray asbestos siding crisscrossed with dark lines supposed to make it look like granite. Except for the addition of a small plate glass window and a line of bare light bulbs hanging at intervals from the ceiling, the store looked pretty much the way it always had—not so much old-fashioned as just cluttered and dim. Outside it was identified by two Amoco pumps, a tired Coca-Cola sign, and a random display of outdated posters.
    Nowadays, Harlowe people drove the seventeen miles down Route 37 to the shopping center when it was time to stock their shelves. Nevertheless, almost everyone in town had occasion to duck into Linden’s two or three times a week. They came for milk and bread, treats for the children, tomato paste for a half-cooked supper, the right-sized screw, stove black, birthday candles, the newspaper, home-made banana bread, and gasoline—not to mention library books, insurance, hunting licenses, and tickets to the New Hampshire sweepstakes.
    Part of old Ike Linden’s genius as a storekeeper, and as a selectman too, was his ability to hear volumes and say practically nothing. This, combined with his mastery over such an abundance of material goods, gave him a reputation for knowing a great deal. People had always brought him their questions about income tax,