The Auctioneer by Joan Samson Page B

man made no motion to indicate that he had heard.
    John turned and pushed through the curtain into the store and headed for the door.
    “Your razor blades,” Fanny said from the dimness.
    John backed up, swept the package of blades off the counter, and continued toward the door.
    “That’ll be a dollar twenty-one,” Fanny called after him.
    John gulped on air and stopped. He reached into his pocket, pulled out two crumpled dollar bills, and presented them at the counter.
    “Never mind,” Fanny said as she picked his change out of the register. He has all he can do to help hisself and us these days.”
     
    A lot of the stuff in the attic was disintegrating with heat and dust and age. The auctioneer took it away in great truckloads and the attic emptied out more quickly than they could have imagined. The only thing they got a decent check for was the trunkful of Mim’s mother’s letters and cards—thousands of them, gnawed at the corners by squirrels and sprinkled with the decaying lace from valentines. Mim’s mother had belonged to a quilting club, a flower club, a postcard club, and a matchcover club, and she had corresponded with members from all over the country. Every letter started with a flat chronicle of failures, deaths, and ailments. The letters her mother wrote back, Mim thought, must have been almost indistinguishable from those she received. A large energetic woman, who believed every promise she ever heard, Mim’s mother had chafed at reality right up until the day she died. Mim had been one more failure. She’d married young; she’d married a farmer; she’d turned her back on the promise of her young beauty -that beauty which, according to all her mother’s dreams, should have won her a doctor or a senator or a prince. The letters made Mim uncomfortable. She half believed it was the complaining itself, the act of putting it on paper, that had kept her mother so unhappy. Herself, Mim never put pen to paper if she could find any way to get around it.
    On June twenty-eighth, Perly and Gore took the three cartons of half-finished quilts, the only thing of any value left in the attic. After they left, John and Mim and Hildie climbed up and surveyed the debris: the gnawed bits of cardboard boxes, the rotted quilting scraps, the dust shoved up in scuffled ridges, the chewed corncobs of the red squirrels who lived up there all winter, and a heap of rusted smudge pots left over from the time John’s father had tried to grow peaches. Mim went down for a broom, and they spent a hot and dusty afternoon cleaning the big room.
    When they were finished, Mim folded her arms and watched Hildie run up and down on the wide loose boards. “Best spring cleaning we ever had,” she said. All that rummage was just an invitation to fire. I bet we never feel a need for one speck of it.
    “And that’s an end to it,” John said. “An end to it once and for all.”
    Mim didn’t answer until they were following Hildie down the path to the pond to bathe. Then she said, “Well, they got eyes in their head to see with. There’s just no point to pesterin’ us again.”
    John didn’t answer.
    “Do you think, John?” she asked.
    “If you’re so positive, why you askin’ me?” demanded John.
     

4
    On Thursday, John and Mim were up in the garden picking the first of the peas and Hildie, squatting near the tangle of vines, was busy shelling and eating them. From time to time all day, in the course of their work, they had paused to listen. Gradually now the sound of a truck grew unmistakable, and one by one they all stood up and watched the road.
    “It’s just Cogswell,” breathed John.
    “Might be he needs a hand with a job,” Mim said!
    Cogswell jumped down from his battered green truck, waved, and started up the pasture to meet them. He was a tall rangy man with a looseness to the way he moved that was only partly related to his drinking. Like everyone who knew him, the Moores felt a kind of fond