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Summertime in the BelgradesContentsfor Printing
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Auction at the Old Farmby Don Watson Early summer touched down briefly in May, a respite between the damp, bone chilling tendrils of winter that refused to free us into the green of spring. The sky was a bleached blue as Albert Sproul, The White Dog, and I lurched up over Central Street and took the big S turn by Roger Lord's pasture and hard left up to the Outlet Road. Then we rattled up the farm's rutted gravel lane, past the elderly maples gnarled and sapless. At the base of the road we had seen the sign. AUCTION . . . FORECLOSURE SALE Squat Saabs and trucklike Volvos with low numbered license plates were parked in the yard as we edged Albert's Studebaker to a spot near the meadow. Men with strong jaws and gentle tans paced the grounds waiting for the auction to begin. These were men with fine vertical creases that started at their cheekbones and defined their mouths. These are creases of wealth. Only the rich are born with these creases. And the tans. Not the blue/red burns of lobstermen and farmers, but, rather, the color of skin warmed at country clubs or yacht clubs. While others examined the fine old barn and the carriage house, Albert started, with The White Dog, down a path that split a perfect stone wall and led to a spring pond in the woods. A tanned man in tattered shorts joined Albert. "Where's the pond?" he asked. "Follow the White Dog." "How are the black flies out here?" "Mean," Albert replied. "Are they gentle where you come from?" They walked around the clear cool spring pond and then back through the woods to the farm. People milled around on the lawn with numbered cards in their pockets. "Bidders," Albert whispered knowingly. "Them with numbers in their pockets put up $10,000 just to bid!" On the porch stood a well dressed man in a double-breasted blue blazer and shiny loafers with tassels. Too well dressed to be wealthy he turned out to be the auctioneer. Beside him an old man with egg whites for eyes sat silently leaning on his cane. "Used to be a real farm some years ago." The old man said to no one in particular. "Veal critters in the barn down below and hogs up back. And sometimes, old Walter...this was Walter Bodwell's place, you know." He looked around as if for confirmation. "Well, it was, and when old Walter got into the cider, well," he started to laugh and the laugh became a cough and his egg white eyes ran, "then the chickens would come right in the kitchen." They all sat silent in the large dining room of the farmhouse. Bidders and onlookers listened as the rules of the auction were detailed. "...and was a working farm until 1986 when it was purchased and converted into a bed & breakfast." The auctioneer looked around the room at his prospects. He looked to the back at the SBA man who would nod his approval as the bidding rose. He looked at the man who was about to lose his bed & breakfast. It was quiet for a long time. Outside in the low meadow a groundhog poked his head up through some rushes and above, high on the ridge that dove down to a small quarry the auctioneer thought he saw a coyote. The selling of property always made him feel uneasy. Some history gone. Dreams smashed, money lost. It was not his job to think of who or why. He couldn't allow himself to care if the firm-jawed man won the bidding and cut the old farm into fifty or so house lots with fifty natural cedar houses and fifty two-car garages. He saw them in his mind's eye. He saw the coyote skulk back and the groundhog flee for other fields. The pond would die...there would be no more farm. "Alright...who'll start the bidding at $300,000." Don Watson, Hallowell resident and observer extraordinaire, is the author of The View from Powderhouse Hill, in which this short story appeared. All rights are reserved by the author. | ||