To get to the Matson sale I had to drive through town. On the edge of town I passed the high school where my wife Ellen teaches English in the upper grades. Through the school windows I could see students moving about in front of bright posters. I knew that if Ellen weren`t teaching I could not be thinking about buying that New Holland mower listed on Matson`s sale bill. My 30 Holsteins are a fine bunch of cows, but if it weren`t for Ellen`s job things on the farm would be tough.
This made me think of Matson and his family. I mean, I didn`t really know them. But I could tell from their sale bill what had gone wrong. Too much machinery, not enough wheat. Too many bankers, not enough rain. Tough luck all around.
But bad luck draws a crowd like blood pulls flies. Several pickups followed mine as I turned at the red auction flags. Soon, up ahead, I could see the shiny aluminum tops of Matson`s grain bins. Below were his newer white house and the haphazard lines of pickups stretching from his yard down his driveway and along the shoulders of the highway.
I parked, leaving myself room to turn around, and began to walk quickly toward the crowd. Sales do that to you. Anything can happen at a sale. In Matson`s yard there were cars and trucks parked across his lawn. Their tires had rutted the soggy, April grass and water welled up in the zig-zag tread marks. Closer to his house, a pickup had backed over a small spruce tree. The tree remained bent over in a green horseshoe beneath the tire. I slowed my walk. For a moment I thought of turning back, of going home. For if everybody left, there could be no sale. But even as I thought, several farmers passed me. I kept walking.
Ahead, the crowd surrounded the auctioneer who stood atop a hayrack. He wore a wide, black cowboy hat and his tanned, wrinkled throat bobbed like a rooster`s craw as he cried the small stuff. Cans of nails. Some rusty barbed wire. Three fenceposts. Some half-cans of herbicide. A broken shovel. Beyond the auctioneer, in even lines, was the machinery, mostly John Deere green and Massey Ferguson red. Beyond everything were Matson`s long, unplowed fields.
I registered for a bidder`s number, then stood with a cup of coffee and looked over the crowd. You can`t get in a hurry at a sale. You should get the feel of things. The crowd was mostly farmers with a few bankers and real estate men thrown in. The younger bankers wore flannel shirts and seedcorn caps. I could pick them out right away. Like the real estate guys, their faces were white and smooth and they squinted a lot, as if they were moles who just today crawled out of the ground into the sunlight. Moles or skunks.
Off to the side I noticed an older farmer picking through a box of odds and ends. He fished out a rat-tail file from the box and drew it across his thumbnail. He glanced briefly around, then laid the file alongside the box and continued digging.
”Gonna spend some of the wife`s money?” somebody said to me. I turned. It was Jim Hartley who milked cows just down the road from my farm. I knew he already had a good mower.
”Not if she can help it,” I said.
He grinned. But then his forehead wrinkled and his blue eyes turned serious. ”Hell of a deal, a bank sale like this. Imagine if you had to sell out. Had all these people come onto your farm and start picking through your stuff like crows on road kill.”
I looked back to the old man with the file. But both he and it were gone. ”Be tough,” I said. That old bastard.
Hartley looked around at the crowd. ”Haven`t seen Matson anywhere. Can`t blame him for that. Good day to get drunk.”
”I don`t really know the man,” I said. ”He`s a stranger to me.”
”He`s got some pretty fair equipment,” Hartley said. ”The combine looks good. And that New Holland mower–it`s damn near brand new.” He narrowed his eyes. ”You could use a good mower.”
”I might take a look at it,” I said. I lowered my eyes and took a long drink of coffee.
Soon Hartley went off toward the combine, and I found the mower. From a distance it looked good. The yellow and red colors were still bright, which means it had always been shedded. Up close I checked the cutting sickle. All the knives were in place and still showed serration, which was like buying good used tires still showing the little rubber teats on the face of their tread. Next I turned the hay pickup reel to watch the sickle move. The knives slid easily between their guards with a sound like Ellen`s good pinking shears. Then I saw the tool box and the mower`s maintenance manual. The thin book was tattered and spotted with grease and with Matson`s fingerprints, tiny whirlwinds painted in oil. Its pages fell open to the lubrication section. There Matson had circled and numbered all the grease fittings. I was sold.
I stashed the manual and walked away. I didn`t want to linger near the mower and attract other bidders. I bought another cup of coffee and then stood off to the side where I could watch the mower and see who stopped by it. Two men paused by the mower, but they wore wheat seedcaps and smoked, which said they were grain men. Soon they moved on to the combine. One stocky farmer slowed by the mower, but he wore high rubber boots and a Purina ”Pig-Power” jacket. Pigs don`t eat hay. I was feeling lucky until a man and his son
–dairymen for sure–walked toward the mower like it was a magnet and they were nails. Their cuffs were spotted with manure splash. They wore loose bib overalls for easy bending. And they wore caps cocked to one side, a habit dairymen have from leaning their forehead against the flank of their cows.
The son turned the pickup reel while the old man held his ear to the main bearing case. After the old man nodded, the two of them crawled underneath the mower and didn`t come out for a long time. What the hell did they see under there? Finally they came out and stood off to the side. They stared at the mower and nodded and whispered. I wondered how many cows they had milked.
By now the auctioneer was in the back of his pickup and was barking his way along the hay wagons and rakes, headed this way. I went over my figures again. I knew in town that mower would sell for $5,500, give or take a couple of hundred. I had set my limit at $5,000. As long as I stuck to that figure I couldn`t go wrong.
”Now here`s a mighty clean mower . . .” the auctioneer called. The hook and pull of his arms drew the crowd forward. ”Boys, if this mower were a car, we`d call her `cherry,` you betcha. You know what this mower would sell for in town, boys, so somebody give me $6,000 to start!”
The crowd was silent.
”Five thousand then!”
Still there was silence.
”Boys, boys–four thousand to start!”
In the silence somewhere a dog barked. The auctioneer`s eyes flickered to the clerk and then to the banker. The banker, ever so slightly, shrugged. He was worried about the big tractors and combines, about the house and the land. ”Boys, this ain`t a rummage sale, but somebody give a thousand dollars.”
I saw the younger dairyman nod, and the bidding was on. At $1,600 it was between the dairyman and me. The young fellow began to look at his father before each bid. At $1,700 I saw the old man fold his arms and squint. At $1,775 he pursed his lips and shook his head. His son mouthed a silent curse. ”Eighteen hundred three times–gone!” the auctioneer said and pointed to me. I held up my bidder`s number for the clerk to record as the crowd dissolved away to the next implement.
I couldn`t believe my luck. $1,800 was a steal, no two ways about that. My ears burned and I felt a little shaky. I sat down on the mower`s long drawbar. I ran my hand along its cold steel. I wondered for a moment if the mower had felt any change, if it knew I was up there. Soon enough that shaky feeling receded, replaced by a stronger idea–that I had to get that mower out of here and home as soon as possible.
I found the clerk`s booth and wrote out my check. Then I brought around my truck and got ready to hook onto the mower. Trouble was, Matson had parked the mower in a field-cutting position, which meant its mouth was too wide for highway travel. I knew that the drawbar released to swing to a narrower stance. But for the life of me, I couldn`t see how. I knew I still wasn`t completely over that shaky feeling because if I had been home on my own farm and just sat there a few minutes, I could have figured things out. Not here, though.
I asked another farmer if he knew, but he was in a hurry to join the crowd around the combine. So there was only one thing to do–find someone who knew for sure. And that was Matson.
I walked up to his house. The drapes were all drawn. I rapped on the door and waited. Inside, I could hear a baby crying. Along the sidewalk was a flower bed. Somebody had gone to a lot of work planting petunias and geraniums, but now their dried blooms were clouded over by quackgrass.
A woman answered the door. She was about Ellen`s age, late 30s. She had a bone-white face that said she seldom went outside.
”Is Mr. Matson home?” I asked.
”Yes,” she said. She just stood there. From deeper in the house I could smell cigarette smoke.
”I bought . . . an implement,” I said.
”Tom–” she called back into the dusky hallway.
We waited. But there was no answer. No one came forward. She shrugged.
”He`s back there in the living room,” she said, leaning back toward the now louder crying of the baby. ”Why don`t you go on in?”
I walked down the dim hallway into the living room. In the room the TV was a colored bull`s eye. The Phil Donahue show was on, but the picture kept wavering. I didn`t see Matson anywhere.
”Tom–” his wife said loudly from behind me. ”Some man`s got a question.”
Matson slowly sat up from where he had been lying on the couch. He was fully dressed in coveralls, leather boots, a cap, even his work gloves. He did not take his eyes off the TV.
”And why should we believe you?” Donahue was saying to a man seated on the stage.
”Tom–” his wife said even louder this time.
”I heard,” he said.
”The mower,” I began. ”I bought the mower and–”
Matson nodded and walked past me toward the door. I followed. Outside we walked in silence toward the mower. The auctioneer was standing on the platform of the combine. ”I`ll buy this combine myself,” he was saying.
”Then I`ll put it on a truck and haul it to North Dakota and I`ll make myself $10,000 in one day. And one of you could do the same thing, you know that, boys.”
Matson did not look at the auctioneer. He walked toward the mower like there was a perfectly straight though invisible line drawn in the dirt. I explained my trouble with the drawbar. He nodded and slid underneath. I saw him remove three cotter keys. He handed them to me, then swung the drawbar.
”Now why didn`t I see that?” I said.
But Matson still didn`t speak. He just stared at the mower.
”It looks like a good mower,” I said, then immediately wished I hadn`t. For I was sure he would ask me how much I paid. However, all he said was,
”I`ll hook you on it, if you like. Then you can go.”
”You bet,” I answered. I quickly got in my pickup. He waved me backward, then held up his hands. I felt him slide the iron pin through the mower`s tongue and my bumper hitch, felt the clank in my spine. You know when you`re hooked on.
I got out of the pickup again but there was nothing much to say. ”Okay, thanks,” I said. ”Guess I`ll be rolling home, then.”
But Matson didn`t reply. He just stood there staring at the iron pin that joined his mower to my truck.
I drove off very slowly, watching the mower and Matson in the rearview mirror. It was like they were on TV. The mower stayed the same size, but Matson got smaller and smaller as the camera pulled away.
Suddenly Matson`s legs were moving rapidly. He began to grow in my mirror. In another few moments he was running alongside my truck, pounding on the side with his fist. Ahead of me was the highway, and I thought of speeding up and leaving him behind. But I stopped. I rolled the window halfway down.
Matson`s face was completely white, as if all the blood was gone from him. He paused as if he had forgotten why he had run after me. ”It was a good mower,” he finally said. His right eye twitched as he spoke.
”I believe that,” I said.
”It never let me down,” he said.
”That`s because you took good care of it,” I said. ”That`s plain to see.”
”I did. I worked hard. Nobody can take that away from me,” he said. His voice was softer now.
”Nobody I know ever said otherwise,” I answered. ”When your name came up people said, `Matson–with a little more luck, some more rain and better wheat prices, he`d have made it.` That`s what I heard other people say.”
”This is not my fault–” he said, jerking his arm at the pickups and the auction as if he hadn`t heard me. ”It wasn`t me. I did everything I could.”
For one brief moment I thought of getting out and putting my arms around Matson. But you just can`t do things like that. Finally he walked away.
Out on the highway, I kept the truck at 25. The mower started to sway side-to-side if I drove any faster. Ahead of me the sun was shining on the dark fields where other farmers were planting. I couldn`t stop thinking about Matson. About that run-over spruce tree. His white-faced wife, her flower bed run to weeds.
I thought about Ellen, about how sometimes in the evenings when there`s nothing on TV she reads me poems, poems she likes and uses in her English classes. I thought of one poem in particular, by W.H. Auden. His poem was about a painting in a museum, a painting of Icarus and Daedalus.
Icarus and Daedalus were prisoners on this island, but they made wings from feathers and wax, strapped on the wings and flew away. Icarus, however, flew too close to the sun. The heat melted the wax and he fell into the ocean and drowned.
The poem, though, was not so much about Icarus as it was about the people who saw his accident. In the painting there was a plowman in a nearby field. The plowman saw Icarus fall, but he just kept plowing. There was a passing ship, too, but it had somewhere to get to and so just kept sailing. Auden was saying that while other people suffer, we usually just go on with our own lives. We eat. We sleep. We work. We drive down the highway just like I was now. And all the while, terrible things are happening to other people.
Suddenly my truck yawed and shuddered. Behind, the mower was whipping violently side-to-side. I was driving way over 50. I hit the brakes hard. Back at 25, the mower trailed straightly again. I let out a breath and watched my speedometer from then on.
But I hated driving that slowly. For what I most wanted to do was get that mower home, park it in the machine shed and close the door on it. Then I wanted to eat lunch, sweep up in the barn, milk, eat supper, watch TV and go to bed early. Because once I had done all that, this day would be over.
Will Weaver is an award-winning author of short stories. He grew up on a farm in Minnesota where he currently teaches English at Bemidji State University.
