The Miller Place on the Courthouse Steps

Most of the list was vacant lots and a burned-out filling station. One line was a house and 2.3 acres on the county road north of town.

Everybody knew it as the Miller place. Old Dale Miller had died in it, and his children lived in Arizona and Oregon and had quit answering the tax bills. It had been standing empty six years. You could see it from the blacktop, a tall white farmhouse going gray, with a porch that sagged in the middle like a tired horse.

I drove Nate out there that evening. You could not go inside before a county sale. You bought what you could see from the yard, and you bought it as it stood.

The weeds were to my hip. There was a cistern with a concrete lid, and beside it one stubborn clump of something red just breaking ground.

Nate walked around the house once, slowly. He got down on his belly and went under the porch with a flashlight. He stood back by the road and looked at the roofline a long time with his head tilted, the way he sights down a driveshaft.

“Ridge is straight,” he said. “Foundation’s limestone and it hasn’t moved. The porch is shot and I bet the wiring’s older than Dad.” He rubbed his jaw. “Good bones, Em.”

“What would it go for?”

“What have we got?”

“Forty-two thousand and some change.”

“Then that’s what it would go for,” he said. “Or it goes to somebody else.”

The sale was on a Thursday morning in April, at ten o’clock, on the courthouse steps. They have held it there as long as anybody can remember. The auctioneer was a man named Dobbs, sixty or so, in a tan windbreaker, with a clipboard and a voice that carried across the square to the bank.

There were maybe twenty people. Most of them were there for the lots. A landlord from over in the next county stood near the front in a quilted vest with his hands in his pockets. I knew he was a landlord by his boots, which had never been in a field.

I had taken a vacation day. Nate had come straight off a job with grease to his elbows.

The terms were printed on a sheet. Payment in full the day of the sale, certified funds. No warranty of any kind. A county deed, mailed when it was recorded.

I had a cashier’s check in my purse for forty thousand dollars, and under it a bank envelope with two thousand in cash, because the rest of what we had was tip money and I had never gotten it all turned into anything bigger than twenties.

Dobbs read off the parcel number. “House and two and three-tenths acres, known locally as the Miller farm. Who’ll give me twenty thousand?”

The quilted vest lifted a finger.

“Twenty-five,” Nate said.

It went up by thousands. Thirty. Thirty-five. At thirty-eight the vest stopped using his finger and started saying the numbers out loud, which I took to mean he was thinking about each one.

“Forty,” Nate said.

“Forty-one,” the vest said.

Nate looked at me. I had told him forty-two was the bottom of the jar. Past forty-two there was nothing, not a furnace filter, not a gallon of paint.

“Forty-one five,” Nate said.

Dobbs looked at the vest, and the vest looked at the house number on his sheet, and I watched that man decide that a sagging porch was not worth five hundred dollars more to him.