The Nine Names on the Hay Wagon

Auction day

Vernon Sutter has been calling sales in Woodford County for thirty-five years. He is sixty, he wears a white cowboy hat year round, and he can sell a box of bent nails for four dollars and make you glad you bought them.

He set the sale for the second Saturday in October, at ten in the morning, household first, then lunch, then machinery at one. He put the sale bill in three county papers and on the board at the co-op.

It was a clear October afternoon by the time we got to the middle of it. The kind of fall day you get maybe six of in central Illinois, when the sky is high and the beans are out and nobody is in a hurry yet.

Three hundred and eleven people signed for bidder numbers at Carl’s table. Carl counted. Rita and the church women ran the lunch stand out of the machine shed: pork tenderloin sandwiches, sloppy joes, and pie by the slice.

Vernon ran the household lots from the hay wagon, with his ring man walking the folding tables and holding up each lot. Lamps. Crocks. Quilts. The Depression glass went for more than I would have guessed.

Ardell came at nine thirty in his gray quarter-zip and khakis, with Denise and a clipboard. He stood on the ground by the wagon all morning, marking down every lot and every price on a sheet of his own.

He was not doing anything wrong. It was his job, as executor, to know what sold. He was good at it. He caught one mistake in the clerk’s tally that would have cost the estate forty dollars.

I wore my maroon fleece, because it was cool in the shade, and I worked the tables with the ring man, and I did not look at my brother any more than I had to.

The microphone

At a quarter to one, Vernon sold the last box lot off the last folding table. That was the end of the household. Next was the machinery, lined up in a row out past the red barn.

The crowd was already drifting that way, the men in seed caps heading out to look at Dad’s tractor and the old planter while Vernon took a drink of water.

I climbed up the side of the hay wagon. Vernon looked at me, surprised.

“Vernon, can I borrow that for two minutes?”

He looked at me a second longer. He had known my mother. He had known my father. He tipped back the white cowboy hat and held out the microphone.

“Two minutes,” he said. “The machinery boys get restless.”

I switched it on. It squealed once through the speaker on his truck, and that turned some heads back toward the wagon. I took the index card out of my fleece pocket.

Ardell was right below me, on the ground, holding his clipboard. He looked up at me, calm and a little curious. I think he thought I was going to thank the bidders for coming.

“Before the machinery sells,” I said, and my voice sounded strange coming back at me off the barn, “I want to thank the people who got us here. Mom’s neighbors. It’ll only take a minute.”