Clifford Simak - Out of Their Minds

Then the program was over and George Duncan came pushing through the crowd and took me in tow and began to introduce me to some other people. Some of them I remembered and some of them I didn't, but they seemed to remember me, so I pretended that I did.

But right in the middle of it Miss Adams was standing up on the little platform at the front of the room and calling to George Duncan, "You forgot," she told him, "or are you pretending to, in hopes you'll get out of it? But you promised to be our auctioneer tonight."

George protested, but I could see that he was pleased. One could see with only half an eye that George Duncan was an important person in Pilot Knob. He owned the general store and was the postmaster and a member of the school board and he could turn his hand to many other little civic chores, like auctioneering the baskets at a basket social. He was the man that Pilot Knob always turned to when they needed something done.

So he went up to the platform and turned to the table that was stacked with decorated baskets and boxes and picked one of them up for the crowd to look at. But before he started in on his auctioneering, he made a little speech.

"All of you know," he said, "what this is all about. The proceeds from this basket social will be used to buy new books for the school library, so you will have the satisfaction of knowing that whatever you spend here will be used to a good purpose. You aren't just buying the basket and the privilege of eating with the lady whose name you find inside it; you also are contributing to a very praiseworthy public cause. So I'll ask you fellows out there to loosen up a bit and spend some of that money that is sagging down your pockets."

He hoisted the basket that he held. "Now here," he said, "is the kind of basket that I like to offer. I tell you, fellows, this one has a hefty feel to it. There's a lot of good eating packed into it and the way it's decorated and all, I'd say the lady who put it up probably paid as much attention to what went into it as how it looks outside. And it might interest you to know that I seem to catch a whiff of good fried chicken."

"Now," he asked, "what am I bid?"

"A dollar," said someone, and someone else immediately made it two and then from the back of the room came a bid of two and a half.

"Two dollars and a half," said George Duncan in aggrieved surprise. "Are you boys going to stop at two and a half? Why, if you were to buy this basket by the pound, that would be dirt cheap. Now do I hear…"

Someone bid three dollars and George worked it up from there, fifty cents and a quarter at a time, to four seventy-five and finally knocked it down for that.

I looked about the crowd. They were a group of friendly folks and they were having a good time. They were spending an evening with their neighbors and were comfortable with them. Right now they were intent upon the selling of the baskets, but later on there would be time for talk and there would be little weighty talk, I knew. They'd talk about the crops, the fishing, the new road that had been talked about for twenty years or more but had never come about and now was being talked about again, of the latest scandal (for there always was a scandal of some sort, although often of the very mildest kind), of the sermon the minister had preached last Sunday, of the old gentleman very newly dead and beloved by all of them. They'd talk of many things and then they'd go home through the softness of the late spring evening and they'd have their little worries and their neighborhood concerns, but there would be none of them weighed down by huge official worries. And it was good, I told myself, to be in a place where there were no overpowering and dark official worries.

I felt someone tugging at my sleeve and looked in the direction of the tugging and there was Linda Bailey.

"You'd ought to bid on that one," she whispered at me. "That one belongs to the preacher's daughter. She's a pretty thing. You'd enjoy meeting her."

"How do you know," I asked, "that it's the preacher's daughter's basket?"

"I just know," she said. "Go ahead and bid."

It was up to three dollars and I said three dollars and a half and immediately, from across the room, came a bid for four. I looked where the bid had come from and there, standing, ranged with their backs against the wall, were three young men, in their early twenties. When I looked at them I found that all three were looking at me and it seemed to me that they were sneering at me in a very heavy-handed way.

The tug came at my sleeve again. "Go ahead and bid," urged Linda Bailey. "It's them Ballard boys and the other one's a Williams. They are terrible louts. Nancy will just die if any of the three of them should bid in her basket."

"Four fifty," I said, unthinking, and up on the platform George Duncan said, "I have four fifty. Who will make it five?" He turned toward the three ranged along the wall and one of them said five. "Now I have five," sang George. "Will someone make it six?" He was looking straight at me and I shook my head, so he sold it for the five.

"Why did you do that?" Linda Bailey raged at me in her neighing whisper. "You could have kept on bidding."

"Not on your life," I told her. "I'm not going to come into this town and the first night I am here make it tough for some young sprout to buy the basket that he wants. His girl might be involved. She might have told him beforehand how to identify her basket."

"But Nancy's not his girl," said Linda Bailey, much disgusted at me. "Nancy hasn't got a fellow. She'll be mortified."

"You said that they were Ballards. Aren't they the people who live on our old home farm?"

"That they are," she said. "And the old folks are nice enough. But them two boys of theirs! They are holy terrors. All the girls are scared of them. They go to dances all the time and they are filthy-mouthed and do a lot of drinking."

I looked across the room and the three still were watching me, with triumphant leers pasted on their faces. I was a stranger to the town and they had bluffed me out, they had overbid me. It was silly on the face of it, of course, but in a little place like this small triumphs and small insults, because of the lack of any other kind, are often magnified.

Christ, I thought, why did I have to run into this Bailey woman? She'd always been bad news and she hadn't changed. She was a meddler and a busybody and there was no good in her.

The baskets were going rapidly and only a few of them were left. George was getting tired and the bidding had slowed down. I told myself that perhaps I should buy a basket, to demonstrate, if nothing else, that I was no stranger, but was a man, instead, who had come back to Pilot Knob and meant to stay awhile.

I looked around and there was no sign of Linda Bailey. More than likely she was sore at me and had stalked away. Thinking of her, I felt a little flare of anger. What right had she to demand that I protect the minister's daughter, Nancy, against the more than likely innocent designs—or at least ineffectual, if not innocent designs—of some loutish farm boy.

There were only three baskets left now and George picked up one of them. It was only half the size some of the others had been and it was not over decorated. Holding it up, he began his auction singsong.

There were two or three bids and they got it up to three fifty and I made it four.

Someone over against the wall said five and I glanced in that direction and the three were grinning at me—grinning, it seemed to me, with all the clownish malice in the world.

"Make it six," I said.

"Seven," said the middle one of the trio.

"I have seven," said George, somewhat aghast, for this was the highest any bid had run that night. "Do I hear seven and a half or does someone want to make it eight?"