Page 3 of The Auction
No, no. Don’t say that, Daddy! Of course, I wouldn’t leave here. I love being a sugar beet farmer in Riverbend, Montana.
Truth was, I thought I was a better liar than that.
Instead, he was hauling me off to the Rodeo Remnant Auction, where he planned to basically sell me to the highest bidder.
Winner gets the farm and the house, as long as he agrees to marry me. Thus ensuring the fruit of my loins would carry on the family legacy.
Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen.
However, my dilemma was this. What if some yahoo ponied up and did marry me? Because four hundred acres, a three bedroom, two bath, twenty-five hundred square foot house, including barn, and equipment, and, I imagined, sex with me on the regular, was a pretty decent deal for a cowboy in these parts.
Sure, I could get a divorce as soon as Herb kicked it, but then I was relying on a local judge to determine what was a fair and equitable distribution for me. Which you would think would be all of it, but that was not a guarantee in these parts where misogyny was bred deep.
It also required my cowboy-buyer to agree to a divorce.
Which, given whatever his investment was going to be, might not be in his best interest.
No, I needed another plan.
“For the last time! Juliette!” Herb bellowed.
I didn’t bother responding. There was no point. I’d learned how to swallow my tongue from as early as I could remember, and that’s what I just kept doing.
I gave myself one last glance in the mirror.
I appeared exactly how he wanted me to look.
Plain, white, cotton dress. No makeup. Long, straight, natural, light brown hair pushed off my face with a floral embroidered headband. Hazel eyes that had already seen too much, and at the same time, not enough.
Virginal. I looked fucking virginal.
I didn’t want to look at that girl in the mirror anymore.
I skipped downstairs and stopped at the bottom step. Herb was opening the front door, showing me his back, and I was struck again by how fast it all seemed to be happening.
The weight seemed to be falling off of him in pounds almost daily. His shoulders were slumped. The threadbare denim shirt I’d been ironing for him for years, he called it his church shirt, was drooping around his shoulders while the steps he took to shuffle out onto the porch were measured.
Careful. Like he was suddenly always afraid of falling.
I swallowed the sudden lump in my throat. It would be easy to say I didn’t love my father. It would be easy to say that because my father didn’t love me. I wasn’t a daughter to him, I was a possession. Something precious for him to own.
It wasn’t intentional, it was simply an internal failing of his. He didn’t love…anything.
Because you couldn’t both love something and own it.
Except, what Herb didn’t realize, was that we had more of a transactional relationship. He made sure I was sheltered and fed. I kept the house and worked alongside him in the fields during planting and harvesting seasons.
He didn’t beat me. Nothing more than a slap against my head or a hard tug on my ponytail when I wasn’t moving as fast as he wanted, or didn’t figure shit out as fast as he neededme to do. No verbal abuse either, really. He didn’t believe in cussing and calling me stupid or ugly would have been pointless, because I wasn’t either of those things and he knew it.
So there was no affection in our relationship, but there was grudging respect.
Herb worked for the land. A one man owner/operator. There were plenty of folks out there younger than he was who couldn’t manage an operation this size the way he did. Not that he counted my contributions, but still.
The man gave this place everything he had.
I understood why the thought of losing it devastated him. But I didn’t care.
“I’m ready, Daddy. I just wanted to fix my hair one last time.”
