Page 2 of The Auction
The biggest, most exciting week of the year for us regular folks. People from out of town were actually going to show up on purpose and not just because they were stopping to get gas on their way to somewhere else. Our town of five hundred plus people was going to swell to maybe as many as six hundred. As horse people from the surrounding areas came looking to get a bargain price on quality trained quarter horses.
We called it the Rodeo Remnants Auction.
An event where rodeo cowboys came to auction off their aging horses. These animals, who had once been in the peak of conditioning in their sport, were basically being aged out of the business. Too old to perform, but too useful to be put down. So the cowboys would bring their trailers to Riverbend in August every year and auction off their beloved animals.
A lot of tears at this event.
This year, however, was going to be somethingdifferent. Because Herb had come up with an idea that he thought was going to be real special.
This year, along with the rodeo horses, my own daddy was planning to auction off…well, me.
ONE
JULIETTE
I know,it sounds archaic when I say it out loud. Something that couldn’t happen in this year of our Lord whatever. Not when there was internet and everything. But you’d be surprised about some goings-on in a town like Riverbend.
“Juliette! Now!”
“I’m coming, Daddy!” I called down the stairs. “I just have to-”
“I don’t want to hear what you’re doing,” he shouted up to me. “I want to see it done. You get down here and stop stalling. My decision is final.”
There wasn’t a decision, I wanted to remind him. Decision implied there had been some kind of choice. Options that I had. And there weren’t any.
Today, I was going to be sold. Sorry…married.
It’s not like my father was a human trafficker. Not really.
It came down to a few basic facts.
The first one being, the doctor told him it was cancer and that it had spread from his throat to his lungs. He wasso filled with it, there was no point in trying to treat it at this point. They gave him months, not years.
Herb had been a lifelong smoker, who believed all the rot about cigarettes causing cancer was just a lot of nonsense intended to keep the price of cigarettes so high. By his reasoning, if they really were that bad for you, people would stop making them.
Yeah, he got that one wrong.
So his days on this earth were officially numbered for Herb Clarke.
Second fact, Daddy didn’t believe his daughter could manage the farm once he passed. He was right on that score. Not that I couldn’t have managed the farm, but I wouldn’t have. As soon as he told me what the doctor said, my plan was to sell it ten seconds after putting him in the ground and never look back. May he rest in peace.
Maybe he knew that. Maybe he knew my hatred for this place was something I held deep down inside.
Finally, Herb believed in the sanctimony of marriage. That a wife was designed by God to serve her husband and bear his children. So if he got a husband for me, he could leave the farm to him and ensure the Clarke farm legacy would go on through our lineage.
I know what you’re thinking. Why not just pick a man out for myself?
Well, as I mentioned, I didn’t see the fine people of Riverbend very often.
Also, Herb refused to let me date.
Hence, his dilemma of knowing he was dying, needing to find me a husband pronto, or else…
Or else I would betray him once he was in the grave.
That’s what he called it when he got drunk after learning of his fatal diagnosis. That I would sell the farmthat had been in his family for generations and it would be like the Clarkes’ had never been part of this land.
At the time, I’d protested.
