“Forty,” he said. His voice did not shake, which surprised him. “Fifty,” Coburn answered before the auctioneer could even repeat the number, and now he was playing to the room half turned, so the crowd could enjoy his face. “Sixty.” “Seventy.” Coburn shook his head in mock wonder.
“Lord, look at him go.” “Eighty.” The barn had gone loud with the kind of laughter that has cruelty folded inside it. And the auctioneer was grinning openly now, looking back and forth between the towering white man and the lean black boy, as though refereeing something. Arthur's heart was going hard against his ribs. “Ninety,” Arthur said.
It was the number that emptied his pockets. It was the whole of two years of his life set out loud in front of a barn full of people who thought his life was a joke. The word came out of him steady, and it landed in the room. And for a moment there was nothing on the other side of it, but Dale Coburn's grin.
Coburn let the silence stretch until he had every eye, and then he spread his hands wide and laughed. You know what? Keep it. Keep your boat anchor, son.
He turned back to his neighbors, shaking his head, washing his hands of the whole foolish business with a showman's flourish. I'm not going to stand here and rob a child of his life savings over a hunk of burned iron. Let him have his treasure. The laughter swelled.
It was worse than the bidding had been because now the joke was complete, and Arthur was standing alone inside the punchline. “Going once,” the auctioneer managed, wiping his eyes. “Going twice. Sold to the young man for $90.” Arthur walked to the front and laid down his money. $90 counted out bill by bill onto the clerk's table, and when it was done, there was nothing rolled in the sock anymore, and nothing under the loose board at home.
He counted it without a word, and he did not let his hand shake while he did it. And when it was done, he turned and looked at the safe instead of the crowd. "Son," the auctioneer said not unkindly, lowering his voice so it was almost private, "you understand we don't deliver. That thing's yours where it sits.
Must go 400 poundss. " "I know," Arthur said. It was the first thing he had said above a whisper since he walked in. What happened next, the town would talk about for a while, though not in the way Coburn had intended. The boy went out to where he had left a flatbed handcart, the kind a man uses to move feed sacks, and he wheeled it in through the big doors.