Excerpt from In the Country of the Blind by Edward Hoagland, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Chapter 2

Dorothy and Karl took him to the evening auction sales. At 8 p.m., with no movie house in town, people congregated Tuesday on the short set of bleachers facing a wooden ring in which aging dairy cows were sold, mainly for hamburger, and vealer calves, also for slaughter, if not singled out by a farmer rebuilding his herd. Rival buyers from meat companies in Massachusetts bid against each other for the frightened cows, mooing instead of lowing—old matrons who might have been leading a barn full of milkers out to pasture every day and back but had outlived their peak productivity and now were being disposed of. Crammed into an unfamiliar pen with strangers of their ilk, dominant till this morning but milling, terrified, they were in pain as well from not having been milked.

Press couldn't see this, but heard all of it once Dorothy interpreted. The calves bleating, a few weeks old, and Rog, Rupert's son the auctioneer, peremptory as a sergeant keeping order. Both Swinnertons had an expert eye for what an individual cow would weigh and her age and condition, but also how the farm family sitting there near them might feel watching her go to be ground up to be served on a bun with fries if they'd owned her. "It's like taking your old car to the crusher," said Karl.

"Good blood sausage there," Rog barked harshly. "Don't throw out the innards." Rog was a better businessman than Rupert, Dorothy said, but people liked him less. Then, in fact, Rupert introduced himself to Press via a rough hand, at Melba's urging. When Press asked if she was with him, "No. Wanda," Rupert specified ironically.

A wheelbarrow was auctioned, a box of quacking ducks, some lawn furniture, and a bag of squawking chickens, in Dorothy's description. Kids clambered up and down the shaky bleacher boards, while the little crowd bantered with Rog's interpretation of his miscellany. A case of motor oil, truck tires, three Seiko watches ("Not hot, but warm"), and other stuff: to vary the procession of woeful, doleful, panicked cows being prodded offstage into livestock eighteen-wheelers for the trip to the slaughterhouse.

"Look at the boobs on that lady, though!" Rog might interrupt his conventional spiel when a particularly udderly cow bolted into the ring. "You don't want her throat cut yet, do you? Buy her for the farm. She'll keep the milk truck coming. She's got Holstein written all over her. The guy that owns her's going out of business and he needs the money for the poker game."

Like Rupert before him, Rog held a wee-hours game in his office after the show, at which sellers could lose what they'd earned earlier in the night. He was ruder, more grasping than Rupert, Karl said, but his patter was better and the bookkeepers were his mom, Wanda, and his Quebecois wife, Juliette, who was invaluable when dealing with French-language folk, who may have farmed here for forty years without learning English. And when you died, whether Yankee or French, Rog and his wife would show up to persuade your widow into selling cheap everything they could, in her grief and a necessity for cash, before the children arrived from California, or wherever they'd moved, to lend her some guidance. Land, house, and cattle.

"He's a vulture," Karl said. "But also a good fireman. Maybe he thinks there'll be jewels in the ashes." But he added, "No, he's okay, a pretty good man. He's backed me up." Meaning in the famous steeple fire Karl and his cohorts were known for, when they saved the church, people in the village said.

Rog sold a bull; then a pony. When Rupert's voice interrupted, kibitzing occasionally, Rog shook him off. "Look at that little brown Jersey. Wouldn't she fit in your boudoir nicely?" Rupert couldn't top lines like that. They were both ladies' men, roaming the roads to pick out bargains, but that French wife kept a tighter rein on Rog.

Excerpted from In the Country of the Blind by Edward Hoagland. Copyright © 2016 by Edward Hoagland. Excerpted by permission of Arcade Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.