• Chapter 19 •

Just as the collapse of an elevator could be said to symbolize the end of an era, so could an auction sale, especially the one Mac and his friends attend the day after the demolition. Mac is a history buff, but his main reason not to miss this sale is his hope to buy a relic that might get Roseanna Wilkie off his back. With all her harping about the stone duck, he’s got to do something. He wants to quit being bothered with thinking about having to part with a treasure he’s found on his own land. The sale booklet lists arrowheads, but Mac has heard that it might be illegal to sell them. Best of all would be a peace pipe, but he’s never heard of anybody having ever come across one of those.

Mac has attended his share of auction sales, but nothing even close to the scale of this one. There are buyers from as far away as New York. The sale booklet is one thing, but seeing the stuff is another thing altogether. Five steel Quonsets are jammed full of stuff, as well as sixteen wooden granaries and a barn. Its huge loft has two floors, with barely room to walk between the display cases. Bud Harrison had hauled into his yard an old general store he got from the hamlet of Ardath, a BA bulk oil shed from some other ghost town, a schoolhouse, fire hall, two threshing gang cookshacks on wheels and a railway station. He even laid down track for a caboose. All that’s missing is a church.

His nephew is selling it all. Rows and rows of tractors – John Deere, Oliver, Massey, Minneapolis Moline…and tractors Mac has never heard of…a Gibson. Stationary engines are stacked in a pile as high as a house.

“Buy one! Take them all!” The auctioneer holds up a motor-oil bottle with a screw-on spout. “What am I bid? What am I bid? Seventy-five dollars! Do I hear a hundred, hundred, hundred…?”

Sid climbs up on a Case steam engine, and Jeepers takes his picture.

“It’s all here,” Abner says. “Saskatchewan’s history. From this big steamer down to one-furrow sulky plows.”

“An engine like this pulled a twenty-furrow gang plow,” Sid says. “Cut through the prairie like a hot knife through butter.”

“My grandfather walked behind a one-furrow plow,” Jeepers says. “He had it hitched to three horses.”

“Didn’t those Ukrainians hitch their wives to the plow?” Pete says.

“Maybe Doukhobors,” Jeepers says, “I don’t know.”

Mac examines stacks and stacks of scrap iron: blacksmith forges, trip-hammers, seed cleaners…every kind of seeding, plowing, fixing and harvesting device imaginable. Mounds of rusted iron. He sees a pile of lightning rods and weather vanes like the ones on Lee’s barn.

Oak-framed glass display cases stand in rows on each side of the second-tier walkway in the loft of Harrison’s barn. Three cases are full of brass harness bells. Seven other cases are filled with brass oilers that look like a Russian tsarina’s collection of gold-encased Easter eggs. The brass-encased cylinders are glass, so an operator could gauge the level of the oil as it dripped into an engine.

The coffee-rowers sit with the crowd on the bleachers. A BobCat lifts a brass bell. One side of it is embossed with the manufacturer’s name in German print, and on the other side it reads, “Potter’s Church Supplies, Winnipeg”. The bell sells for $3,700 to an old couple sitting beside Nick.

“Where you from?” Nick asks.

“Lethbridge,” the man says.

“You a dealer? Collector?”

“We thought it would look nice in our front yard,” the woman says.

A spotter holds up a life-sized tin sign of a policeman in blue, with the words Coca-Cola, and a brown Coke bottle on it.

“Sold one of these last month in Atlanta, Georgia,” the auctioneer says. “$3,500.”

This one sells for $2,700, and it goes to Atlanta, Georgia.

Mac is waiting for the arrowheads. They’re listed in the booklet, but he hasn’t seen them anywhere. But with the prices this stuff is fetching, maybe it’s a good thing the arrowheads don’t show up. A cast-iron Police Order sign with two pie-plate circles stacked one over the other reads “Keep Right”. It sells for $2,400. A gas pump with twin BA globes sells for $10,000. A Model T Ford sells for $23,000. The buyer tells the auctioneer that he’s bidding for his son who’s an oil broker in Calgary. Shell Oil quart bottles with screw-on spouts sell for $300 each.

“When do they sell the steam engine?” Abner asks.

“Tomorrow, it says in the book.” Mac leafs through the pages. “But the arrowheads are listed to sell today.”

“Steamer will likely go high,” Jeepers says.

“Hundred thousand,” Nick says. “The way things are selling.”

“Hell no,” Sid says. “Not if it goes to New York. Why, it would cost a fortune just to get it there.”

A cast-iron Case eagle mounted on the globe of the world sells for $13,000, and then Mac notices the next item.

“There you go, Mac,” Nick says. “Something Indian!”

“Not really what I’m after.”

“The arrowheads have been pulled from the sale,” the auctioneer says, but he doesn’t say why. “But we’re selling the buffalo skull. Twenty, do I hear twenty?” Several times he repeats, “Twenty, do I hear twenty? Fifteen then, do I hear fifteen? Ten? Seven-fifty?”

Mac puts his hand to his brow and raises his index finger.

“I got seven-fifty!” the auctioneer says. “Do I hear ten? Ten? Ten…? Sold then, for seven-fifty!”

“It’s all yours,” Sid says.

So he has bought a buffalo skull. His grandfather likely sold buffalo skulls just like this one. But not for seven-fifty. Maybe if he factored up the inflation….

Later that night, Mac takes the skull from his truck box and carries it down the alley to the Wilkie backyard. He knocks on their door. No one answers so he sets the skull down on the step. Angela and her mother will know who it is from. It’s not a peace pipe, not arrowheads, not a stone hammer; but a buffalo skull is a part of their heritage. He hopes they will appreciate it.