In the darkness, I felt their weight pressing me against the buggy. Large calloused hands held me from all different places. Some cupped my breasts while others lifted me from my middle, poking their fingers through pant cloth, continuing their search for the heat. I knew some of them were angry, and I looked back into the darkness for Aaron.
I am a stranger, an Englisher for them, but the Mennonite marketers grew used to my presence. I was the girl with the hidden camera. I was tolerated because they didn’t see me use it. I spent money willingly; I smiled, and as an Englisher revealing more skin and curves then my Mennonite lady counterparts in the August heat, I was very nice to look at.
I attended only two farm produce auctions prior to the consigned municipal sale. Both auctions were opportunities for me to secretly press the camera shutter. The photos taken with the digital pen were good. The men and boys -some barefoot, but all wearing smart short rimmed, black straw hats, suspenders, work shirts and tailored jeans- were my main subjects, for I was able to stand with them while the bidding took place.
The Mennonite women, dressed in their modest, flower print homespun dresses, lace bonnets and black sneakers, did not bid. They either ran the office, or hung back behind us, as if they held a station above or beneath their men. The children, mostly grimy faced and wide-eyed dressed in miniature mocks of their parents, mixed freely with both groups and stared at me, the Englisher.
The night of the municipal auction was really no different then the daytime produce sales. Most attendees were Mennonites and few were English, either local time-passers or dealers. I did not plan bidding, but drawn to the event for my art’s sake, I arrived maybe fifteen minutes before the auctioneer started his song.
I joined the circle of hatted men under the covered cement pavilion and they, conceding, allowed me to stand close. Aaron, the thirty-something shiny faced auctioneer seemed to grin, just slightly, when I emerged in the front row before him. Aaron's auction partner, the old man with the hook for a hand, sang “humana hum a na” the auctioneer song, into the sound system . The auction's box lots, full of automotive manuals from a vocational school, were not bringing a bid. The Mennonite men around me exclaimed in their tones of thick German accents, “Ya, just a dollar”. It seemed incredible to them these things were not bringing a bid.
The night seemed to follow a similar route of low or non bids. Items went for low prices because they were not useful to these Mennonite men. The horse and bicycle served their transportation, and many men, using rubber-less metal wheeled tractors, and not agreeing with combustion engines, electronics, nor appliances, could only sadly watch the non-sale of things they would like to have.
All the while, the men traded opinions, and I weaved in and out of their circle, pressing the top of my camera pen at waist level, catching their expressions, their postures and dress. Some men were dark and filthy, their clothes and faces stained as black as the bottoms of their bare, calloused feet. Others, like the auctioneer Aaron, were shiny pink and clean. The group Aaron stood with were the owners of the auction service. Prosperous yet compliant with their ways of Mennonite life, these sharp men, stood clean with even sharper creases in their blue pants and hats. Theses men were the Old Order of Mennonites; their bearded and mustache-less faces, separated them from Englishers who made war with long mustaches and glory in God's name..
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