In memory of my dad, David
SEPTEMBER 1972
Thirty-five years ago, Havens would have opened his eyes and thought of the day ahead as lacking. The surprise of old age is how comfortable a person can be with an empty day, how companionable it can be. If anything, Havens wants the day to empty itself even more, allow for memories to pay a visit, and should he decide to spend his time doing nothing more than sitting in his recliner and missing her, what’s to stop him?
Havens is neither by nature nor by habit an early riser, and it is only out of a sense of duty to an imperious old pigeon that he gets up rather than turn over and doze a little longer. When he stretches his arms overhead and arches his back, his joints creek in protest. He looks in the mirror at a face that seems both familiar and startlingly foreign. Old age is a menace; there is no abating it. Every day it claims more territory. Forgoing shaving, he splashes water on his face and puts on exactly what he wore yesterday—a pair of saggy jeans, his red flannel shirt, a coffee-stained gray pullover, and sneakers mended at the toe with packaging tape—and humming tunelessly, wanders through the quiet house. He glances out the living room window at the pasture, pillowy with fog. The day, too, seems to be getting a late start. Havens would prefer to drink a cup of coffee before facing the pigeon, but the chirps coming from the enclosed back porch are insistent, so he leaves the coffee to boil on the stove and goes out to take his instruction.
“What are you in such a flap about?” He notices the bird has worked loose the bandaging on his wing and the joint is exposed again at the break. “You’ve picked yourself raw, silly.” He removes the top of Lord Byron’s cage and slides the window open so the pigeon can enjoy the brisk air. Fluffed up, the bird hops onto the window sill, gives in to instinct, and plummets. Eight months convalescing, and still the bird refuses to accept his decrepitude. Havens respects this in any being, feathered or otherwise. He rushes outside to retrieve the bird, before applying ointment, bandaging the wound, and getting his hands pecked at in return.
“Quit it, would you. Violence is never the answer.”
The bird knows Havens is a pushover. He tips over the seed tray as if to say, Slop.
Havens checks on the other patients, a noisy mockingbird almost feathered enough to fly and a rambunctious blue jay that cuckooed itself by flying into the kitchen window yesterday. Before heading to the barn, he puts down a dish of food for the black cat he has refused to name lest it get any ideas, and out of spite, the cat refuses to find himself more suitable accommodations and continues to deposit lizard parts on the back step.
The mule, Molly, is indifferent to him, interested only in the fresh hay he puts out for her. She eats enough for a herd. “You’ve let yourself go, you know,” he says.
Of all the animals in his care, Gimp is the only one ever pleased to see him, and the three-legged goat is as agreeable a creature as ever there was. Havens pets him and opens the stall door so he can burn off his energy in the turnout and watches as the billy takes a stab at bucking and topples over instead.
It’s while Havens is filling the water bucket that he hears the rumble of a car coming down his driveway. He’s not expecting anyone, and those who know him know better than to show up unannounced. Unless something is wrong. You’d think the mechanism to stand guard would have become a little rusty over time, but no, he’s braced.
He steps out of the barn and squints down the dirt driveway. Is it a rental? Nobody from these parts has a clean, new car, certainly no Ford Fairlane. Tourist, maybe.
Before the vehicle comes to a stop, Havens stands in such a way as to make his position clear, and still, a lanky man in his late twenties, maybe thirty, unfolds himself from the driver’s seat.
“The craft center is another four miles down the road. There’ll be a sign on the right.” Havens flaps his hand to shoo him off in case he gets the idea that a reply is in order. Scrawny fella. Perhaps one of those religious types. Maybe he’s deaf, Havens worries, because the guy continues to approach him.
“Good morning, sir. Is this Plot 45? There wasn’t a sign.” He has a soft way of speaking that Havens instantly decides is the result of over-mothering. Even though his hair is too long, his shirt is tucked in, and he’s wearing proper shoes, not those leather sandals everyone traipses around in these days. He’s not entirely objectionable-looking, but still, he has made Havens unsure of himself. To cover this, Havens raises his voice.
“Best be on your way now.”
The interloper has more pluck than his appearance lets on. He takes another step forward, and says, “Are you Mr. Clayton Havens?”
Either the guy is peddling something, or he’s one of those pencilnecks from the Clearcreek Mining Company with another pathetic offer to buy his land. “Whatever you are selling, I don’t want it, so you hustle your hindquarters back down my driveway and find someone else to pester.”
There is no change in the stranger’s demeanor. If anything, he appears pleased with himself. Damned if he doesn’t stand his ground and open his rattrap again. “I’m not selling anything, Mr. Havens. I’m here to ask you a few questions about some people you may have known a long time ago, a family by the name of Buford, I believe?”
There is only one life-form lower than a prospector, and that’s a reporter. Havens has lost his knack. “Don’t you Mr. Havens me. Now, I told you once already to leave.”
“I was hoping you would be able to tell me where I could reach them. I was told you—”
Without waiting for him to finish, Havens spins around and treks to the barn. It’s been ages since some outfit up north has sent a hack out here trying to sniff out a story on her. Always they speak like this, persistent-like, “when” instead of “if,” acting like they’re here to do you some big favor. Years ago, one of them pretended to want to know about Havens’s work as a documentarian for the FSA and his later shift in focus to nature photography, appealing to his ego—“A blunt style uncommon for that period,” he’d said of Havens’s photographic style, as if Havens had invented it—but whatever angle they pitch him, they all want to get at her.
“Is there someone else I might talk to?” the kid yells. “I could come back later if this isn’t a convenient time…”
Havens goes into the tack room and snatches the Winchester from the gun rack, then marches out of the barn toward the intruder. “I have nothing to say to you, not now, not later, not ever.” He pets the muzzle.
Now the kid gets the idea. He backs up all the way to his vehicle, bleating about having been given the wrong information. “I’m very sorry for troubling you.”
Havens keeps the rifle aimed at the rear window of the rental until it has made its way down the driveway and back to the street. Take a left, he wills. Don’t you go driving into Chance.
Only a city boy would put on his blinker and look both ways on a road that never sees traffic. “Goddammit.” The stranger hangs a right.
Havens hurries to his pickup and cusses when he sees the keys aren’t in the ignition. It takes him a good fifteen minutes rummaging around in the house before he tracks them down and gets back to the old clunker, which sputters and objects to his impatience by backfiring. So much for flooring it into town.