the absent with mean innuendo. Often his razor tongue stropped itself on the faults and flaws of his dead parents as though he had come fresh from a rancorous argument with them, and at other times he called them saints in a tearful voice.
Stong caught Hawkheel with petty tricks again and again. After Hawkheel started farming, once or twice a year he found mailbox the knocked over, water in the tractor’s gas tank or the gate opened so the cows got onto the highway. He knew who’d done it.
Still, he kept on buying grain at the feed store until Stong told him about Josepha. Stong’s eyes shone like those of a greedy barn cat who has learned to fry mice in butter.
“Hell, everybody in town knows she’s doin’ it but you,” he whispered. He ate Hawkheel up with his eyes, sucked all the juice out of his sad condition.
It was cold in the store and the windows were coated with grain dust. Hawkheel felt the fine powder between his fingers and in his dry mouth. They stared at each other, then Stong scurried out through the chilly passageway that led to the house.
“He’s got something coming now,” said Hawkheel to Urna. “I could wire him up out in the woods and leave him for the dogs. I could do something real bad to him any time, but I want to see how far he goes.”
Stong had sour tricks for everybody. Trade dropped away at the feed store, and there were some, like Hawkheel, who spat when they saw the black pickup heading out of town, Stong’s big head turning from side to side to get his fill of the sights before the woods closed in.
For a long time Urna made excuses for Stong, saying that his parents’ death had “turned” him, as though he were a bowl of milk gone sour in thundery weather. But when Stong told the game warden there was a summer doe in her cellar she got on the phone and burned Hawkheel’s ear.
“Leverd, what kind of a man turns in his neighbor over some deer meat he likes to eat just as good as anybody?”
Hawkheel had an answer, but he didn’t give it.
A few years after Josepha left, Hawkheel began to slide deep into the books. He was at Mosely’s auction hoping the shotguns would come up early so he could get out of the crowd and take off. But it dragged on, hundreds of the old lady’s doilies and quilts going one by one to the summer people. Hawkheel poked through the boxes on the back porch, away from the noise. A book called Further Adventures of the One-Eyed Poacher sounded good and he dipped into it like a swallow picking mosquitoes off the water, keeping one ear on the auctioneer’s patter. He sat on the broken porch glider and read until the auctioneer, pulling the crowd behind him like a train, came around to the back and shouted “Who’ll give me five dollars for them boxes a books!”
Surrounded in his trailer by those books and the hundreds he’d added to them over the decades, Hawkheel enjoyed his solitude.
Stong, too, was more and more alone up at the store as he got older, his trade dwindled to a few hard-pressed farmers who still bought feed from him because they always had and because Stong carried them until their milk checks came in. Listening in on the phone wasn’t enough now; he interrupted conversations, shouting “Get off the line! I got a emergency.”
“You ask me,” said Urna to Hawkheel, “he’s funny in the head. The only emergency he’s got is himself. You watch, they’ll find him laying on the kitchen floor some day as stiff as a January barn nail.”
“When I get through with him,” said Hawkheel, “he’ll be stiff, all right.”
Stong might have fallen to the cold kitchen linoleum with an iron ringing sound, but in his sixties his hair turned a fine platinum white and his face thinned to show good bones. It was a time when people were coming into the country, buying up the old farmhouses and fields and making the sugarhouses into guest cottages.
“Bill, you look like a character out of a Rupert Frost poem,” said the woman who’d bought Potter’s farm and planted a thousand weedy birches on prime pasture. The new people said Stong was a character. They liked his stories, they read morals into his rambling lies and encouraged him by standing around the feed store playing farmer—buying salt blocks for the deer, sunflower seeds for the bluejays and laying mash for the pet chickens they had to give away each fall.
Stong set his tattered sails to catch this changing wind. In late life he found himself admired and popular for the first time, and he was grateful. He saw what the summer people liked, and to please them he carried armloads of canning jars, books, tools and other family goods down from the house to the store. He arranged generations of his family’s possessions on the shelves beside the work gloves and udder balm. He filled the dusty window with pieces of old harness, wooden canes and chipped china.
In autumn he laid in ammunition for the summer men who came back for their week of deer hunting. The sign in his window read GUNS BLUE SEAL FEED WINE ANTIQUES, a small part of what he offered, for all his family’s interests and enterprises were tangled together on the shelves as if he had drawn a rake through their lives and piled the debris in the store.
“They say,” said Urna, “that he’s cleaned out everything from kettles to cobwebs and put a price tag on it. You know, don’t you, that he’s selling all them old books his grandfather used to have. He’s got them out there in the barn, higgledy-piggledy where the mice can gnaw on them.”
“Has he,” said Hawkheel.
“I suppose you’re going up there to look at them.”
“Well,” said Hawkheel, “I might.”
The Stong place was high on a bluff, a mile upstream from Hawkheel’s trailer as the crow flew. To Hawkheel, every turn of the road was like the bite of an auger into the past. He did not remember his adult journeys up Stong’s driveway, but recalled with vivid clarity sitting in the dust-colored passenger seat of their old Ford while his father drove over a sodden mat of leaves. The car window had been cranked down, and far below, the hissing river, heavy with rain, cracked boulders along its bottom. His father drove jerkily, lips moving in whispered conversation with invisible imps. Hawkheel had kept his hand on the door handle in case the old man steered for the edge and he had to jump. It was one of the last memories he had of his father.
The Stong place, he saw now, had run down. The real-estate agents would get it pretty soon. The sagging clapboard house tapered away into a long ell and the barn. The store was still in the ell, but Hawkheel took the old shortcut around back, driving through the stinging nettles and just catching a glimpse through the store window of Stong’s white head bobbing over a handful of papers.
The barn was filled with dim, brown light shot through like Indian silk with brilliant threads of sunlight. There was a faint smell of apples. On the other side of the wall a rooster beat his wings. Hawkheel looked around and saw, behind the grain sacks, hundreds of books, some in boxes, some stacked on shelves and windowsills. The first one he took up was a perfect copy of Thad Norris’s 1865 The American Angler’s Book. He’d seen it listed in his catalogue at home at $85. Stong wanted one dollar.
Hawkheel went at the boxes. He turned out Judge Nutting’s nice little book on grouse, The History of One Day Out of Seventeen Thousand. A box of stained magazines was hiding a rare 1886 copy of Halford’s Floating Flies, the slipcase deeply marked with Stong’s penciled price of $1.50.
“Oh God,” said Hawkheel, “I got him now.”
He disguised the valuable books by mixing them with dull-jacketed works on potatos and surveying, and carried the stack into the feed store. Stong sat at the counter, working his
