Chapter 21
I headed to Abner's homestead just as the sun was rising.
I was still tired from yesterday's events and the long drive back from Seattle.
It felt good to be home, walking through the woods behind my cabin.
The dense trees had once intimidated me, but now they felt like a comfort after the concrete and steel of Seattle.
I went through the woods on the path I could barely make out. I'd gone north with Scout to see her secret place, but I'd never crossed to the northeast path to Abner's place. This was the first time I'd been past that boundary.
The slope leveled out and the forest thinned and then opened, and Abner's homestead showed itself from the woods.
There were three acres, maybe a little more, carved out of the hillside in an irregular clearing that followed the natural contour of the slope.
It wasn't flat the way my clearing was. The land tilted and rolled.
Abner had worked with the grade rather than against it, terracing in some places, letting the slope do what it wanted in others.
The result was a property that looked like it had grown out of the ground rather than been imposed on it.
The cabin sat at the high end of the clearing. It had started life as something close to mine. A hand-built single-room structure, probably the same era, the same plain construction.
Abner had expanded it over the years. An enclosed mudroom jutted from the front, a lean-to frame of standard two-by-fours bolted directly into the original exterior wall, plywood sheathing, a shed roof pitched to throw the rain away from the entry.
To the right, an addition extended the cabin's footprint by twenty feet.
Behind that, another room stepped back into the slope, its roofline lower than the original, following the grade.
The work was not pretty. It would never appear in a magazine, but it was sound. The joints were tight and the framing was plumb. The rooflines would shed water in the right direction.
Two decades of reading construction defect claims had taught me to see the difference between amateur work that hid its flaws and amateur work that had none to hide.
This was the second kind. Every addition had been thought through by a man who understood loads and wind and the wet coastal weather that settled in for eight months of the year.
Abner Flint built all of this himself. With a military retirement check and a young girl and an unwavering determination.
A ground-mounted solar array sat on the south-facing slope kitty-corner to the cabin. It was older than mine, the panels a previous generation's technology. Slightly smaller, weathered at the frames, but angled with the same precision Abner had brought to my installation.
An equipment shed stood beside the array, a smaller version of the one we'd erected together on my property. I could hear the faint hum of the inverter through the walls. A propane generator sat on a concrete pad beside it, dusty from disuse but well-maintained.
Below the cabin, the barn occupied the flattest ground on the property. Built from rough-sawn lumber that had silvered with age, it was weathered but stout, the doors still hanging true on their hinges.
A chicken coop leaned against the south wall, the wire mesh tight and clean. I could hear the birds inside, the low impatient muttering of hens who knew the sun was up and considered my arrival overdue.
An older Chevy pickup sat beside the barn. It was faded blue but rust-free and well taken care of.
The goat paddock spread across the slope between the barn and the treeline, the fencing was woven wire on wooden posts. Four goats stood at the fence watching me approach, ears forward, eyes flat with suspicion.
I recognized Cincinnatus immediately. He was the biggest, a rangy brown-and-white buck with a torn left ear. Behind the four, further up the slope, the meat goats grazed in a loose cluster, unnamed and incurious.
I stood at the edge of the clearing with Scout's list in my hand.
Seeing this homestead, I was starting to grasp the full shape of the life she and her father had built here.
Nothing was new, but nothing was neglected.
Everything had been built, repaired, and maintained by the same pairs of hands, and those hands had done good work.
There was no decoration or ornamentation, but there was order. And the order had a beauty of its own.
This is Scout's home. This is what made her.
I unfolded the list. Scout's careful, slightly old-fashioned handwriting, each item numbered, each instruction precise.
Number one. Goats.
The four at the fence watched me cross the paddock to the feed shed.
I found the pellets inside, stored in a galvanized can with a lid that sealed tight against rodents, a coffee can scoop resting on top.
Scout's instructions specified the ration, two scoops each for the named goats, distributed in the trough so no one could bully anyone else away from their share.
But Cincinnatus had other ideas. He planted himself between me and the trough and stared at me with his strange horizontal pupils, head slightly lowered.
"You remember me? Well I know who you are," I told him. "Scout warned me about you."
He didn't move. I'd been around enough job sites to know a foreman's posture when I saw it. This was his paddock and I was an unbadged visitor.
I poured the pellets into the trough anyway, working around him, and the other three crowded in. Cincinnatus held his position another moment, his eyes on me as he joined them.
Next came the water trough. It had a skin of pollen and a few drowned insects floating on the surface. I tipped it, scrubbed it with the brush hanging on the fence post, and refilled it from the spigot at the barn.
The well pump kicked on somewhere with a deep mechanical pulse, and I made a note to check the pressure tank when I returned that evening. Item six on the list, but Abner's systems were all connected, and I was starting to think the way he thought.
The chickens were furious by the time I reached the coop. I lifted the pop door and they came down the ramp in a feathered procession, a dozen hens fanning out across the yard with their heads down.
The feed was in a second sealed can beside the coop. I scattered scratch in a wide arc the way Scout's list described, Spread it thin, make them work, fat hens stop laying. I watched them go after it with a single-mindedness that seemed close to violence.
The egg basket hung on a nail beside the coop door. Wire, with a wooden handle worn smooth. I took it down and went into the coop, ducking under the low frame, into the warm dim interior that smelled of straw and dust and the smell of roosting birds.
The nesting boxes ran along the back wall, built into the structure, each one bedded with clean straw. Eleven eggs. Brown, a few pale green, one still warm enough that I held it in my palm a moment before setting it in the basket.
Eleven eggs and nobody home to eat them.
The thought arrived with more weight than it should have carried. I stood in the dim coop with the basket on my arm and let my mind wander. Four hours away, Abner was lying in a hospital bed with oxygen running into him, and Scout was probably asleep in a chair beside him.
Still, this homestead went on producing. The hens laying, the beans ripening, the batteries drinking in the morning sun. The systems Abner built didn't know he was gone, they just ran. That was the point of them. He had built a life that could hold itself together.
But it couldn't hold itself together forever. That was the other thing I understood, standing there. Systems needed hands. The man had built everything to outlast weather and scarcity and the county's hostility, but none of it would outlast neglect.
Somebody had to walk the fence line. Somebody had to mend the deer netting. Somebody had to read the charge levels and write them in the notebook. For now, that somebody was me.
I came out of the coop into the morning light. The hens ignored me. Cincinnatus, finished with his pellets, had returned to the fence to supervise.
I checked the list. The garden was next. Repair the deer fence, the hole Scout had flagged. I looked up the eastern slope to where the netting stood eight feet tall around the green rows.
I rolled my shoulders and went to find the wire in the shed. It was where I knew it would be, on a labeled shelf, exactly where a man would put it if he believed, the way Abner believed, that order was a form of love.
It took an hour to fix the deer netting and the sun had fully risen by the time I was done. I glanced into the shed and noted the electrical reading, then grabbed the egg basket and headed to the house.
The front door was unlocked, just as Scout said it would be. Remembering her directions, I removed my boots and left them in the mudroom, stepping into the house in my socks.
The interior of the cabin was exactly what I expected.
The main room was small and clean, organized with the same discipline that governed everything else on the property.
The kitchen occupied one corner. A propane stove, a deep enamel sink, open shelves holding plates and bowls in neat stacks, pots hanging from cast-iron hooks screwed into the ceiling beams. The pots were old, their bottoms darkened by decades of use, but every one of them had been scrubbed clean and hung in order of size.
On the counter was a wooden cutting board and a mason jar holding wooden spoons. I set the eggs down on the cutting board and covered them with some cheesecloth.
The rest of the furniture was plain. A small table with two chairs near the kitchen, the tabletop worn smooth in two places where elbows had rested through thousands of meals. No tablecloth, no centerpiece.
A small woodstove stood against the far wall on a hearth of flat stones, its black flue pipe running straight up through the roof.
On either side of it sat two old chairs.
They looked like they had been new in the 1990s, their reupholstered fabric worn shiny, their cushions compressed into the shapes of the two people who used them. A reading lamp stood beside each one.
But the thing that most impressed me was the bookshelf. One entire wall of the living room was lined with books.
The shelf ran floor to ceiling, built into the structure the way the nesting boxes were built into the coop. It held hundreds of volumes, their spines softened by handling.
I stepped closer and squinted at the titles. Robert Louis Stevenson. Shakespeare in a worn collected edition. Thoreau. Wendell Berry. Field guides to plants and birds and mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest. Electrical engineering references with cracked bindings.
On a wooden stand beside the shelf, positioned to catch the light from the window, sat a large Bible, King James Version.
The leather cover had gone soft and dark with handling, the gilt long worn off the page edges, a ribbon marker hanging from somewhere in the middle.
It was the most worn book in a room full of worn books.
Then I noticed another book resting beside the larger of the chairs by the woodstove. Steinbeck's East of Eden. Abner must have been rereading it after Scout watched the movie with me and Grace.
I stood there and an image assembled itself in my mind of a winter evening, wind driving rain against the windows, the way it did out here for months at a stretch.
The woodstove ticking with heat, the room cozy.
Abner in one chair with a book open in his lap.
Scout in the other, her legs folded under her, lost in Bradbury or Bront? or whatever world she'd borrowed from the Port Chasten library.
Neither of them speaking. The lamplight, the fire, the storm outside, and the two of them reading through the dark months together, year after year, a girl growing up inside this small warm room with her father.
No television. No internet. No phone. Just this.
The image moved through me with a force I hadn't expected and my throat tightened. The simplicity of it all, the sufficiency of it. I'd spent two decades in a house with every convenience and every TV channel and every device... and the rooms had been emptier than this one was with nobody in it.
Abner had built his daughter a childhood out of books and lamplight and the woods outside, and the woman that childhood produced was probably the most complete person I'd ever met.
You did good, Abner. I hope you know that.
The ledger sat on the bookshelf at eye level, exactly where Scout had said it would be.
A plain notebook with a pencil tucked into its spiral.
I opened it and flipped the pages. Fifteen years of battery readings in Abner's cramped, precise writing, columns ruled by hand, dates and charge levels marching down the pages in unbroken order. Not one missed day that I could find.
I wrote the date, the reading I'd taken from the shed, and my initials, keeping my numbers as neat as I could manage. My handwriting looked loose and careless beneath his. I closed the ledger and put it back in its place.
I glanced at the two doors that led off the main room, both closed. They led to the bedrooms, Abner's and Scout's. The additions he'd built with his own hands so his daughter could have a room of her own.
I was glad the doors were closed. I had no business behind them, and I didn't want my eyes wandering where they shouldn't. Even standing here in the main room felt like more intimacy than I'd been granted.
This was their home, the inside of their life together. Being alone in it, in my socks, with the morning light coming through windows Abner had framed himself, was almost too much to take in.
I took a last look at the room, at the pots in their order, the chairs in their stations by the cold stove, the wall of books waiting to be reread. Then I let myself out.
In the mudroom I pulled my boots back on and stepped into the full morning. The hens were spread across the yard, working the grass. The goats were chewing on foliage at the far edges. Cincinnatus stood at the paddock fence, watching me with the unblinking attention of middle management.
"I'll be back before dark," I told him. "Pop door closed, everybody put away. You have my word."
He chewed and said nothing, which I chose to take as acceptance.
I started back toward the treeline. At the edge of the clearing I stopped and looked back once. Then I walked into the trees and headed home.