Chapter 7
The morning had started out easy, and I was thankful for that. I sat in my camping chair on the porch with my second cup of coffee steaming next to me. My laptop sat on the railing where I could see it without bending over.
The screen showed a guy in Arizona standing on a roof that looked like it had never seen bad weather.
He pointed at shingles and talked about lifted pieces and broken wood underneath with the confidence of someone who had probably never dealt with moss or standing water or rain that comes sideways for three days in a row.
I was trying to figure out how to use what he was saying. Claire had told me about the roof damage when she showed me the cabin. Storm damage, she had called it. Lifted pieces on the south side.
I had climbed up there once already, just to look, and what I saw made me worried. Not terrible, but worried enough to watch videos by guys in Arizona who had never seen eighty inches of rain in a year.
I stopped the video when I saw movement at the edge of the woods.
The man who came out of the treeline was maybe late fifties, maybe sixty. Built like someone who had been doing hard work for many years. Not big but solid in a way that showed the strength went all the way through, like a fence post or an old tree stump.
Long blonde hair with gray streaks, tied back with what looked like twine.
A full gray beard that went past his collarbone and moved a little in the wind.
He wore canvas work pants and a wool shirt and lace-up boots that had clearly been repaired at least twice.
The leather was scratched and faded, but the stitching was tight.
He carried a rough cloth bag in his left hand and a shotgun hanging on his right shoulder. A flapped leather holster rode his hip, a shoulder strap carrying its weight.
He walked from the edge of the woods to my porch without rushing and without saying hello. No wave. No greeting. Just the steady walk of a man who was either completely comfortable on this land or didn't care about normal manners.
I watched him come and decided it was probably both.
"Morning," I said when he got to the porch.
"Morning. I'm Abner Flint."
"Thomas Harmon."
"Greetings, and nice to meet you."
His voice was flat and slow, with a breathless quality that made me wonder if Abner was a heavy smoker.
Blue eyes peered out from under heavy eyebrows.
He looked me over, then he looked at the laptop on the railing, at the stopped image of the Arizona guy and his dry roof. Then he looked back at me.
He put the cloth bag on the porch. I looked at the bag. There were dark splotches on it that looked like blood.
"Shot two raccoons this morning before I realized I'd crossed the property line." He said this without seeming embarrassed, like it was just a fact that needed to be dealt with. "By right, they belong to you."
I looked at the bag again. It moved again, like weight settling rather than anything alive. At least I hoped that was what it was.
"Uh, I appreciate the thought," I said. "Your care about property lines is impressive. Thanks."
I looked at the bag and felt myself running out of words. I had no idea what else to say. I had been ready for many new things in my new life on the peninsula, but a stranger coming from the woods to bring me dead raccoons in a cloth bag was not one of them.
He seemed to sense that I wasn't sure what to do. He bent down and opened the bag and looked inside without emotion. Two gray shapes lay still in the rough cloth, fur messy, bodies limp.
"Raccoon is better than people think," he said. "Most people have never eaten it cooked the right way. They've formed opinions based on either not knowing or the cooked-wrong version, which is definitely not good."
Abner suddenly broke into a wheezing cough. It took him a moment to catch his breath. He looked up at me.
"You skin it and clean them," he continued, picking up where he left off. "Soak overnight in salted water. Cook it slow and long with root vegetables. Carrots, parsnips, turnips if you have them. The salt soak pulls out the wild taste. The slow cooking breaks down the tough parts."
He closed the bag and straightened, catching his breath.
"The meat is dark and rich. Better than pork in my opinion."
"That sounds better than I expected," I admitted.
"Raccoons are a problem animal in Washington State. People find them cute, but they can be very destructive. Their numbers are out of control because of a lack of predators. The natural order is unbalanced. They are an unintended consequence of human encroachment."
He said this the same flat way, but there was something underneath it now. The certainty of someone who had believed this for a long time.
"Raccoons can be hunted all year with a small game license, like coyotes. There are more of them on the peninsula than there should be." He looked toward the woods he had come from. "My position on this is well-known and not changing. Raccoons and coyotes don't respect boundaries like people do."
I made a decision. It wasn't a hard decision. I had no plan to hunt raccoons myself, and the man standing on my porch clearly did. The only question was whether I would make a problem out of something that wasn't worth making a problem of.
"Don't worry about the property line," I said. "You're welcome to hunt raccoons on my land any time you want. No need to ask. No need to knock."
Abner went still.
It was a quick stillness. Half a second, maybe. But I caught it. Something had been offered that he didn't expect. I watched him process it without showing it, the way a man does when he has learned to keep his reactions inside.
When he spoke again, his tone had grown a little warmer.
"I will not encroach deliberately, but I will take your permission. I thank you."
"Yeah. Sure thing."
"What are you watching?" He nodded toward the laptop.
I turned it so that he could see the stopped frame. The Arizona guy was frozen mid-gesture, his hand pointing at a shingle piece that had lifted maybe a quarter inch from the one beneath it.
"The roof. Storm damage. The person who sold me the place mentioned it.
Lifted pieces on the south side. I need to check the wood underneath before the next big rain.
" I looked at the screen. "I've done basic roofing work, but not on this type of shingle.
Trying to understand what I'm looking at before I climb back up there. "
He looked at the laptop screen for a moment. His blue eyes moved across the image with the attention of someone reading rather than just looking.
"This man is in the wrong weather for what you need," he said. "Lifted pieces in a high-rain place are not the same problem as lifted pieces in a desert. The repair steps are somewhat different."
"How so?"
"Desert, the primary concern is wind lifting them and sun damage.
The sun bakes the shingles brittle and the wind catches the edges.
You can often reseal a lifted piece with roofing cement and a few nails and call it done.
" He looked at the cabin roof behind me.
"Here, the main worry is water getting underneath.
A lifted piece that has been lifted for any length of time has let water in.
The question is not whether you can reseal the piece but whether the layers and wood beneath it have already started to rot.
You need to lift the piece completely, check what is underneath, and make your decision based on what you find rather than what you guess. "
I listened. This obviously wasn't the advice of some guy who had watched a few videos. This was the advice of a man who had made these repairs himself more than once. Probably on his own roof. Probably many times.
"I appreciate that," I said. "Saves me from learning it wrong before I learn it right."
He nodded. His eyes moved toward the pond, following something I hadn't noticed. I followed his look and saw it. A rabbit at the far edge of the clearing, brown against the grass, barely visible.
"I have traps out on my property," Abner said. "None on your land."
"Don't worry about property lines for rabbits either," I said. "Or raccoons. I won't be hunting them. I'd appreciate you keeping the local numbers down."
He looked at me. The judging look was back in his eyes, but it was a different judging now. He was changing something, updating his mental file on me.
"Rabbit season ends on the fifteenth of March. Three days from now." He paused. "Beware the Ides of March."
He said it in the flat way he said everything, as if it was just a useful piece of scheduling information. A date on a calendar, nothing more.
But I knew it was more. I had heard the phrase, I knew it was from Shakespeare.
I couldn't, if asked, have given the context with any confidence beyond Julius Caesar and something bad happening.
Someone getting stabbed, I think. Just general cultural knowledge that floats around without ever being pinned down.
"I've heard it," I said.
Abner looked at me with an expression that wasn't quite surprise and wasn't quite judging, but had parts of both. Something in what I had said, or how I had said it, had registered with him.
"The Ides of March is the fifteenth, in the old Roman calendar," he said.
"On the fifteenth of March in 44 BC, Gaius Julius Caesar was killed in the Theatre of Pompey by a group of senators calling themselves the Liberators.
Sixty men with daggers, though most historians agree that only twenty-three wounds were made and that most of the sixty either lost their nerve or were too crowded to reach him. "
I stared at Abner, trying to take in what he was telling me.
"The phrase comes from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Act One, Scene Two, in which a fortune-teller warns Caesar to beware the Ides of March and Caesar dismisses him as a dreamer.
" He adjusted the strap of the shotgun on his shoulder.
"Caesar's dismissal of the warning is often pointed to as the play's first example of the main character's fatal overconfidence. "
He said all of this in the same informational tone he had used to describe raccoon cooking and the difference between desert and high-rain roof repair. No performance, no showing off, just passing along useful information from someone who knew it to someone who didn't.
I looked at him closely, at the canvas work pants and the old shotgun and the cloth bag of raccoons and the gray beard that went past his collarbone.
I had made an assumption. A label. Backwoods hunter.
Self-sufficient loner with practical knowledge and limited education and probably some nutty ideas.
The assumption hadn't been demeaning, it had simply been wrong. Or at least significantly incomplete. I was honest enough with myself to realize this immediately.
"I didn't realize Caesar's murder was that specifically written down," I said. "In terms of how many people and wound count."
"Most people don't. Most people's knowledge of Caesar comes from the Shakespeare play rather than from Suetonius or Plutarch. Who were much more specific about the details."
"I haven't read Suetonius or Plutarch," I admitted.
"Most people haven't."
Abner coughed again, his eyes watering. When he was done, he slung the sack over his shoulder.
"If you change your mind about the raccoons, let me know before the stiffness sets in. After that point they are much less useful." He paused. "This is true of most things."
He held out his hand. I took it. The handshake was brief and firm and dry. His palm was rough in the way of a guy who uses tools every day.
There was something in the handshake that I understood to be important. A formal beginning of something that was not yet friendship, but was the first step towards it. The recognition that two men had spoken and found each other acceptable and would probably speak again.
"Welcome to the peninsula, neighbor."
"Thank you, Abner. Good to meet you."
"Likewise."
Then he walked back across the clearing and into the woods and was gone between the trees with the ease of a guy for whom disappearing into a forest was simply the way you went home.
One moment he was there and the next moment the woods had swallowed him and I was standing alone on the porch with my coffee and my laptop and the lingering sense that I had just been taught about more than Roman history.
I ran a hand through my hair and shook my head, then I picked up the laptop and looked at the stopped video. The Arizona guy and his dry, simple, easy roof. His two inches of rain per year and his confident assumptions about how roofing worked everywhere.
I closed the webpage.
I opened a new tab and typed "Suetonius" into Google. The results came up immediately. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus. Roman historian. Born around 69 AD. Best known for "The Twelve Caesars," a collection of life stories of the first twelve Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Domitian.
I clicked on the Wikipedia article and started reading.
I learned Suetonius had access to imperial records during his time as secretary to Emperor Hadrian.
That his life stories were notable for their inclusion of personal details and scandalous stories that more serious historians had left out.
That the section on Julius Caesar included specific details about the murder, including the number of wounds and the names of some of the conspirators.
I read for twenty minutes. Then I closed the laptop and looked at the edge of the woods where Abner Flint had disappeared.
I had been on the peninsula for less than two weeks.
I had met a woman who sold me property and seemed to carry burdens she hadn't explained.
I had met another woman who wanted simple pleasures and offered them without conditions.
And now I had met a man who lived in the backwoods and hunted raccoons and could quote Shakespeare and discuss Roman historians with the casual authority of someone who had spent a lot of time with both.
The peninsula was not what I had expected. None of it was what I had expected. And I was beginning to understand that my expectations had been formed by a life that had not prepared me for much of anything except the path I had been traveling for twenty-two years.
I picked up my coffee. It was cold. I tossed it into the grass and went inside to make a fresh pot.