Enon by Paul Harding Read Free Book Online

broken hand hurt dangling at my side, so I held it up near my cheek. Out of habit I looked for birds in the backyard. We’d bought a couple of feeders and Kate kept them filled. She tried to get the chickadees to eat from her hand, but they never would. The feeders were empty by the time Kate was buried. I couldn’t bring myself to refill them, so I fetched the bag of seeds we kept inthe bottom drawer of an old bureau in the garage. After cranking open one of the windows in the nook, I removed the screen and scooped up a bunch of seeds in an old plastic juice pitcher that had faint traces of a family of cartoon bears painted on it, and tossed them out into the yard.
    The empty house held its silence like a solid volume. There was weight to it. The hosts on talk radio sounded brash and insipid and oblivious. The music on the classical station sounded like music for a dentist’s office. Rock music sounded lurid and insincere. I tried to read a newspaper but the bad news made me feel more hopeless and the good news seemed invented. I wanted to call Sue’s parents’ house and ask if she’d arrived okay and ask if it felt better to be there, but I knew that that would be the wrong thing to do. Sue had called at some point the night before. I remembered hearing the message on the answering machine, and from the tone of her voice that she’d arrived without any problems. I already felt bad, not having answered her call, not having already called back, as if I’d missed my one slim chance. I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the message and I unplugged the phone. I checked my cell phone and saw that she’d left a message on it as well. I slid the backing off the phone and removed the memory card.
    By three o’clock, it was unbearable to be in the house anymore, so I went outside and started to walk. I didn’t want to walk along the road, on the sidewalk. Someone might see me and stop and offer condolences or deliberate small talk. I imagined myself walking down the sidewalk and a woman pulling over and asking if I was doing okay and other peopledriving by and seeing me and knowing I was that grieving father and separated husband, and the exposure and embarrassment and humiliation being too much to take. But, since the Fairfield estate had been subdivided into a development twenty years earlier, it was no longer possible to cut through the fields that had originally been called Wild Man’s Meadow, when Enon had first been colonized, at least during the day. As conspicuous as walking along the road felt, cutting through the meadow would have drawn more attention, if only for the strange and sorrowful fact that in the thirty years there had been houses set around it, I had never seen anyone, adults or kids, in the meadow, no one exploring or stalking through the high summer grass or marching through winter snows. Whenever I passed it, I recalled swiping my way through the tall, buggy grass and being half terrified that the wild man, after whom the area had originally been named and about whom I had been told by some older neighborhood kids, was scrambling toward me with unnatural speed and aim from somewhere along the line of trees bordering the meadow. My terror was greatest in broad daylight, because of a sense that the wild man was so terrible and so wild he did not even need the cover of darkness or creeping stealth to claim his victims in his realm. I told Kate about the wild man one day when we were walking by the meadow. She must have been seven or eight—old enough to be told the story and be thrilled instead of frightened. But she had not been thrilled or frightened in the least.
    “That’s just people’s backyards,” she said, and just like that it was true; her understanding of the landscape unseated myown—the mythical wild man of the meadow simply disappeared or, simply, had never existed for her and would never be grafted into her impression of the place.
    Scooting past the meadow, I felt so panicked