The Hermitage

The flood-watch shack on the river flats stood on the levee road eight miles below Haysville, where the river bends around the bottoms, and it had been built in the 1950s for the levee tenders and abandoned in the 1990s when the county put the flood gauge on a satellite, and it was the cheapest roof in the county, and it was where Wayne Granger came to die.

He came in November, in the gray weather after the harvest, with a duffel bag and a box of tools and no plan past the month, and he found the shack standing — four walls, a stove, a bed frame, a window onto the river — and he patched the roof and he banked the walls and he set up housekeeping the way he had set up in the boarding house above the grain office twenty-four years before: everything necessary, nothing soft.

The county hired him to tend the levee road. It was not a real job — it was the kind of job a county gives a man who is too old for the yard and too proud for the dole — but it came with the shack and a small wage and a reason to be there, and Wayne Granger took it the way he had taken everything since the fall: with his head down and his hands working.

He was fifty-one. His heart had been bad since the winter — he had felt it going, the way a man feels a pump going, in fits and starts — and he had not told anybody, because there was nobody to tell, and because telling people about your heart is the first step toward lying down, and Wayne Granger had spent his whole life learning to stand.

In December he bought the bird.

It was at the feed store in Atwater, a goldfinch in a cage, the last of a batch the store had not been able to sell, and the storekeeper had given it to him for two dollars because the bird was old and the cage was rusted and nobody else wanted it, and Wayne Granger had carried it back to the shack and hung it in the window onto the river, and he had named it, in the privacy of his own head, after the only king he had ever believed in.

"Hello, June," he said to the bird. "You're the prettiest thing on this levee, and I'm the ugliest, and between us we've got about one good season left."

The bird did not sing. It was old, and it had been caged too long, and it sat on its perch with its feathers fluffed and watched the river, and Wayne Granger talked to it the way he had never talked to anybody: without shame, without a ledger, without the need to be right.

"Fifteen years ago," he told the bird, "I was the biggest man in the county. I owned the elevators and the house on the hill and the price of corn from the Missouri to the river. I had a wife — I had a wife twice, and I sold the first one and buried the second — and I had a daughter who wasn't mine, and I raised her, and I lied to her, and she forgave me, and I left anyway. That's the kind of king I was. The kind who burns his own fields."

The bird watched the river. The river did not answer. And Wayne Granger sat by the stove in the flood-watch shack with the goldfinch in the window and the winter coming down, and he wrote letters he did not send — one to June, one to Dwight, one to the man who had bought his wife — and he read Lana's letter again, the one she had written the afternoon before she died, and he folded it, and he put it back in his coat, and he told himself he was not waiting for anything, and he was, of course, waiting for everything.

The winter was hard. The river froze and thawed and froze. The levee road needed gravel and then mud and then gravel again. Wayne Granger worked the road in the mornings and sat with the bird in the afternoons, and he lost weight, and the pump got worse, and he told the bird about it, because there was nobody else to tell.

"The heart's a machine like any other," he said. "It's got a season, same as corn. Mine's about done. I can feel it. It's not a bad way to go — in a shack on the river, with a goldfinch in the window and a county road outside that's better for my having walked it. A man could do worse. Most men do worse."

In February the pump nearly quit, and he was too proud to call anybody, and he sat on the bed for three days with the pain coming and going, and on the fourth day he got up and fed the bird — the bird had gone two days without seed, and it was thin, and it watched him with its bright black eye, and he filled the feeder and told it he was sorry, and he made a resolution: no matter what happened, the bird would not starve. It was the only promise he had left to keep, and he meant to keep it.

He wrote it down. He wrote it on the back of a feed bill, in the careful hand of a man who has learned to write what he means:

Don't forget me. And don't let the bird starve. If you're reading this, feed the bird. That's the whole of it. That's all I've ever learned that was worth passing on.

He put the note on the table, under the coffee cup, and he sat in the chair by the stove, and the February dark came down, and the river ran past the window, and the goldfinch watched him from its cage, and the season turned, and the king waited.