I sold our house after I repaired the damage I had done to it and cleaned the yard. I sent Susan half of the money and put the rest in a savings account. I rented two rooms at the back of a large house half a mile from the center of Enon, from an elderly widow named Trowt. I received her permission to paint the rooms white (they were an antique salmon color when I first moved in). One room is my bedroom. I have a twin bed and a nightstand with a lamp on it. I keep my clothes in the closet, either hanging from hangers or in one of two inexpensive plastic three-drawer storage containers that have transparent fronts. The other room has a small electric stove, refrigerator, and sink along one wall. There is a high table with a butcher-block top in front of the appliances and sink, where I prepare my meals. Without any conscious decision, I have stopped eating meat. Most of my meals consist of rice and vegetables, which I chop with a dull old chef’s knife that has a magnet stuck to its handle that I found on the side of the refrigerator when I moved into the apartment. There is a narrow chair in one corner of the room, and a small table, on which sits a goosenecked lamp and a putty-colored rotary telephone. In the remaining corner of the room there is a large wingback Queen Anne chair that Mrs. Trowt gave me after checking in on me a week after I moved in and finding the apartment so spare. The chair is upholstered in fabric that has sun-faded poppies on an ivory background. The arms are slick and threadbare and stained with loops and dashes of ink that has browned with age. There is a standing brass lamp with a gold shade next to the chair that Mrs. Trowt also gave me.
I no longer drink bitter potions, or whiskey. I own an old green-and-blue pickup truck that I bought for twenty-five hundred dollars from a retired landscaper I knew years ago. I use it to transport a used ride-on lawn mower and a weed trimmer and a rake and a big broom and a shovel. I tend fourteen lawns in Enon. The truck breaks down regularly and I am happy to work on it during the weekends with some of my grandfather’s old tools, which I keep in a large plastic gray toolbox just inside the door to my rooms. My hand still hurts at the end of most every day and I take aspirin before I cook dinner every night.
I still smoke a cigarette with the pot of coffee I drink early every morning, and another after dinner. My rooms give out onto a circular courtyard formed by the turnaround of the gravel driveway. There is a barn opposite my rooms. It has a large door that slides open and shut on an iron roller. I open the barn door and sit just outside the opening on an old iron garden chair painted white that has blisters of rust erupting all over it. I am comforted by the feeling of the large dim open looming interior of the barn behind me. I smoke my cigarette in the morning and watch the light unroll across the yard and illuminate the gardens. I smoke my cigarette at the end of the day and I watch the evening advance and the light retreat and the gardens fold back up into shadow. When it’s hot I sometimes pull the chair just behind the threshold of the barn door so I can sit in the shade. The barn timber smells sweet. There’s a trace, too, of the hay once stored there. The big interior of the barn mutes the hissing of summer. When it’s cold I sometimes pull the chair just inside the barn so I can sit out of the wind or the snow. In the cold, the barn smells like the iron nails that hold it together and the iron pulleys above the loft. I sit in the chair and smoke and look at the light and the colors and think about things like trying to paint the same view in different seasons and how I could never translate the colors I see into paint, or how I don’t know what colors I’m actually looking at. I am a connoisseur of the day. Sometimes I sit in tears. Sometimes I sit in a wordless, inexplicable kind of brokenhearted joy.
At night, I am tired from work. I sit in my white room in the chair and look at a library book under the lamp. Sometimes I fall asleep in the chair. Sometimes I dream about Kate. I wish the dreams could be us sitting together in the garden, talking peacefully, with me kissing her forehead at the end and promising to see her again soon. But my dreams are the usual bizarre, fractious affairs and Kate always shows up just as I am about to slide off a steep roof, or when I am wrestling a wild dog in the desert, or when I’ve forgotten that I had a daughter and am enjoying the inexplicable admiration of a beautiful woman at a party in a majestic house. The timing is always terrible and I am always caught off guard by her sudden appearance. I try to tell her not to move because the tiles on the roof are loose and she will plunge to the cobbled street below if she does not stay still, or I yell to her to run before the dog notices and turns its fangs from me to her, or that I am sorry for flirting, and that I miss her so much, every single day, everywhere, all the time, and that I love her so much, and this is all a dream, and she knows how dreams are, and that I didn’t mean to let her out of my thoughts for even a moment. As upsetting as these meetings are, there is consolation in them, too—real joy at seeing my daughter—whether they anticipate an eventual reunion or are just figments that comfort me once in a while until I, too, simply cease and there isn’t a soul left in Enon or anywhere else on this awful miracle of a planet to remember either of us.
By Paul Harding
Enon
Tinkers
About the Author
PAUL HARDING is the author of the novel Tinkers, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers. He was a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Harvard University, and Grinnell College.
PaulHardingBooks.com
Paul Harding, Enon
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