It occurred to him now that he hadn’t eaten since breakfast at the nursing home.

He glanced toward the house. The woman was standing in the door watching him as if she’d learn his intentions, some quality of apprehension in her posture. He looked away and he heard the screen door fall to.

The day was waning. Beyond the frame farmhouse light was fleeing westward and bullbats came sheer and plumb out of the tops of the darkling trees as if they’d harry the dusk on. A whippoorwill called and some old nigh-lost emotion somewhere between exaltation and pain rose in him and twisted sharp as a knife. As if all his days had honed down to this lone whippoorwill calling out of the twilight.

The old man sat for a time just taking all this in. Whippoorwills had been in short supply in the nursing home and it was a blessing not to smell Lysol. He breathed in deeply and he could smell the trees still holding the day’s heat and the evocative odor of honeysuckle and the cool citrusy smell of pine needles.

Well, I never held myself above tenant farmin, he said to himself.

At least the lights worked and he guessed Paul was still paying the light bill. He figured the first one to come due in Choat’s name would be the last. The house was jammed with the accumulation of the years. He had used this place as a junkhouse and now Choat seemed to have toted everything he couldn’t use or didn’t want down from the main house. Boxes of pictures and memorabilia Ellen had saved. Now it was spilled and thrown about at random, and he was touched with a dull anger: his very past had been kicked about and discarded.

He set about arranging some kind of quarters. He carried boxes and chairs and garbage bags of clothing into the bedroom and set up Paul’s old cot by the window for what breeze there was.

He sat for a time bemusedly studying snapshots. Dead husks of events that had once transpired. Strange to him now as if they’d happened on some other level of reality, in someone else’s life. An entire envelope of photographs of dead folks. One of Ellen’s father lying in his casket. His shock of black hair, great blade of a nose. Eighty years old and his hair black as a crow’s wing. Another of Ellen standing by the old man’s grave. He studied her face carefully. It looked ravaged, tearstained, swollen with grief.

He put them away. He had not even known they existed. He had no use for them then or now, and why anyone would need to be reminded of so sad a time was beyond his comprehension.

He fared better in an old brass-bound trunk. Choat had missed a bet here, if he knew he’d kick himself. He found Paul’s old pistol wrapped in a piece of muslin. He unfolded the cloth. An enormous Buntline Special—looking pistol but it was really just a .22 caliber target pistol on a .45 frame. He fumbled around in the trunk but he couldn’t find any shells.

He shuffled through a stack of 78 rpm records reading the labels.