“One problem solved,” I tell the chickens, who are huddled in the coop and not pleased about how snow flutters in when I open the door. I mean the girl with the camera. She won’t be back out here in this snow, all those national-forest roads closed, at least for a while. “But another one gained,” I say, peering into the coop. One of the hens eyes me cantankerously and refuses to move. “Marie. What are we gonna do about her?” I push at the hen with the back of my gloved hand and she clucks and then leaps to the side. “Got a woman in the house with me and one day in, I start thinking things. What? Yeah, so maybe I was. Maybe I did steal a look when she leaned over to pour the coffee. I didn’t look long, anyhow, so don’t go making me out to be some kind of pervert.”
I brush the pine bedding back from the ledge of the coop, tidying the chickens’ mess. “And yes, she’s attractive, okay. I find her attractive. I did, years ago, when we first met. And I still do. There, I said it.” One hen seems to change her mind and comes back toward me, beak out, intending to peck. “Easy,” I tell her and swat her softly on the head. “You’re lucky I need you, or you’d end up like Susanna.” The hens stand in a row at the back of the coop, watching me as I tuck their eggs into the deep pocket of my coat. “Sorry,” I say. “That was uncalled for. What happened with her was about putting her out of her misery. You understand that, don’t you, ladies?” I close the door and latch it and shimmy back through my skinny path to the porch.
You’re talking to chickens, Cooper. You’re confessing. You’re apologizing to them. Critters with brains the size of a pea. You’re losing your mind.
I stomp off the snow, turn to look once again at the woods. Even though I’m close, the birds are fluttering toward the feeder, pulled there by hunger, by the situation of snow. Two, maybe three years back, Jake brought the feeder, and after much debate—not right off the porch （bird seed all over the place）， not on the clothesline （bird crap all over the clothes）—we dug a hole with the post-hole digger and sunk a straight and skinned piece of locust and installed the feeder just outside the window so that Finch and me could watch the birds when we ate our meals. Scotland had come shortly thereafter and taken the opportunity to point out that Finch’s childhood would be lacking if I didn’t see to getting her a pet crow. Which she has been harping about every spring since: finding a baby crow to nurture and tame.
Now, juncos, plain and gray, tremble in from the woods, gathering at the base of the feeder, but the snow is deep there. I grab the shovel from the porch and walk toward them and they scatter. I clear a spot so that when the seed spills, they can get it from the ground. I step back and lean on the shovel and wait and see if they’ll come back with me that close, and they do. Beautiful, fragile little things, quivering. I look up and see Marie at the window, Finch tucked in against her, and Marie’s arm across Finch’s middle. It’s a happy sight, the two of them watching in wonder and smiling, and I smile back, but inside I’m seeing that in spite of everything I can give Finch out here—and it’s a good life, and the best I can do—there is also something missing. A woman to love and soothe and guide her. A mother.
TWENTY-ONE
There was an incident, before. Before the cabin, before the car accident and CPS, before Finch. Six weeks after I got back from Kabul. Aunt Lincoln had died while I was overseas, so I was unable to fly home and attend the funeral, but I know she wasn’t the type to hold such a thing against a person. Anyhow, she’d left me the place, so I was living out there on the farm but not farming it. I’d gotten a job at the lumberyard. Nothing fancy, just unloading wood and keeping inventory and sometimes sweeping sawdust. It was hard work and I liked it: the strain on the body, the counting and tallying in my little chart with a clipboard. After everything I’d lived through over the past four years, there was something reassuring about the simplicity of it, wood and numbers, that was all.
I was at the diner in town, eating a Reuben sandwich with french fries and pickles and a Coke. It was 2007 and I was sort of a hero in my little corner of the universe. They were good people in that town, Vietnam veterans scattered among them, people who’d learned their lesson from that conflict and who realized it was okay to feel mad or confused about the war, but it wasn’t us soldiers who made the decisions about who to fight, and where. They hung yellow ribbons in their windows, plastered stickers on their bumpers. When I came home, they threw a big parade to welcome me. Sometimes people gave me free stuff, and at the bar they would always tell me my drink was on the house.