be by June, and about a bird he could hear and not see, which he recorded
honestly as heard, not seen, because that was the unit's whole religion and it
had become, without his noticing, his too. The journal came back with an A
on the cover and, under his last entry, in Mrs. Delaney's looping hand: You
have learned to look at things, Owen. That is rarer than it sounds, and it will
keep.
She kept him a moment after the bell, not in the way of trouble but in the
way of a person handing something back with both hands. "I had a boy in
this room a long time ago," Mrs. Delaney said, "who wrote down license
plates. All day, every car that passed the window. His journal was nothing
but plates, front to back, in columns." She said it without judgment, tidying
the stack of journals on her desk into a square. "His father had been hurt on
the road, and the boy had an idea that if he wrote them all, he'd catch the one
that mattered. It took him most of the year to stop." Owen stood with his
journal against his chest and did not say that he knew the arithmetic of that
idea from the inside. "What did he write after he stopped?" he asked. Mrs.
Delaney smiled with the part of her face that kept her secrets. "Birds," she
said. "Very badly at first. He drew a heron like a folding chair. But he wrote
birds." She tapped Owen's journal once, lightly, where the grade was. "You
skipped the folding-chair stage, Mr. Tate. Or no — I expect you didn't. I
expect the early pages of yours are nobody's business, and that's as it should
be. Looking is a skill. So is putting the pencil down." He carried that home
with him all the way down the lane, turning it over like a stone in a pocket,
and he did not write it in the notebook, because it was not the kind of thing
the notebook was for anymore. It was the kind of thing you just kept.
116
He still kept the notebook. He wanted to be clear with himself about that, in
the privacy of his own head, where clarity was a house rule: he still kept it,
he still wrote in it, some. What changed, across April and into May, was its
address and its weight. It stopped riding in his backpack on the walk to
school, that was the first thing — stopped without a decision, the way a tooth
stops hurting, so that one Tuesday morning he was halfway down the lane
with his pack thumping and realized the familiar corner of it was not digging
at his back, and he stood still a second in the road, checking, the way you
check a pocket. Then he walked on. It lived on his shelf now, in his room,
standing upright between his father's shop manuals — the big diesel binder
with Hollis's tabs still in it, in Hollis's colors, and the slim factory book for a
make of truck nobody in the county ran anymore — and it looked, Owen
thought, exactly right there, the way a book looks right when it has found its
shelf-mates: a record among records, a tool among tools, taken down some
evenings and not others. He wrote in it when there was something to write.
There was, less and less often, something to write. He did not experience this
as loss. He experienced it the way you experience a cast coming off — the
limb underneath thinner than you remembered and entirely, ordinarily yours.
The Prescott house sold in May, on a Tuesday, without anybody in Alden
remarking on it much beyond the remarking a house sale always gets, and
that plainness was itself a kind of news. The parcel the old man had run —
the equipment yard behind the house, the sheds, the fenced acreage where the
machines had stood in rows like a gray herd — had gone separately, earlier,
to a solar company out of Abilene, and by the second week of May the
survey stakes were in and the first posts going up in rows across the back
acreage, straight and level and patient, waiting for the panels that would
come on trucks and be set like dark water across the field. People drove out
to look at them the way people drive out to look at anything new in a county
117
that does not get new things often. Paula drove Owen past on the way home
from a Saturday supply run in the next town over. And Owen looked at the
rows of posts standing in the old yard and felt the particular quiet of a place
being used for something that had nothing to do with anything, and found the
quiet good. The field would make electricity out of daylight. It was hard to
imagine a more complete change of subject.
The family that bought the house was named Moss. There was a mother,
whose first name Owen did not catch the first time and was too embarrassed
to ask about the second, and a daughter, Sadie, who was ten and had hair cut
straight across like a ruler had done it and a gap between her front teeth, and
a stepfather who worked somewhere involving pipelines and was gone in the
weeks, and a baby who was mostly a rumor of blankets and a white noise
machine. They had come from Lubbock. They had bought the house, as far
as the town could determine, because it was a good house at a good price on