Daniel Sparks, age ninety-six, stood at his living room window and watched a fish hawk descend into his backyard garden. The hawk came each day like this, dropping a fat bluefish or bass from the nearby Sound onto the earth of the garden, sometimes a dove or sparrow, a rat or rabbit. And Daniel, standing at the living room window, described it all to his wife, Clara, who had been dead for years.
Perhaps other dead animal smells had brought the hawk here: those oyster shells tilled into the garden soil long ago, or the remains, dust really, of the four small graves of the dogs beneath the giant mulberry. Whatever the hawk’s reasons, watching it eat was a habit that seemed never to have begun, but just was.
Sometimes when the fish hawk came with a small bird the sky filled with other birds high over the trees, flocks cursing and gnashing and carving up the air, tossing and swirling, a swell of twisting clouds, black specks. And Daniel would describe the bird clouds to Clara—speaking as if, rather than having been dead for several years, she was only blind to the world. And they lived together again whenever he spoke: his own voice reflected in the window, the cold glass blurring with his wife’s name in his breath, her listening, living shape would slip from inside him until there she appeared on the sofa, reclined, laughing. His eyes closed as he spoke and he passed through her and lifted, a breeze came into the window, his bones flew around, wild bones darting like a child in the dust and light of the room. Then the hawk would finish and fly off, and silence would settle again in the house. There he sat at the kitchen table, the sensation of hunger sudden, like a stark memory of hunger, its imprint a little ravenous dart in his gut. He’d glance down at a plate of something, a bowl of soup, a TV dinner growing cold or still frozen in its package. How did this get there? Trips out to the grocer on Thursday afternoons. The smell in the grocery aisles of waxed cardboard and frost. A mother, passing by, pushing her child in one of the carts’ seats, child kicking the seat cage. The bus ride back with his grocery bag—never more than one—in his lap. The bus window fast-forwarding through the town he’d known all his life, the outside world’s velocity unreal and youthful now, framed like that. His wife reaching up to him, her cold, dry hands on his face. Stella, their dog, licking a bloody paw. Pewter salt-and-pepper shakers shaped like pineapples—heirlooms, they’d thought. But for whom? How, now, without children? Outside, the apartments and store fronts passing by, discrete parcels of life. A reflected microwave beeping with the strong smell of a dinner overcooked. The panic on the bus of a missed stop. The television news, commercials barking. Silence. The sound of his mouth, chewing. He’d forgotten the oats. Had he? Mr. Sparks? Mr. Sparks! They were waiting for him to get off the bus. This driver knew him. Here we go, Mr. Sparks!
Winter, as he watched the hawk one day, Clara said: It’s snowing. I can smell it. And it was true; it was snowing, and the hawk had just landed in the garden.
Clara said, Go, go introduce yourself.
Too often, when Daniel had thought an idea of Clara’s was misguided, he’d later see that she was not wrong.
Outside, his breath murmured in the frozen air. The ground was hard, the coat he’d put on, too light. He was wearing his slippers. Dark earth quilted the peppered snow, and he felt the hard shapes in his arches and toes. He stepped over a patch of ice and felt his feet go dizzy, then set. The air seemed to chill the closer he came to the hawk, until he stood within a dozen feet of it. His fingertips and the rims of his ears burned. You’re bigger than I expected, he said, by way of introduction, but the fish hawk didn’t look up.
Daniel Sparks stood there. He glanced back at the house, then back at the frozen garden. The fish hawk ate. And the longer the old man stood, the more the hawk’s indifference irritated him. It was his garden after all. He stepped closer, and the fish hawk paused, then chewed, swallowed. Closer still, the fish hawk seemed to grow larger and strange. You know this yard is mine, Daniel said. And you’re welcome. He stepped closer, close enough now to reach out and touch the hawk’s indifferent eyes. I might outlive you yet. A small bone hung tethered by sinew from the fish hawk’s beak, like a taunt or a fetish intended for the old man. The hawk’s mate cried from high above in the sky. The hawk ignored this, too. How extraordinarily alone we are.
The old man saw the small black dot high in the blasted white sky, circling. Then he looked down and saw what the hawk was eating. His wife smiled, his parents shielded their eyes from a bright light, his dogs from so long ago, every generation, running in circles, their barking. The crisp flag the army had sent home in lieu of his brother. A leap into a Michigan pond, the afternoon sun shattering in the water. The hawk pecked and tore, paused. Pecked and tore.
A possum, meat and bones, the thrashed coat. That’s what it was. Other piles of frozen bones from the past around it. An airplane, through the frame of the little bubble window, clouds, farmland below, three thin threads of steam in the altitude trailing off the wing. The hawk pecked, tore. Daniel stood at the outer rim of the icy garden. Over by the mulberry stood a much younger Daniel scraping a shovel into the earth, tossing the summer soil onto a black, loamy mound to the side. The oyster shells he’d cast into the yard over the years speckled the mound. The hawk paused thoughtfully. There was the black plastic lawn bag by the pile of dug-up lawn; inside the bag was his Stella, a mixed breed, Rhodesian Ridgeback in her, perhaps a little Labrador, something blond. A rescue, like the others. She had made it to fourteen. By then, arthritic, desperately devout. He could never own a dog now. The hawk glanced up. The snow was falling in sweeping flakes around its brindled crown. The hawk turned back to its food. Its mate called out, high above, once again.
Daniel felt the cold now entering his ribs, gnawing at the marrow of his fingerbones. He turned and stepped away from memory and the nearer immediacy of this hawk. His slippers passed over the frozen earth to his house. Careful—easy, the hawk said.
And then he was sitting at the kitchen table. He had just returned from his wife’s service, the funeral, oh, some time ago now. He knew as much, here, now, his bones thawing—that this was memory speaking. How quiet the house had been that day. As if the rooms had gone deaf the moment he stepped inside and closed the front door behind him. The atmosphere, the still, dry solitude. It was snowing that day, too. And then, later, the cry of the hawk had pierced the dry light breaking through the living room window. He came over and stood in the light and watched it land, wings flashing, then tucked. The brindled weave of feathers. Streaking blood on its breast. He remembered this now, the first day he could recall the hawk. And that day, yes, the hawk had dropped with a small parcel, a brown hare, which lay limp and likely already dead on the ground for a moment. But Daniel now recalled that the hare had animated, suddenly, as if some new life had surprised the delicate bones and muscle and pulse within its pelt and sent it launching off and away. And Daniel laughed in delight at this small surprise, this tiny sharp star having pierced the thick mourning substance of this emptied room, the laughter in his body lifting and darting with the hare. And the hawk just stood, watching the hare disappear, as Daniel just stood, watching the hawk living.
His slippers were wet and still burned from the cold outside. He took a pot pie from the freezer and put it into the microwave. This was real, but then, so had Stella been, just now outside. He set the egg timer, so that even if the microwave timer went off and he forgot, the other timer would go off. Now the microwave moaned, and the little digital clock was counting down life in little glowing numbers. He returned to the living room. Outside the back window, there was no burial mound, no Stella. But the hawk was still picking and tearing thoughtfully at what remained on the ground.
Then the old man heard the mate scream again, above—the call louder now, closer. His parents waved, his wife smiled, facing him in the glass so close he could see the pale, wispy hairs above her lip, the cracked lipstick, the small mark, a mole to the left. And the window blackened, then fluttered. The hawk’s mate had fallen from the sky and flown into the glass, hovering in front of Daniel like a giant angel, wings extended, its talons punching and clicking against the window, as if to break in and grab him up. But then she lifted, and he watched her fly away. He was on the floor now. Had he fallen? He pushed himself up and stood. In the window, the fish hawk launched from the frozen earth and then vanished.
After that, Daniel returned to the window but never saw the fish hawk again. What to make of such a thing? Another spring came, then summer. He ran necessary errands, though sometimes could not recall them. Untended, the back garden overgrew with weeds, and these weeds grew into small aggressive trees, memory oaks and memory maples; they darkened the light of the present. And then a woman was coming from somewhere to check on him. A young girl, friendly. The home-care girl. Candice. Her early way with him was slightly patronizing, but she adjusted as she got to know him. A few visits later she was like a daughter who got along well with her dad. They talked. Got to know each other. She was a child! Her husband was in school, electrical engineering. Daniel mentioned his past as a structural engineer. Candice withdrew a little when she spoke of her husband. You just saw it in her manner, a shift of the light. Daniel wondered if they had trouble, more than the usual. Candice began to resemble his wife. And then she was pregnant, and the resemblance strayed. She showed him the bump. Congratulations! he said. Well. Isn’t that something!
Food appeared. Dishes seemed to clean themselves and travel back into the cupboards; the mail came inside and sorted itself into discrete stacks. Oh. Candice, yes. The clock stole hours and minutes when he wasn’t looking. Rooms stole his reasons for having come into them. The world grew increasingly vivid and important inside him. Here, he attended weddings, funerals; there, he and his brother played baseball together, his mother died and came to life again, and his father had such wisdom. The tape rewound and rushed forward, grew thicker with patina. Sometimes his wife looked like a child.
This home-care girl, Candice, she came and went. They’d sit and talk. She would remind him of her name, and he’d say, I know, I know! She didn’t seem to mind talking with him. Boy, her belly sure was getting larger, wasn’t it? She said she’d need to take a leave from her home-care company. He didn’t say anything. Maybe he hadn’t heard. She said her headaches were out of control sometimes. He said, Have you named it?
It? she said. It’s a boy, it’s not an it! And no, no name. Not yet.
He said, Here—take them. He was holding out the old pewter salt-and pepper- shakers: A gift, he said.
And she said, No, didn’t she?
His appetite would come to remind him to eat with confusion and urgency, like a missed stop on a bus. He slept, occasionally bathed—certain material habits didn’t leave him; pinpoints piercing the canopy of trees. Until the voices and the trees out back grew so thick he could step into them. That’s how it felt, like he could step into them and find himself hiking.
Then one day he heard her downstairs, opening the front door, coming in, closing the door behind her. He was on the floor of the bathroom. Well. This is a mess. Downstairs she called out, Dan. She walked much more slowly now—pregnant as she was. She joked about how she now only waddled about. She called his name twice again. Mr. Sparks? He heard her rising the stairs. Mr. Sparks! He heard her come to the doorway of the bathroom, and then her voice clenched up, a gasp. He felt her cool, dry hand on his neck, a couple of fingers pulsing. Then he felt her face over his, her mouth closed over his. He felt her breathe into him. When he opened his eyes, there was her face, inches away. He saw the fine hairs over her lip. Her pale lipstick. He almost said her name.
The last three months of his life he spent in a convalescent center. Outside the sealed window of his room, the cars gathering, people coming and going in the sun, a jet airplane could take the longest time just to cross the whole sky. He wondered where the caretaker, that girl, had gone. Had she somehow lost him? He worried she might be looking for him. He’d brought the forest with him. His sleeping dreams sometimes intruded. He’d find himself salting a cassoulet Clara had made, using the heavy salt shaker. Clara, there, smiling. But the shaker had run out of salt. In one dream the hawk came back—he and Clara stood together at the window now. The hawk was smaller in the dream. Clara and he, they never had kids. Had wanted them, now and again. Their marriage was occasionally troubled with this desire. Couldn’t. Now dream children are in the yard, look at them! They are his. Little weeds.
Candice held onto the house keys. No one had asked for them back. The old man had been at the convalescent center for a month or two now. She had visited his place three times since she found him there on the bathroom floor. The stroke, oh it was awful! She visited the empty house, just walked around inside. She didn’t know why. The place relaxed her. She was in her third trimester, late in it, the morning sickness was long gone and had been replaced with these terrible migraines. But now those had passed, and she was just sort of generally, extraordinarily uncomfortable. Yes, this place, something soothing about it. Outside, whenever she approached the front door, she paused to regard the nameplate beneath the doorbell: Daniel and Clara Sparks. It was a little speckled with white house paint. Whenever she saw this, she scraped a little of the speckling off. A habit. What had passed through the old man’s mind each time he came home and saw his wife’s name there, dead all these years. Had he ever expected to see her when he came in? She hoped whoever moved in would leave the Sparkses’ names, this tag beneath the doorbell. Though she didn’t know why it mattered. We come and go, we turn into other people, other names.
Inside, Candice sat on the sofa, reclined, and just listened to the house. She had always loved how quiet the old plaster walls were. Then she heard the hot water heater kick in the basement, and the house groaned and clicked, and it was as if the house had begun to breathe. It would be a good house to raise a family in. Its bones were old, it felt open, the walls seemed to have the human capacity for patience. If a house could be kind, that would be its personality. She had thought about visiting him at the convalescent center. She only partially understood why she hadn’t. The baby kicked, then it kicked again. She counted the seconds between kicks, reclined on the sofa. Through the back window, the afternoon sun shot light onto the floor. Someone would need to come and clean up that yard. The house was falling apart—walls peeling, the old paint, some kind of leak in the bathroom that had pulled up the tiles, warped the floorboards. But still, such soul here. She dozed, then woke.
She pushed up from the sofa and went into the kitchen. She opened a drawer and found a bunch of yellowed bills, a couple of recipe clippings, an old photo of a woman: Clara Berkowitz written in cursive on the back. His wife, once. There was a sealed plastic bag with HEIRLOOMS written in marker just below the seal. Inside it were a dozen small, yellowed stationery envelopes on which the handwritten names of different vegetables could be read between the smears of dirt: Brandywines—yellow/red; Lettc—Red Giant; Beans—Windsor; Collards—blue curled scotch. . . . She felt the bag, the little seeds. She set it back into the drawer and paused. She took it, then, and put it into her purse.
He’d said something about a hawk. Mentioned it used to visit him? She didn’t understand what he said sometimes. He might have been drifting again. She had seen these pewter salt-and-pepper shakers as he talked about the hawk. She’d forgotten about the shakers. They were shaped like pineapples, here on a little corner shelf in the kitchen. When she had asked about them, Daniel said: Oh, those. For our wedding, a gift. Then he said: Here—take them. A gift.
But she’d said no. She couldn’t recall why. Maybe she’d worried how it would look, that she was taking advantage of him—they seemed valuable. Had that been it?
Why did she remember this? She slipped them into her purse. Sometime later she would see the Realtor’s sign out front. She’d drive by now and again and each time feel this quiet gasp, a relief, seeing the sign still there. Her relief that the house hadn’t yet sold. She mentioned the sign to Steve, but they couldn’t afford such a house. And then one day she drove by, and the sign was gone. Something more than the sign had been taken away, that’s how it felt. Some significant chance had passed by and was now receding infinitely, smaller and smaller, down some closed-off road. The last time Candice drove by she saw two little girls sitting on the porch, a woman just a little older than herself smoking a cigarette. On the lawn behind the shrubs a younger kid, a little boy riding around the grass in a plastic ladybug with wheels. Candice still had the tarnished pewter pineapple salt-and-pepper shakers. The little married totems, Dan and his wife, now her only purchase on that life. It would have been a nice place to raise a family.
And years later still, Candice will take the long way home from the Price Chopper. She’ll have her kids with her, a little boy and an infant girl. The child she had carried while she visited Daniel Sparks back then will now be three years old, the boy. Her health will be on her mind—a couple of symptoms, an early, guarded assessment by her physician. It could be entirely benign, nothing. There will be a biopsy, more tests, blood proteins, in a few days. The CD in the car stereo will sing the wheels on the bus go round and round. She will drive by the church, Saint Clemons, with the graveyard beside it and she’ll recall this old man she once took care of, back when she worked for the center; wasn’t he buried here? Daniel Something. She had found the notice in the paper, after he’d been taken to the hospital. Years ago, now. Yes, Daniel Sparks, Saint Clemons, beloved husband of . . . and she recalled the salt-and-pepper shakers. She recalled reading no surviving family, and thought: then who am I? But she hadn’t visited the hospital. And then a week or two later, she hadn’t visited the convalescent center. She could have, for a few months. Then who am I? The couple of inches of obituary text had drawn up the same ache she felt when later the house had sold, that sense of chance turning away, dancing down the road without her, leaving its residue of jealousy and a little guilt. Guilt, like a legacy, now. Had he wondered if she would drop by? Had he hoped she would visit? Did he wait for her at the hospital she’d avoided? Had he waited for her at the old folks’ home? She had felt an aversion to visiting him, a tug of repulsion, which still made her feel . . . well, she was so pregnant at the time. And those places, they—
It will be a small graveyard. She’ll pull into the gravel lot of the church. Her oldest boy’s name is Daniel. A coincidence, her husband’s choice, the name of an uncle he’d been fond of. They’d gone back and forth on that name. She had never gotten to tell the old man, this original Dan. Though they’d decided on that name while he was still alive at the convalescent center. Yes, she’d read the obituary and said aloud: Daniel, we named him Daniel. Then, thinking of him at the convalescent center while this little Dan, hers, a newborn there beside her, ruddy with his infancy, wrapped up, sleeping in the second-hand Pack ’n Play.
But now, these years later, she will get out of the car with the kids. She won’t explain why. She doesn’t understand it, quite, herself. Her daughter, Sophie, is only one- and-a-half. Candice unstraps the kids from the seats, rewraps Sophie in her carrier against her chest.
She will stroll with the kids until she sees Sparks in the sculpted lettering on the marble block, Daniel Sparks. Beside him is Clara’s stone. Right—his wife’s name—Clara. Her own little Dan hobbles up to the stone and swoops down and slaps his hands against the cool marble a few times, then backs away and falls backward, sitting now, on the lawn by Candice’s feet. Then he stands and slaps the stone a couple more times, sits. And Candice will hope that the old man sees her there with her kids: Hi, Daniel. She’ll hope he knows she thought to visit, finally.
But this is all in the future. Right now, Candice knew none of this; sitting in the car outside the house with the pewter salt-and-pepper shakers shaped like pineapples, so tarnished and heavy. A couple of weeks ago she had found the old man on the bathroom floor. She’d saved his life. I mean, that was something, wasn’t it? Jesus, she hoped he was OK. She reached into her purse and let the salt-and-pepper shakers rub together in her hand. They felt smooth and substantial, family heirlooms. She would set them on a shelf at home, keep them in a special place, as they had been kept here, in Daniel’s house. Now the objects would look over her home, as they’d looked over this old man’s from back when he was young. Someday she would pass them down to her kids’ families, generations. She really did hope he was OK. She felt the baby kick. She felt the shakers in her purse. She took her hand from the purse and started the car. She pulled out of the old man’s driveway for the last time.
One morning at the convalescent center while Daniel Sparks slept, that hawk flew up and brushed against him, then hung fluttering, glaring, just a foot from his face. He woke—a nurse was standing over him, smiling.
Good morning, Dan. It’s snowing outside! she said. Saccharine. This one, she wore too much makeup, this girl had lipstick on her teeth, and often spoke to him like he was a child. She was the child for crying out loud! His dream lingered in the glass of her eyes: all the children, the house as it had been, his dogs. These recurring dream sons and dream daughters darting wild in the light, dancing in this nurse’s eyes, and then the dream left, chasing after the hawk.
Later, somewhere not far away, Candice will watch her little boy pick up a heavy pewter object shaped like a pineapple and shake it. Before she can stop him, he’ll turn the shaker upside down, laughing now in delight as the salt pours like sand onto his hands.
Mine, he’ll say. Mine.
And she’ll smile and think about all the time they have ahead.
