He woke at the hour when the sky is still slate and the swifts have not yet come out from under the eaves. He had never owned an alarm. The house went slack and quiet a little before five and that was his prime waking signal, the way a tongue goes to a tooth just to check it's still there.
Downstairs he opened the windows to let the night out. Cold came in off the field, smelling of clover and wet fence post. He kindled the stove with tinder from the box, ground the java his brother sent at Christmas, cut the core out of an apple, and ate it at the sink while the chrome of the kettle went from grey to gold. Steam buffered against the pane and ran down in threads. The radio muttered from the shelf and he turned the dial until the static gave way to a line of fiddle, then let it play.
On the fridge, under a magnet, a unicorn: purple, four-legged, horn like a carrot, drawn by his grandson at four. Beside it, a stripe of school photos, and the boy's notion of a house — square, square, triangle, sun in the corner with a face on it. He is eleven now and comes on the Saturdays his mother picks up a shift, and eats like a horse, and is welcome to.
The gate hinge had gone to rust. That was the day's whole ambition. He carried the box out past the nest in the porch eave, past a web strung between the rails and beaded with fog. A robin worked the lawn. A bumble went from sage to mint and back to sage. A monarch came over the wall on the drift and did not stop. In the meadow the hens kept up their low discord, which is the only conversation they have and the only one they need. They do not excel at anything. They keep no office hours. Nobody has ever asked them to.
The bolt was seized. He slid a length of pipe over the wrench arm for leverage and it gave with a snap that put the birds up out of the vine — a whole flock, gone over the roof in one arc. He worked the spring, set the anchor, drove the nail, checked the level, ran a bolt through and left it a quarter turn shy. Then a little grease on the pin, a patch of felt where the wood had worn to splinters, and a cinch of wire on the latch to hold it while the glue took.
In town a sales force of two young men in matching plaid had the square staked out, clipboards under their arms, wanting to talk about panels and the sun. He gave them a nod and no opening. At the hardware counter he bought a block of beeswax, a box of tacks, a coil of cord, and the girl at the register said have a good one the way you'd say a word in a language you don't speak.
Home. The paper on the table, folded to the crossword he'd started over breakfast, pencil in the fold. Eleven across: Delphic figure, six. Oracle. He wrote it in and then sat looking at it. He had known that word before it was a company. He had known most of them, come to think of it — had used them for sixty years without a second thought, and somewhere along the way every one of them had got itself a logo and a login and a legal department, and nobody had asked him.
He ate toast standing up. He listened to the stream at the bottom of the property, which is a sound with no opinion in it, no meta to it, no second thing underneath the first. He watched a cloud come apart over the ridge. A crow stood on the wire and said the one thing crows say, and the barn wall gave it back as an echo, and neither the crow nor the echo wanted anything from him.
Later, dusk, the dog asleep on the rug and the last light going purple, he stood out by the fixed gate and swung it once, twice, listening to it not complain. Somewhere down the road a phone rang in a kitchen and stopped. Nobody was sending for him, and he liked it that way. No telegram, no messenger on the road, no relay of any kind. Orion came up over the oaks, hunting nothing, the way he has for a googol of evenings and will for a googol more.
Everything out there still had its name. Only the meaning had been quietly taken out of them and put to work somewhere else, and nobody had thought to tell him where, or when, or how to get it back.