Open Season

all her life it was the “old house.” The place where the young man suddenly appeared one fall evening. Lit a fire. Made a home. You see those places from the road in that part of Georgia. The familiar T-shaped, gable-roofed farmhouse of the twenties and thirties, white-washed frieze boards and busted six-over-six paned windows along the rear sleeping porch, always with the same severe beauty that feels like an affront of some kind.

When she was a child, her aunt and uncle used the house for hay storage, preferring to live in the double-wide they set up at the back of the tract farther off the main road. And so the house was an outbuilding to her, or a piece of the landscape, at least until she discovered him living there, and suddenly, in the space of one evening walk, it was a house again. His house.

She hadn’t intended to spy on him. Had never considered herself a voyeur, if that was the right word for it. But then all it takes is the slightest pause on an evening walk down the wooded hill behind your home. And if the time is right and the light has just finished making its slow reversal, releasing from the glass the outside world, taking on the interior—you can look as long as you want to without being seen. And in pausing, even for a few seconds, you become something else, someone else. No longer a woman walking, she became a woman looking in, waiting there in the dimness of the tree line.

She often walked near the old house to move along the edge of the field, and she was practically in the backyard when she accepted that the light she was seeing was coming from the house itself. It never had electricity, and yet every room was lit from within as though something miraculous had happened. As though time had curved back on itself. And there he was, painting in the living room. His back to her. There was an oversized fire in the center chimney—who would build such a large fire in autumn, waste so much fuel?—and small pieces of cardboard filled the empty window panes of the sleeping porch. At first she thought he was a squatter. But the electricity? His truck parked in the drive, brand new trash bins neatly arranged. No, not a squatter. This man was living here. A new neighbor. A young man.

“oh, you mean mr. scott,” said her uncle over the phone. She couldn’t believe they hadn’t mentioned that someone had bought their frontage property. “Can you believe he wanted to live in that old rat nest? He teaches up at Regents in Augusta. Wanted to be somewhere quiet. Said he got tired of all the noise. He’s real nice though, kind of shy,” her uncle went on. “German, I think,” he said. “Hold on.”

She could hear her aunt scolding and correcting him.

“Or Spanish. Hold on.”

Again, her aunt was hollering something.

“He moved down here from New York, you know. You want to talk at Marma?”

“No,” she said. She needed to get dinner going before Bo came in, at least get a pot of water boiling. As long as something was happening on the range, he wouldn’t bother to ask what.

She discovered the next week, when the new mailbox was installed on the main road beside theirs, that his last name was actually McMaster. Scott McMaster. She had been watching him the whole week and had her ideas. McMaster, a noble-sounding name, an old name, probably from an old Irish family, probably Catholic. She imagined a young Mr. Scott McMaster in a Catholic boarding school, a nest of beautiful tall brick buildings surrounding him at recess, walking home along streets lined with brown stones. Scott Mc-Master from New York, now living in her uncle’s outbuilding, the old house.

Scott fixed the windows that first week, and the house...