The last days of owning the farm were strange. It was as if I had a phantom limb; I could feel it move, but not see it. The papers were being signed the first day of December, and I thought I should go over the day before, check out the house and barn for any last remnants of our years there, and spend the night in an Alton motel. Thinking there might be a little last-minute brush-clearing or dirty lifting, I hung my suit in the car and put on a wool-lined olive-drab jacket, from an Army-surplus store, that my father used to wear on weekends, and that my mother inherited and would wear in winter, with not too bad a fit. I hadn’t had the heart to leave it for the auctioneers to clear away. I put on the jacket and threw a pair of loppers and work gloves in the car.

But by the time I got away from my wife and my students, and made my way around Philadelphia, not many hours of daylight were left. The place when I pulled in was still—as still as a picture. Green was gone from everything but the pines and the two glossy holly trees, the male and the female. The orchard grass was an even slope of tan striped with shade. The woods beyond stood tall and silvery, the stalks of darkness between the trunks thickening. The region was called Firetown and as a boy I had imagined it had to do with the way the day’s dying sun made the tops of the trees in the woods flame.

When I slammed the car door, it echoed off the barn wall in a way I had forgotten. When we first moved here, I used to stand in the yard and shout, marvelling at the echo, like the voice of a brother I didn’t have.

The absence of an owner showed in a dozen little ways. I had paid a boy to keep the lawn mowed, but he had lazily left tousled fringes along the edges, and where the black walnut had dropped its pulpy shells on the lawn hadn’t bothered to mow at all. I carried the loppers, though I doubted I would find much to do—perhaps just check the fragile weeping cherry tree for fallen branches, or cut some raspberry canes out of the hosta beds my mother had planted when we were new here. Busywork, to salve my conscience and the wound left when a piece of your life is removed.

As I drifted in my inherited coat across the lank grass, a few shadows filtered out of the orchard and flickered toward the house, eagerly loping. Several more materialized from the direction of the woods. These cats had survived. They thought I was my mother and that good times had returned.

OLIVER’S EVOLUTION