He appointed the big main house himself, before they met. It was done in a fine colonial revival style, furnished entirely with the products of his factory. The wallpaper imitated a homely, hand-painted pattern. He found an Amish woman to weave his curtains. In the evening he and his wife would sit by the brick hearth in a pair of oak rocking chairs and watch the sun set through the collection of antique glass bottles he’d arranged in the west-facing windows.

In addition to the show cats and gray mare, many other animals came and went, dogs and parakeets and barn cats and different horses—and they had several children, too.

When the children left, his wife’s body began dismantling her from inside out. When she was too ill to have intercourse with her husband, she found a kind woman who was willing to do it for her.

After his wife died, the man continued to have intercourse with the kind woman until she, too, died. Then he spent most of his time alone until his son appeared on his doorstep one day, carrying a dirty cloth sack of belongings, asking to be let in for supper.

The man learned to cook as a soldier and could do several dishes serviceably. He broke some eggs in a pan and tended them while his son sat at the table looking at his hands. His son’s face was thin and tired and old. It was strange to have an old man for a son. He did not like to look at his son’s face.

He put his son in what had once been the boy’s bedroom. Now it was crowded with the man’s factory office—his impressive desk, his files and drawings, his dainty models of chairs and chifforobes. The taste for his product had gone sour in the public’s mouth long ago. What they wanted now was the look of wood but not the price. They wanted to pitch everything to the curb for new every few years.

When he closed the factory, he’d built a big steel building at the south corner of his property and filled it with what inventory remained. To take the air in the afternoons he would walk there, crossing his lawn and the long, fenced pasture. He’d unbolt the heavy lock and stick his head inside.

The building was windowless, unelectrified. The dark had a watchful quality. For days, his workers had trundled in and out, scrambled up and down, shouting and sweating, stacking everything into a pile that reached the ceiling. The uppermost pieces had threatened to tip the whole but now sat serene.

The man squinted. There was a leg—there an arm. There were empty seats, empty chests. But unlike others he’d seen, this was a bloodless tangle. The smell of it all drifted up to him—cool, dry, bottled. The man breathed deeply through his nose. Without the smell, there were many things he forgot.

THE LOCKET

Under a noon sun, on a black cloth, lay a glitter of metal—hard to look at. I picked up a locket—old, gold—and dangled it by its chain. I wedged my nail in its seam and split it open like a piece of fruit.