Norman walked on the road until it quit being a road. It just faded into the prairie. There was a small cabin in the distance at the base of a hill, and he headed for it, kicking at dirt clods and rocks  as he went. There were faint ruts from tires and wagon wheels that made a straight line to the cabin.

The cabin stood in a small grove of trees. They were scrub trees, but trees nevertheless, some of the only ones in the settlement. Their branches bent and tossed in the steady wind, and Norman welcomed their shade as he walked beneath them.

The cabin was small, and it looked like it had been built in stages over the years. The center room was the largest and probably the oldest, built of limestone with a short limestone chimney. There were smaller rooms on two sides with wooden walls that might have come later.

One addition, off the side opposite the chimney, looked like a wooden continuation of the limestone cabin. It was a little narrower, its roof slightly lower, but it had the same wood shake shingles as the cabin. It also had a door at the end with glass panels on either side. Outside that door was a small, square, limestone patio with a metal roof.

About a hundred feet past the patio was a well with a cover and square roof with a bucket underneath. It must have been spring fed. A trickle of water ran in the creek bed that sloped away from the well.

The cabin’s other addition, a smaller wooden room set in the wall to the right of the chimney had a metal roof like the one over the patio.

There was also another entry door that appeared to be the back door in the limestone wall next to the chimney. About twenty feet outside that door was a root cellar dug into the base of the hill behind the cabin, and Norman looked inside. The cellar itself was down three steps, dank and musty with limestone walls, low ceiling and dirt floor. It was about ten by ten with shelves lining the walls stocked with jars of canned who knows what, the glass so dusty that you couldn’t see through it. In the back wall was an opening supported by wooden posts that looked like the beginning of a tunnel that went further under the hill. It might have been the mine that Maxine talked about. With the cellar door open, there was barely enough light to see inside the tunnel. It could have been the opening to an old mine in years past, but now it was all caved in.  The tunnel ended abruptly in a sloping dirt wall about six feet past the posts.

The only windows in the cabin, besides the glass panels at the front door, covered the wall on the side of the chimney opposite the smaller addition.

After he circled the place without seeing signs of life, Norman chose the front door and knocked on one of the glass panels, tentatively at first, but then more boldly. His knocks brought no sounds of movement from within, so he tried the knob, and the door swung easily inward.

“Hello!” he called. “Is anyone here?”

The only response came from the whine of the wind around the corners of the cabin, and Norman stepped inside, leaving the door open behind him. He called again, but there was only silence.

The room inside the door was the wooden addition opposite the chimney that had wood shake shingles like the original part of the cabin. It was short, little more than the length of a bed, and narrow. In fact, there were two beds, twin size, on each side against the walls, neatly made with quilts spread over them. Between was maybe six feet of walking space. The room opened into the center of the cabin with the fireplace straight ahead.

Norman surveyed the main cabin from left to right. A pot bellied stove sat on the hearth, piped up the chimney flue, and a wood bin against the wall to the left of it was stocked with split logs. Norman knew from seeing the outside of the cabin that the chimney was short, not tall enough to draw well. A fire on the open hearth would probably have been smoky, and besides being used for cooking, he guessed the stove kept the smoke down. The wall to the left of the fireplace was the side with the windows. Beneath them was an armchair with a cover thrown over it, stuffing peeking from the holes in the well-worn arms and a round cloth-covered table. On the table was an oil lamp with a glass shade, and a glass ashtray. Norman had not seen Noah smoke, so the ashtray might have been a holdover from Angus, or a previous Mac Taggert. Against the wall to the right of the fireplace was a table with fold-down leaves and a hutch with plates and drinking glasses. The corner on that side of the fireplace was flanked by two doors. The one in the back wall was the outside door. The door in the sidewall opened into a small bedroom that was the smaller wooden addition, the one with the metal roof. It was barely large enough to hold a double bed, a nightstand, and a short chest with drawers. There was no closet, just hooks on the wall.

There was no electricity or indoor plumbing in the place. The walls were paneled with knotty pine, and the floor was rough wooden planks. It was impossible to keep out the dust, the way the wind blew, but the place was clean enough. It was small and cozy with everything you needed, stove for heat and cooking, beds, and a place to sit and look out the windows. Norman looked around one more time before he departed the same way he came in,closing the door behind him.

He sat in the patio’s shade, letting the breeze cool him.

So, why had he come, he asked himself? What was he looking for? Was he just drawn by curiosity and the lack of anything better to do, or was there something else? After speaking to the man at the store, walking through what little there was of Maxwell, talking with Maxine, trudging along the road to the cabin, and finding nothing there of consequence, he had to reassess the whole thing. What seemed like a quest of some kind now seemed like a dead end, not much different than the bus ride that started the whole journey. He knew it was Noah’s strange words that drew him initially, but what did they really say? He had been rolling them over in his mind ever since, during the hitchhike with truckers and farmers, and finally during the last miles to town, but maybe the old guy was just loony. Maybe it was no more than the babbling of a confused mind that was never right from the start. Maxine said as much.

“Noah was a drinker.”

That was the first thing she had to say, almost like an apology. And Norman knew first hand about the fragmented mind of a drinker.

“You kind of had to throw out the normal way you think about people, and start over again with Noah.”

Noah’s talk seemed at first to Norman like it made a strange kind of sense, posing a mystery that opened the door to an adventure, but did it? Seeing the dried-up town and ramshackle cabin brought him back to square one, right where Norman had begun the journey, washed up and down to his last dime. He scuffed at the flat stones of the patio floor with the toe of his shoe. Just let it go, he told himself.

“Just let it go, God damn it!” he said aloud.

At that point, as he sat in the weathered chair beside the weathered table on the weathered patio, everything began crashing in on him. Everything in his life was gone, his job, his daughter and granddaughter, Henry… Why keep fighting it?

Norman laid his head on his arms on the table and began to weep. And once he started, he could not stop. He felt like he was at rock bottom, and the despair of it all was more than he could bear. The tears came, and he sobbed uncontrollably.

He had cried like that twice before in his life, once when his mother died, and again when Henry passed. But this seemed worse. There was no reason to stop, no light at the end of the tunnel, no kind hand on his shoulder or kind voice in his ear. There was only the wind whistling around the cabin.

******************************************************************

Norman did not know how long he sat there. At some point, he stopped sobbing, but he kept his head on his arms. He was exhausted mentally and physically. He might have slept for a while, and maybe it was the wind that tugged him awake. He didn’t know. He felt like he had been running against the wind for his whole life, but it didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered. It was not like he was in a void, for the space was filled with something, maybe a presence of some kind. He became briefly aware that his mind had emptied of all thoughts, and then he returned to the silence. Henry’s voice was the only thing he heard.

“Don’t ever surrender, you hear me? That’s like giving up! You just allow. Allow the fact that your dumb ass is responsible for all this. That’s when things will start getting better.”

In the silence, Norman allowed. It didn’t change anything in the outer, but it changed something inside. For the first time that he could remember, he felt peace.

“Don’t nothing happen by accident!” Henry sometimes said. “Sometimes you got to look real hard for the reason, but it’s there.”

Norman opened his eyes and looked around, but he saw nothing except that the sun was much lower in the sky. He saw nothing that seemed like a good reason for his being there. Maybe he wasn’t looking with the right eyes. Maybe he needed to see in a different way.

Maxine said that Angus MacTaggert was old when Noah was young, and there were MacTaggerts before Angus. How far back was that? A hundred and fifty years? That would be when this territory first opened up. What did the land that later became Maxwell look like then? A hundred and fifty years ago, people were still plowing up the prairie sod and building houses out of it.

“Colder than a well digger’s ass!” Noah had said and laughed at Angus’s joke.

And suddenly Norman knew it. Maybe it came from emptying his mind and allowing a new inspiration, but he finally got it.

“Angus knew right where to look, and he shared it.”

Noah’s talk was about two different things at once.

Norman walked to the well, and pulled on the wooden cover that was on top of the bricks. It gave easily in his hands, and he tugged it loose and rolled it aside. Looking inside the well, Norman could see the reflection of water at the bottom.

A hundred and fifty years ago, water would have been the lifeline as people settled the territory and moved further west, and the first MacTaggert knew right where to look for it. The man knew how to find water and dig a well. There was still water in it a century later.

Peering inside, Norman saw a patch of blue on one of the bricks.

“Blue ten down,” had been Noah’s words, words that did not fit with the rest.

Norman counted down ten rows of bricks to the one with the blue mark. Getting to the brick was as far as Norman could reach, but it was loose, and he pulled it from the wall of the well. Behind the brick was a sack, and Norman removed it from the cavity.

Norman emptied the contents on the wooden well cover. He was no expert, but the nuggets appeared to be ore, maybe silver. Norman stretched his arm back down inside the well. There was a second bag, and he brought it up also.

So, the MacTaggerts knew right where to look for two things, water and silver. They shared the water with everyone, and Angus shared the silver with Noah. Maxine told Norman that Noah was the last one out here. There were no other MacTaggerts. Norman could take the ore and see what it was worth.

Another thing became crystal clear to Norman. The town’s name might have changed over the years to Maxwell, but it didn’t start that way. It began as Mack’s well.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

With a fresh supply of food, Lizzie was back to feeding the ducks, squealing joyfully as her favorite, the little white one, grabbed a piece for itself. She had plenty to share with the quacking throng.

Norman eased back against the park bench to watch the fun and soak up the late afternoon sun, relaxing as much as he could, though still fearing that it all might slip away again. That fear would probably be present for the rest of his life, but he had a new resolve as well. The vein that yielded Noah’s silver nuggets proved to be pure, and it gave Norman a new lease. Like Angus, he vowed to share it.

“I don’t know what brought you back to us, Dad,” Lisa told him. “I’m just glad you’re back! I don’t want to lose you again!”

And Henry’s wisdom was never far away.

“You don’t never get no do-overs,” Henry would say, “but life is funny. Sometimes it gives you a second chance. What’s done is done, but you can pick up the pieces and start over. And if you ever get that break, hang on to it!”

Norman knew he got one, and he hung on. It was a gift.