“Door,” Kevin finished, and he set the red note down on the table between us as if it might bite. “Mrs. Hollis, Phil wrote it plain. If a man comes to the house asking about the telescope, call the sheriff before you open the door.” He swallowed. “Then he drew a little box with a line through it. I think he meant that the man would have a gun.” Mr. Begay, who taught my husband to read the stars forty years ago and had driven up from the school without being asked, sat very still in the corner chair with his hat on his knee.
The red note went on, in the shaky pencil of a man whose hands were failing. Phil had sold an old rifle at a gun show in Winslow, in the spring, to a man who gave no name. Weeks later that same man telephoned, saying the buyer had used the rifle for something terrible, and that Phil would be blamed unless he paid. Phil refused. The man began to come around. Twice, he sat outside our house in a gray truck. Phil told me nothing. He told the telescope, I suppose, and the map tube, and a red piece of paper. I stood there understanding that my husband had carried a fear alone through a whole summer of ordinary dinners, and had chosen to put it in a tube rather than in my ears.
I read it standing at the window, with the Flagstaff light going orange on the pines. I remember thinking, absurdly, of how Phil always parked the car with the nose facing out. I had teased him for it. Forty seven years of marriage, and I never asked why a retired surveyor, a gentle man who talked to birds, would want a car ready to leave. “Kevin,” I said, “how long has the truck been out front?” He looked at me with his mouth open. Then both of us turned to the window.
A red note in a map tube can be the last thing a quiet husband had the courage to say.
The gray truck sat at the curb across the street, engine off, a shape behind the glass. Kevin reached for his telephone. His hand shook so badly that Mr. Begay took it from him gently and dialed himself. “Coconino County,” he said, in his low, steady Navajo voice, “I am at the home of Mrs. Hollis on Beaver Street. There is a man in a gray truck watching the house. We have reason to believe he is armed.” He listened. “Yes. We will stay inside. We will not open the door.”
Eleven minutes. I have never known eleven minutes to take so long. Mr. Begay stood to one side of the front window with the curtain barely moved, and Kevin crouched by the couch, and I sat in the chair of Phil with the telescope pointing at the ceiling. When the cars came, there were two of them, with no sirens, and they closed in on the gray truck from both ends of the block. The man inside never reached for anything. He simply put both hands on the steering wheel and waited, like a man who had been tired for a very long time.
His name was Dale Terrell, and he was not what I expected. He was sixty one, thin, in a clean flannel shirt, with a gray mustache and eyes red from a long night. Deputy Yazzie brought him in only after Mr. Begay vouched that it was safe, and sat him at my kitchen table with a glass of water. There was no gun. There had never been one. What Dale carried, in a manila envelope, was a bill of sale from the gun show, signed by Phil, and a photograph of a young man in a hospital bed.
“My son,” Dale said. “He bought the rifle from your husband in April. He was twenty four. He did not tell me he was going to use it on himself.” The room went quiet. “I came to find out why a man would sell a rifle to a boy with those eyes. I wanted to scream at him. And then I read in the paper that he had died, and I could not stop coming.” He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. “I was never going to hurt anyone, Mrs. Hollis. I just could not leave the street.”
I will not say what I felt. I will say only that I put a hand on the table beside his, and did not touch it, and that Mr. Begay quietly stepped out to the porch to give us room. Phil had not known. The boy had given a false name and a story about a hunting trip. Phil, who never sold a rifle in his life but that one, had sold it because we needed the three hundred dollars for the roof. I told Dale this. He nodded slowly, like a man receiving the last piece of a long puzzle.
The deputy took a report and did not arrest him. The sheriff, a kind man named Sam Whitcomb, came by himself the next morning and sat with Dale on my porch for two hours. Together they drove to a grief group in Prescott that night. Dale has gone every Tuesday since. He sends me a card at Christmas with a picture of the stars on it, and in the card he writes only a line, always the same: Phil would have told me to look up.
The telescope is in the front window now, pointed at the Peaks. Kevin visits on Sundays, and Mr. Begay comes some Fridays when the sky is clear, and the three of us take turns at the eyepiece while the cold rolls down from the mountain. The map tube sits in the corner, empty, with the red note folded in my Bible. I have learned that a person can love a quiet man for forty seven years and still be handed a stranger at the end. I think that is why we look at stars. They hold still while we learn.
