Read Online Visions by James C. Glass - Free Book Online

when he was not yet forty, buying good land with cabin and well ten miles south of the three building town called Crosley. How he arrived, or from where, forever remained a mystery. He brought furniture with him, and a dozen boxes of books which he kept on shelves surrounding the one room, neat interior of the cabin. There was a mahogany table, and three matching chairs near a wood-stove used for cooking and heating, and a mattress for a bed. The few clothes he had were hung on nails around the walls, and were always clean.
    His toilet was a privy ten yards from the cabin, nestled among fir trees, and beside it a metal pan on a stand facing a book-sized mirror hanging from a tree. Lamps were scattered inside and outside the cabin, the outside lights remaining on each night without exception, often the inside lights as well, for it seemed that Savas Parkos slept little, and lightly. Even when deer came quietly to lick the salt slabs he left out for them, he would be there watching through a mica-covered window.
    There were no visitors to his cabin until the boy came. He spent his days drinking, and reading in several languages: French, German, Greek, Dutch and English. His origin was Greek. The few who knew him remotely said he was from Rhodes, a businessman searching for a simple life and finding it near Crosley. He bought a horse, and each Saturday rode it to Quincy for groceries and whiskey. There, he would check into the hotel, then dine at Delnico’s Basque Restaurant and spend an evening approaching quiet oblivion at the bar. Late Sunday morning he would arise refreshed for the trip home. This he did with complete regularity for nine years, until the boy came.
    Savas was also a mystery in Crosley, where he did his banking, and refused all social invitations from the town residents until the offers finally stopped. The local interest in him, he well understood, related to his initial deposit of over half a million cash dollars in a bank struggling to stay afloat after the end of the mining boom. There was more money than that, some three hundred pounds of gold dust and nuggets he had wrapped in burlap and lightly covered with earth beneath the floor of his cabin. He seemed a wealthy eccentric who lived simply and spent modestly, a man who wanted little to do with people. After a while the townspeople ignored him, and Savas Parkos lived a quiet life alone, until the boy came.
    It was a Thursday evening, and he was washing dishes, daydreaming about something in his past. A sound, like something striking the cabin wall, and he turned with a plate in one hand to see a face pressed against his mica window. When the plate shattered on the floor, the face disappeared. Savas rushed to the door in time to see a figure crash into the brush by the privy.
    “Hey! You want see me, you come back and we talk!” he yelled.
    No answer. Nothing moved.
    “Nothing here to steal, but I have coffee and bread. You want to eat?”
    Nothing. He waited several minutes, then went inside, shut the door and watched at the window until his eyes were too tired to focus, and so he went to bed with all the lamps burning.
    The next day he watched from the window, and saw nothing.
    Three days after that he put some food on a plate and left it on the washing stand by the privy. The food soured, and dried.
    He baked bread, leaving the cabin door slightly ajar, putting one loaf to cool on the washing stand, and forcing himself to stay away from the window all day. When he went outside late in the evening, the loaf was gone.
    The next day he baked bread again, leaving the door wide open and singing every Greek song he could remember. When the bread had cooled, he took a loaf outside along with butter and a small wheel of cheese, and sat by a packing crate which served as table, putting the food on top of it. He broke bread, spread chunks of it thick with butter and cheese, and ate noisily.
    Near dusk, the boy suddenly appeared.
    Savas was first aware of a