I knew old Wiggins years before he scandalized the area newspapers, because he was part of my childhood, like the pine tree with the tire swing and the forbidden, ancient barn I explored in secret. Old Wiggins lived in a one-room cabin on a rise of land just down the road from my grandfather’s farm, and I was his friend, he said. Now I think he called anyone who came to see him a friend, for certain reasons of his own.
Old Wiggins had just finished off his sixties when we met. I was twelve and a newcomer, sent to stay with my grandparents while some distant storm tried to clear itself. He was only a little taller than I was, white-haired and thin like coarse fabric stretched over sticks: his hands rasped when they touched things, but his eyes were burning, brilliant white-blue. He wore flannel plaid shirts and green work pants, summer and winter, and heavy old black shoes; and I remember his cabin, lined with rows of bent-nail pegs where dozens of his shirts, pants, and undershorts hung in logical pairs, a year-round clothes calendar: on Wednesday, January 3rd, I wear the black watch double-pocket; on Thursday, June 17th, the hanky-red short-sleeve next to the window; on the first day of autumn, the red one with russet buttons. By my grandfather’s standards, old Wiggins was a poor man, but my grandfather did not own a greenhouse and Wiggins chuckled at my name and said, “The gentleman farmer’s grandgirl!” the day we met. I had gone through the fields and found Wiggins in the glass box that jutted out from the shingles and tarpaper of his home. He was bent, like the miser in my books, over a series of shallow boxes, stirring with a heavy wooden spoon, and I stood watching for a long time — the sun was hot near the glass — before he looked up, shocking me with his tiny, sharp eyes. We stared at each other through the glass squares, balanced, on the roots of our toes, gazing and matter-of-fact.
