Smoky Brown Plaid

In a country that did not have an autumn, Caleb Roe had built himself one. He had gone up into the hills above the rubber estates when he was thirty-one, in the year his wife died, and he had built a cabin of seasoned hardwood on a ridge where the wind came up the valley in the late afternoon and smelled, if a man stood still and let it come to him, of cold leaves and woodsmoke and the rusted iron of things left out in weather. There was no cold here. There was only the wet heat of the lowlands and the slightly less wet heat of the hills. But Caleb Roe had built his autumn, and he lived in it.

He wore the same jacket for nineteen years. It had been brown wool when his wife had bought it for him in a shop on Robinson Road, the year they were married, and at the end of nineteen years it was the colour of the smoke from his fire and of nothing else. The wool had thinned at the elbows. The pockets had been mended and mended again. He wore it in the heat of the afternoon and he wore it in the cool of the night and he wore it down the path to the town once a year in October, when the rains had eased and the road was firm, to buy salt and flour and a bottle of whisky.

The whisky he bought was a peated whisky from an island he had never seen and would never see, blended by a Tamil merchant on Serangoon Road with a quieter spirit from the American south, finished, the merchant said, in a barrel that had held maple syrup. Caleb Roe did not know whether to believe this. He bought the bottle anyway. It tasted of brown butter and of leaves burning a long way off and of a sweetness that came in at the end and did not stay. He drank one finger of it each evening of the year, on the porch of his cabin, and the bottle lasted him almost exactly until the next October.

He did not speak in town to anyone he did not have to. He paid the merchant. He paid the man at the salt store. He nodded to the priest, who was a Portuguese from Malacca and who had once tried, ten years before, to bring Caleb Roe back to the church, and who now only nodded back. He did not stay overnight. He walked back up the road in the long red dusk with his pack on his shoulder, and the dogs of the town watched him go and did not follow.

The town speculated. It had been speculating about him for nineteen years. The clerks said he was hiding from a debt in another country. The wives said he had killed a man. The children said he was a sorcerer and lived with a tiger that came when he whistled. The priest, who knew the most because he had spoken to Caleb Roe twice and at length, said nothing, because what he knew was not interesting and would have disappointed everyone.

Caleb Roe was not hiding. He was not hunting. He was not holy. He had been married seven years to a woman named Margaret who had laughed in a particular way at the small failures of the day, and she had died of a fever in the September after their seventh anniversary, and he had come up into the hills the following month and had built a place where he could be alone with the way the late afternoon felt on the back of his neck. He had decided, on the night of the funeral, that he preferred his own company to the company of people who were not Margaret, and he had not had cause in the nineteen years since to revise the decision.

The town never understood this. The town had never tried it. The town went on speculating, and Caleb Roe went on coming down once a year, and the jacket went on darkening, until the year he did not come at all, and the merchant on Serangoon Road put the unsold bottle back on the shelf and asked, of no one in particular, whether the old man on the ridge had finally got his autumn.