Protagonist · The Quiet Man
Fifty-six. Owner of Haskell Hardware, in the building his grandfather Emmett raised in 1962, behind the counter his father Dale built in 1971. Thirty-one years behind that counter; he knows where everything is by feel, and reads a failing floor, or a failing town, the way other men read weather.
Haskell Hardware is three generations deep. Boyd’s grandfather Emmett built the building on Main Street in 1962, laid the brick, and laid out the twelve-hundred-square-foot apartment above it where the family has lived ever since, by the back staircase, without ever leaving the building. Boyd’s father Dale built the eighty-inch oak counter in 1971, with Emmett, and installed the brass edging and the brass bell above the door the same year; he commissioned the HASKELL HARDWARE sign lettering from a Granger sign painter in 1982, threw the lopsided HASKELL HARDWARE mug at a pottery class in 1990, and made the oak stool in 1989 for Ed Wakely, Boyd’s father-in-law. Dale moved to a small east-side house in 1994 and died there in 2003. Boyd has run the store for thirty-one years, his margins lower than the chains’, absorbing the difference as the cost of remaining the person his father wanted him to be. He lives in the apartment above the store with his wife Jean and Hank, the twelve-year-old Lab.
The door frame between the front of the store and the office carries pencil marks in a hand that is not Boyd’s, Tyler Haskell’s heights, climbing from age five to the last one: age seventeen, five-foot-eleven, the year before he enlisted. Tyler shipped to Afghanistan and, three months from the end of his deployment, an IED on a road in Helmand Province made the measurement final. Tyler James Haskell, 1995–2014, nineteen years old, three months from coming home. The oak stool against the wall was his from age five, when he found his late grandfather’s stool in the back and asked to sit on it; nobody has sat on it since he deployed. The store is the last room where the marks are, the last room where Tyler, in any sense, still exists.
Jean Haskell, fifty-six, is the town librarian, whose hands handle pages the way Boyd’s handle lumber. She lost Tyler too, and differently, she grieves the forward, the grandchildren and holidays that will not come, while Boyd grieves the backward, the store and the stool and the room. They have occupied the same apartment and two incompatible griefs for eleven years, and the apartment has held because Jean is the load-bearing wall. After the October kitchen-table conversation, she begins, quietly and practically, to pack.
Everything the old man in the diner named. The plant up the river keeps shedding shifts; HomePlus opens on the bypass past the cemetery; Boyd mortgages the building to buy eight more months, runs the first sale the store has ever run, lays off Walt, sells the cabin, and loses the store anyway, the last day a Wednesday in January. Jean drives to Granger; Boyd cannot yet come, and stands in the doorway while she goes. He chooses to hold on not because he disbelieves the warning, it is the most specific thing anyone has said to him, but because closing the store is a thing he would have to do, and losing it slowly is a thing that happens to him. He survives it by following Jean to Granger and cutting glass at a hardware store there, the stool left behind in the dark, the marks carried out in a shadow-box he builds by hand.
Haskell Hardware sells to the whole town, so Boyd’s counter is a crossroads. Dennis Reilly comes in for a tape measure with no kink in the blade (The Loyal Man); Maggie Caldwell comes in for structural screws and the news that the chain is quoting her crews direct (The Loyal Daughter). The Haskells turn out for every youth team in The Good Father, and Cooper Marsh stays at their house. The store is “Boyd-run” in every book up to his own, an open Main Street fixture whose fate is the one thing the series saves for The Quiet Man.