The Hermit's Story Read online

  Amy would toss bread crumbs at the black-masked swans until it was dark, until she could see only their ghostly shapes moving pale through the night, the swans lunging at the sound of the bread crumbs hitting the water. I had sat there with her on occasion.

  On the very coldest nights—when the swans were able to keep the pond from freezing only by swimming in tight circles in the center, while the shelf-ice kept creeping out, trying to freeze around their feet and lock them up, making them easy prey for coyotes or wolves or foxes—Amy would build warming fires all around the pond’s edge. Wilder swans would have moved on, heading south for the hot-springs country around Yellowstone or western Idaho, where they could winter in splendor, as if in a sauna, but these swans had gotten used to Amy’s incredible breads, I guess, and also believed—knew—that she would build fires for them if it got too cold.

  They weren’t tame. She was just a part of their lives. I think she must have seemed as much a natural phenomenon to these swans as the hot springs and geysers must have seemed to other swans, farther south.

  From my cabin on the hill, I’d see the glow from Amy’s fires begin to flicker through the woods, would see the long tree shadows dancing across the snowfields, firelight back in the timber, and because I was her neighbor, I’d help her build the fires.

  Billy would be out there, too, often in his shirtsleeves, no matter how cold the weather. It was known throughout the valley that Billy slept naked with the windows open every night of the year, like an animal, so that it would help him get ready for winter—and he was famous for working shirtless in zero-degree weather, and for ignoring the cold, for liking it, even. It was nothing to see Billy walking down the road in a snowstorm, six miles to the mercantile for a bottle of milk or a beer, wearing only a light jacket and with his hands shoved down in his pockets, bareheaded, ten below, and the snow coming down like it wasn’t ever going to stop.

  Billy had always been precise—a perfectionist, the only one in the valley—but during this year I am telling about he seemed more that way than ever. Even his body was in perfect shape, like a mountain lion’s—a narrow waist but big shoulders and arms from sawing wood endlessly. But there were indications that he was human and not some forever-running animal. He was going bald, though that was no fault of his. He had brown eyes almost like a child’s, and a mustache. He still had all of his teeth (except for one gold one in the front), which was unusual for a logger.

  He took his various machines apart daily, in the dusty summers, and oiled and cleaned them. I think he liked to do this not just for fanatical maintenance but also to show the machines his control over them; reminding them, perhaps, every evening, that he created them each day when he took them in his hands. That his work gave them their souls—the rumbling saw, the throbbing generator, and his old red logging truck.

  Even in the winter, Billy took deep care of his machines, keeping fires going night and day in the wood stoves in his garage, not to warm himself, but to keep the machines “comfortable,” he said—to keep the metal from freezing and contracting.

  It would make a fine story to tell, a dark and somehow delicious one, to discover at this point that of all the concern and even love that Billy gave to his machines was at a cost, that perhaps it came at Amy’s expense.

  But that was not the case.

  He had a fullness to him that we just don’t often see. He was loving and gentle with Amy, and I would often marvel, over the years I knew him, at how he always seemed to be thinking of her—of how his movements seemed to be dictated by what might bring her pleasure. And I was struck, too, by the easy way he had of being with her. They seemed fresh together: untouched by the world, and as fresh as that bread.

  Billy took caution to cut the lengths of stove wood to fit in Amy’s various stoves for her bread-baking. He scanned the woods for dead standing or fallen trees, wood that would have the proper grain and dryness to release good and controlled steady heat—good cooking wood.

  In some ways Billy was as much a part of that bread’s scent hanging over the south fork as was Amy.

  But they were her swans.

  So Billy and Amy had a lot of fires: for Amy’s baking; for Amy’s swans, along the shores of the little pond on the coldest nights; for Billy’s machines. Fires in Billy and Amy’s cabin, with those windows always open.

  They used an incredible volume of wood—more wood cut and burned, perhaps, than by any other two people in the history of the world.

  I could step on my porch at almost any hour of the day and hear Billy’s old saw buzzing away in the rich bottom, where trees sprouted, grew tall, became old, and fell over; and through their midst, all his life, Billy wielded a giant saw that other men would have had trouble even lifting, much less carrying and using.

  He kept the woods down there neat; he cut up nearly all of that which had already fallen and carried it out. You could have picnics or ride bicycles or drive cars into those woods if you so desired, between and among the larger, healthier trees, so free of underbrush and downed trees did he keep it.

  But no one ever went there. Things only came out of it.

  Stove-sized pieces of wood, for Amy’s bread. For the swans’ bread. For the scent of the valley. The sound of the saw. Billy’s huge, cross-striated chest muscles.

  What it was like was a balance; Billy’s (and Amy’s) life was wedged—as if stuck in a chimney—between rise and fall, growth and rot. He had found some magic seam of life, a stasis in those woods, and as long as he could keep the woods the same, he and Amy would stay the same, as would his love for her—as would her love for him.

  I would think—without pity—If I had done it like him, none of them would ever have left. If I’d given it my all, I could have lodged us, wedged us, into that safe place where neither life nor death can erode a kind of harmony or peace—a spirit—but I wasn’t a better man. There goes a better man, I’d think, when I saw him driving out of the woods and down the road in his old red truck, the truck sunk nearly to the ground with its load of fresh wood. He gave it his all, and continues to give it his all, I’d think, and he’s going to make it. They’re both going to make it.

  I would feel better to realize that—and to see it.

  Somebody in this world has to attain peace, I’d think.

  ***

  Baking was not all Amy knew how to do. She had gone to a music school in Chicago, had been there on a scholarship to play the piano, but then she’d met Billy, who had driven a trailer load of horses out to sell to a man near Chicago, Amy’s uncle.

  Amy left her bakery, and she left school, too. For thirty years after that, the only times she ever played the piano were on the irregular visits to friends’ houses in town, and once or twice a year when she would go to one of the churches in town, sixty miles away, on a Wednesday, alone before God on a Wednesday afternoon in the spring or in the fall, the church dark and cool and quiet, and she would play there, ignoring the church’s organ and playing their piano.

  ***

  I know that loving a woman isn’t about giving her things; I know that’s an easy and common mistake for men to make, confusing the two. It is the way of other animals in the wild, animals with strong social bonds, to show affection for their mates by bringing in fresh-killed game—but with men and women it is a little more complex. I have watched Billy and Amy, and have watched my three lovers flee the valley—which is the same thing as fleeing me—and I know the best way for a man to love a woman, or woman to love a man, is not to bring gifts, but to simply understand that other person: to understand as much (and with as much passion and concern) as is possible.

  Nonetheless, certain presents can sometimes speak eloquently the language of this understanding, and in the last year before Billy became different, before he began to slip, he bought Amy a piano.

  Billy had been cutting trees in secret for her—live trees, some of them, not just the standing or fallen dead ones.

  Big, beautiful trees—mixed conifers, immense l
arch and spruce and fir trees, and ponderosa and white pine.

  Not a lot of them—just a few every year—on the far side of the bottoms, his father’s land, his cutting-ground—and Billy had been saving that money for years, he told me.

  A tree cut for love is not the same as a tree cut for money, or for bread-baking—but even so, Billy said, he didn’t like doing it, and after he’d made the finishing cut on each piano-tree—cutting one every two or three months—his secret life—Billy said he would feel queasy, as if he were sawing off a man’s thigh: the forest, and life, growth, that dear and sacred and powerful to him.

  It was not that Billy did not understand death—he did. Or said he thought he did, which is, I guess, as close as you can come, until you’re there.

  ***

  Billy knew—he sensed—something was getting out of balance whenever he’d cut one of those ancient trees—but he’d sit and rest after the big tree leaned and then fell, crashing slowly through the leafy canopy below, stripping limbs off other trees, even taking smaller trees with it—shaking the forest when it hit, making the woods jump.

  Billy would sit on a log and just breathe, he told me, and think about nothing but love, about Amy, and he would not move, he said, until he felt that balance—that strange stasis—return to the woods.

  The way he put it—what he was looking for, sitting there in the woods like that, barely breathing—was that he would wait until the woods “had forgotten him again.” Then he would feel safe and free to move back through their midst.

  So he knew what he was doing, in this life; it wasn’t just by accident that he’d holed up in this valley, wedged between the past and the future. Just him and Amy. He had a good feel for what was going on. The way he worked at sawing those logs every day was exactly the way he felt about preserving and nurturing his love for and his life with Amy, until the way he went at those logs with his saw became his love for Amy.

  It was easy to picture Billy just sitting there, mopping his balding head, pouring a cup of water from his thermos in the after-silence of each tree felled, and watching, and listening. Drinking the water in long gulps. A flicker darting through the woods, perhaps, flying from one tree to another, looking for bugs.

  Billy’s eyes, watching it.

  And then home in the evenings, those secret trees resting silent and new-cut, drying out in the forest, and his old red truck laboring, puttering up the hill, past my cabin, home to his wife—past the pond, past Amy in the dusk; Amy seeing the truck pass, waving, throwing a few more bread crumbs to the beautiful, silent, patient swans, and then rising and taking the shortcut through the woods up to their cabin.

  The other part of her life. Her husband. She had her swans, and she had a husband. Children? Never. She was suspended as gracefully, as safely, between the past and the future as was Billy.

  And then, when Billy had sawed enough logs, he sold them and bought the piano and built a little cabin for her next to the pond, just a tiny cabin which housed only the piano and a bench and a lantern and, of course, a stove. The little piano cabin was full of windows, and Amy would open them if it wasn’t raining, and play music to the swans—beautiful classical compositions like Pachelbel’s Canon and Mozart, but also church music. “Rock of Ages” was one of my favorites, and it carried the farthest. Sometimes I would walk through the woods at dusk and sit on a boulder on the hillside above the river and the pond and listen to the music rising from the trees below.

  Other times I’d creep through the woods like an animal to get closer to the pond, and I’d look through the trees and see Amy playing by lantern-light, her face a perfect expression of serenity, playing hard (the thrown-open windows of the little square cabin acting as a giant speaker, so that the sound carried across the hills, up into the mountains, and I liked to think of the mountains absorbing that music, the peace of it settling inches deep into the thin soil, to bedrock, and calming the wild mountains as darkness fell).

  Sometimes Amy sang, ever so quietly. It occurred to me as I watched the swans all watch Amy (lined up, floating there on the water like children in a school recital, listening) that Amy had let go of her bakery job, and her music school, as easily as she let go of everything—tossing away all thoughts of controlling the moment (much less the wild future), as if tossing crumbs to the long-necked swans. Casting away all control, and simply being.

  ***

  Billy had always taught me things. He would stop in and point to my fallen-down wandering fence (I had no livestock, and hence no need of repairing the fence) and tell me that if I’d lay it in a straighter line, that would somehow dissuade the moose from walking through it and knocking it down.

  “You can keep those same-sized replacement poles in your barn, too, instead of having to custom cut a new one each time a moose or elk herd walks through,” he said, but again, I didn’t really care if they knocked it down. I didn’t really care if there was a fence or not.

  Other times Billy would drive up while I was splitting wood in the side yard and point out that the head of my ax was about to fly off any moment now—that the little splinter-wedge chuck I’d used to wedge it back on the first time was getting loose.

  “Soak the handle in salt water,” he said. “Then drive the wedges in.”

  Everything could be controlled. I listened to Billy, and nodded, and learned some things, and forgot others.

  But in the evenings, I listened to Amy.

  ***

  I went over to Billy and Amy’s for supper about once a month. I felt safe in there, sitting at the kitchen table while Amy baked her tortes, quiches, breads, and pies—showing off, the way a person should probably do from time to time. The kitchen, and perhaps the entire valley, groaned with the bread’s scent, which enveloped the deer, the elk, the swans—all living things were aware of it. Yearling wolves fell asleep dreaming of man’s heaven, perhaps, not knowing what they were dreaming of, but surely just as at peace as if they had dreamed of their own.

  Billy took me out to his barn at our October supper—the moon round and orange, and a breeze from the north—and we walked around in his barn looking at things while Amy baked. Billy had not yet started up the wood stoves in his barn—that would not happen until November or December, when the machines, like the animals, began to get cold. Instead, we just walked around inspecting things. Billy inspected his inventory—the rows of nuts and bolts, oil filters of various shapes and sizes, ignition coils.

  Everything gleamed under the light of the shop’s lanterns. The concrete floor was spotless, with none of the visceral oil stains one usually sees in such a place. He picked up a set of packed wheel bearings—spun the smooth inside hub like a toy. He had a case of a dozen—a lifetime’s supply, perhaps—and when one set went bad, he’d just pull them off and stick in a new set. The bearings glistened with the faintest high-grade condensate of lubrication, of earnest readiness.

  “If something happened to me,” he said, “you’d take care of her? Not just anybody could take my place. You’d have to learn things she doesn’t know, and kind of check in on her. Kind of make sure she had enough of everything.”

  “Nobody could ever take your place, Billy.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about,” he said. The big barn was silent except for the flickering hiss of the lanterns: safe and clean and warm, and yet also somehow like a trap.

  We blew out the lanterns and went back across the yard (so many stars above!) and into the warm small kitchen. We sat at the table, said grace, and began to eat, closing our eyes in the bliss of the meal. The windows, as ever, were wide open, and the night’s cool breezes stirred against our arms and faces as we ate. The wood stove creaked as the fire died down and the cabin cooled.

  Night and day; day and night. There is a perfect balance, a drawn and poised moment’s tension to everything. Is it peculiarly human, and perhaps evil, to try to hang back—to try to shore up, pause, build a fortress against the inevitable snapping or release of that tension’s thr
ead? Of trying to not allow the equation to roll forward, like riffle water over, past, and around the river’s boulders?

  ***

  When things started slipping for Billy, they didn’t seem like much, not at first: forgetting names, and forgetting the sequence of things—getting in the truck one morning, he told me, and not remembering to turn the ignition on—putting it in gear, easing the clutch out, and then wondering for several moments why the truck wasn’t moving. Those sorts of things were allowed up in this country and were fairly common, though I didn’t know why.

  Billy was coming by to visit more and more frequently that fall, telling me things out of the blue—giving me knowledge the way someone else might pass out old clothes he no longer had any use for. Maybe Billy knew he was losing the race against rot and was trying to give away as much as he could before it all seeped away. I didn’t know that, then. I just listened, and watched, and was glad he was my neighbor.

  “You can put sixteen-inch tires on your truck in bad winters,” he said. “Gives you another three, four inches clearance. It won’t hurt nothin’.”

  ***

  Later in the fall, when the larch needles turned gold and began falling, flying through the air, tiny and slender, covering the road with a soft gold matting, Billy began forgetting to go into the woods.

  Instead, he would come over to my place, with his empty truck and his dog, to give me advice, as if to prepare me with what I’d need to know to continue living up here. We’d share a glass of iced tea, and I’d just listen. I could tell he had forgotten my name—the way he looked at me strangely and never used my name anymore. I’d often be wearing my camouflage clothes from having been out in the woods hunting deer, meat for the winter, and sometimes I still had my face painted with charcoal.