The Hermit's Story, Rick Bass [beautiful books to read .TXT] 📗

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 thread? 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.

Billy would stare at my face for a full minute. His mind was going, gone—over the next ridge—and I wonder what he must have thought, looking at me—wondering if I was a devil, or an angel. I hope that he still recognized me as his neighbor.

“Cut those lodgepole pines behind your house, as soon as they die,” he said, “those beetle-killed ones. Get ’em down on the ground where it’s damp, so’s the eggs can’t hatch and spread.”

Billy would stare out at my crooked, wandering fences. He’d open his mouth to say something else, but then would close it. We’d be out on my porch.

“Shit. I can’t remember what I was going to say.” Billy would rub his head, the side of his face. “Shit,” he’d sigh, and just sit there—having forgotten, even, that he was on his way to go cut wood.

“Let me take you to