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

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 larch 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