The Hermit's Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

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