The Hermit's Story Read Online Free PDF

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 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,