The Hermit's Story Read Online Free Page A

incredible loaves of bread. I’ve heard it said that when you die you enter a room of bright light, and that you can smell bread baking just around the corner. I’ve read accounts of people who’ve died and come back to life, and their stories are all so similar I believe that’s how it is.
    And that’s what this end of the valley—the south fork of it, rising against the flex of the mountains—smells like all the time, because Amy is almost always baking. The scent of her fresh loaves drifts across the green meadows and hangs along the riverbanks. Sometimes I’ll be hiking in the woods, two or three miles up into the mountains, and I’ll catch a whiff of bread, and I’ll feel certain that she’s just taken some out of the oven, miles below. I know that’s a long way for a human to catch a scent, but bears can scent food at distances of seven miles, and wolves even farther. Living up here sharpens one’s senses. The social senses atrophy a bit, but the wild body becomes stronger. I have seen men here lift the back ends of trucks and roll logs out of the woods that a draft horse couldn’t pull. I’ve seen a child chase down a runaway tractor and catch it from behind, climb up, and turn the ignition off before it went into the river. Several old women up here swim in the river all year round, even through the winter. Dogs live to be twenty, twenty-five years old.
    And above it all—especially at this south end of the valley—Amy’s bread-scents hang like the smells from heaven’s kitchen.
    All that rough stuff—the miracle strength, the amazing bodies—that’s all fine, but also, we take it for granted; it’s simply what the valley brings out, what it
summons.
    But the gentle stuff—that’s what I hold in awe; that’s what I like to watch.
    Gentlest of all were Amy and Billy.
    ***
    All his life, Billy worked in the woods, sawing down trees on his land in the bottoms, six days a week. He’d take the seventh day off—usually a Sunday—to rest his machinery.
    There weren’t any churches in the little valley, and if there had been, I don’t know if he and Amy would have gone.
    Instead, he would take Amy fishing on the Yaak River in their wooden canoe. I’d see them out there on the flats above the falls, fishing with cane poles and crickets for trout—ten- and fifteen-pound speckled beauties with slab bellies that lived in the deepest holes in the stillness up above the falls, waiting to intercept any nymphs that floated slowly past. Those trout were easy to catch, would hit anything that moved. Billy and Amy wore straw hats. The canoe was green. Amy liked to fish. The hot summer days would be
ringing
with stillness, and then when Amy hooked one, it would seem that the whole valley could hear her shout.
    The great trout would pull their canoe around on the river, held only by that one thin tight fly-line, spinning their canoe in circles while Amy shrieked and Billy paddled with one hand to stay up with the fish, maneuvering into position so he could try to net it with his free hand—and Amy holding on to that flexing cane pole and hollering.
    They were as much a part of the valley, living there in the south fork, as the trees and the river and the very soil itself, as much a part and substance of the valley as the tremulous dusk swamp-cries of the woodcock in summer.
    And the swans.
    Five of them, silent as gods, lived on a small pond in the woods below Billy and Amy’s cabin, gliding in elegant circles and never making a sound. Amy said they never sang like other birds—that they would remain silent all their lives, until they died, at which point they would stretch out their long necks and sing beautifully, and that that was where the phrase “swan song” came from.
    And it was for the swans as much as for anyone that Amy baked her bread. She had a park bench at the pond’s