The Hermit's Story Read Online Free Page B

edge that Billy had made for her, and every evening Amy would take a loaf of bread there and feed it, crumb by crumb, to the beautiful big birds as dusk slid in from out of the trees.
    Amy would toss bread crumbs at the black-masked swans until it was dark, until she could see only their ghostly shapes moving pale through the night, the swans lunging at the sound of the bread crumbs hitting the water. I had sat there with her on occasion.
    On the very coldest nights—when the swans were able to keep the pond from freezing only by swimming in tight circles in the center, while the shelf-ice kept creeping out, trying to freeze around their feet and lock them up, making them easy prey for coyotes or wolves or foxes—Amy would build warming fires all around the pond’s edge. Wilder swans would have moved on, heading south for the hot-springs country around Yellowstone or western Idaho, where they could winter in splendor, as if in a sauna, but these swans had gotten used to Amy’s incredible breads, I guess, and also believed—knew—that she would build fires for them if it got too cold.
    They weren’t tame. She was just a part of their lives. I think she must have seemed as much a natural phenomenon to these swans as the hot springs and geysers must have seemed to other swans, farther south.
    From my cabin on the hill, I’d see the glow from Amy’s fires begin to flicker through the woods, would see the long tree shadows dancing across the snowfields, firelight back in the timber, and because I was her neighbor, I’d help her build the fires.
    Billy would be out there, too, often in his shirtsleeves, no matter how cold the weather. It was known throughout the valley that Billy slept naked with the windows open every night of the year, like an animal, so that it would help him get ready for winter—and he was famous for working shirtless in zero-degree weather, and for ignoring the cold, for liking it, even. It was nothing to see Billy walking down the road in a snowstorm, six miles to the mercantile for a bottle of milk or a beer, wearing only a light jacket and with his hands shoved down in his pockets, bareheaded, ten below, and the snow coming down like it wasn’t ever going to stop.
    Billy had always been precise—a perfectionist, the only one in the valley—but during this year I am telling about he seemed more that way than ever. Even his body was in perfect shape, like a mountain lion’s—a narrow waist but big shoulders and arms from sawing wood endlessly. But there were indications that he was human and not some forever-running animal. He was going bald, though that was no fault of his. He had brown eyes almost like a child’s, and a mustache. He still had all of his teeth (except for one gold one in the front), which was unusual for a logger.
    He took his various machines apart daily, in the dusty summers, and oiled and cleaned them. I think he liked to do this not just for fanatical maintenance but also to show the machines his control over them; reminding them, perhaps, every evening, that he created them each day when he took them in his hands. That his work gave them their souls—the rumbling saw, the throbbing generator, and his old red logging truck.
    Even in the winter, Billy took deep care of his machines, keeping fires going night and day in the wood stoves in his garage, not to warm himself, but to keep the machines “comfortable,” he said—to keep the metal from freezing and contracting.
    It would make a fine story to tell, a dark and somehow delicious one, to discover at this point that of all the concern and even love that Billy gave to his machines was at a cost, that perhaps it came at Amy’s expense.
    But that was not the case.
    He had a
fullness
to him that we just don’t often see. He was loving and gentle with Amy, and I would often marvel, over the years I knew him, at how he always seemed to be thinking of