The Hermit's Story (17 page)

Sometimes I'd like an omen, about what I should do. But there aren't any. Nature's rarely that way. Nature's slow, and we're quick. If the windy day had been an omen, I can't imagine what kind. I think it was just a windy day.

The next day there was less smoke, and by the day after that it had all cleared. It was just the smoke from some grass fires over in Idaho, carried over into our valley on the high winds.

***

Not far downriver from me, there is a married couple, Greg and Beth, who are expecting their first child in the spring. They're not all that much younger than I—in their early thirties—and sometimes on my early-morning canoe rides I go along the river right past their cabin. They sleep later than I do; smoke does not begin to rise from their chimney until after daylight. I see all kinds of creatures on my canoe rides—deer by the dozens, and coyotes, ravens, and moose, bull elk, and porcupines, and once a pair of mountain lions. Sometimes I will stop outside of Greg and Beth's cabin, about a hundred yards off, hidden back in the cottonwoods and the tall frosted cattails, and will study the stillness of their cabin: the way nobody's moving, the way nobody's up and about yet. Sometimes I imagine how it must be for Beth in there, sleeping, warm beneath the blankets, with that baby warm inside her. I sit there in my canoe and wait for the sun to come up—for it to strike my hair with red, to set it aflame.

Sometimes I'll get out and walk along the shore. There are interesting tracks in the mud along the riverbank: cranes, herons, and other wading and shore birds.

There's supposed to be a real nice man up here, a biologist, a young man, not too far down valley. I suppose I should go and visit him, but I'm scared. I'd like to wait just a little longer.

Birds rise from the river's marsh grasses, the tall cattails, and take frantic flight as I move along the river's edge. A beaver slips up from the bulrushes, dives into the still pond above its dam of chewed-up sticks: dives deep, plunging.

I keep walking, scaring up more birds: killdeer, snipe, and plover. They fly away fast and do not come back.

S
OMETIME BEFORE DAWN
, on their first date, driving north through North Carolina to go canoeing in the mountains, they hit an owl. Sissy was sitting up, leaning against Russell's shoulder, and they had been listening to the radio, not speaking, benumbed by the lateness of the hour and the endless roll of road beneath.

They saw the underside of the owl flare up, brilliant white in the glare of the headlights—it swooped right at their faces, barely missing the windshield—and then there was half an instant of silence, so that they thought they had missed it (it was a great horned owl, and seemed as large and incongruous to the night sky in that brief moment as a flying man), but then they heard and felt the thump of the large body striking the canoe, and a few feathers swirled past their windshield, and after slowing and looking back, not seeing it, they drove on, remorseful, saddened.

“Maybe he made it,” Russell said.

They followed narrow winding mountain roads that hugged steep cliffs and the edges of rivers, from which rose ribbons of steam. They drove slower and slower, and saw more and more owls, passing through them as if through a nighttime hatch of immense moths, though they didn't strike any more.

They were still in North Carolina when the sun came up, burning orange-red through the fog, and they stopped for breakfast at a small diner that had a smokehouse attached to its side, through the wood-slat cracks of which issued slow blue smoke. The scent of the smoke caught their attention as if a clothesline had been strung across the road.

The diner was built from old cinder blocks and the parking lot was red clay with scattered beds of gravel. Numerous low swales held muddy water. The lot was filled with old mud-splattered trucks and cars, bald-tired and with sprung-out taillights and headlights duct taped in place. All of the license plates were local, and none of the vehicles had bumper stickers of any kind—as if the drivers led lives so pure as to be unconcerned of anything beyond their immediate control.

Russell and Sissy went out back first to take a look at what was cooking. They found glistening pork ribs and ham steaks blushing as red as oak leaves in autumn. Some chickens, too.

“I'm hungry,” Russell said. They stood there in the blue smoke, letting it bathe them for a while, and looked out at the forest dropping away below them: sweetgum, hickory, oak, loblolly, mountain laurel. They could see more ridges, more knolls and valleys, gold lit, through the framework of green leaves and branches. Tobacco country, down in the lowlands. Russell took another look at the hams. “This is my country,” he said. “Or getting real near it.”

He turned and studied the mound of fresh-split oak sitting next to the grill. Fuel for the coming day's work of altering the taste of a thing. He didn't possess a trace of fat. It would be hard to guess where the calories went on him. It was his own opinion that they just sort of vaporized, like coal or some other combustible shoved into a glowing furnace.

When they went inside, the diners all swiveled to study them unabashedly, and at length. Sissy had never felt so on display. Old farmers in blue denim overalls and straw hats staring at her through Coke-bottle glasses. Canes. Gap-teeth, gold teeth, tobacco teeth. Finally Sissy felt compelled to speak. “Hello,” she said.

One of the old farmers gestured the nub of a finger toward Russell, and then toward their car, and toward the canoe perched atop it.

“Son,” he said, “what are you doin' with that owl?”

They looked out the window and saw that an owl, bent-looking and ruffled, was sitting on the hood of their car, blinking. It had gotten sucked up into the canoe, and Russell had been driving so fast it must have ridden pinned back in the stern, unable to get out. Now that the car had stopped and the pressure had been released, the owl seemed scarcely able to believe it was free.

“Can it fly?” one of the old men asked. Others were staring at Russell now.

“We must have scooped it out of the sky,” Russell said.

Only about half of them believed him. They set their papers down and sipped their coffee and watched the owl with interest and speculation. “It seems disinclined to fly,” one of the men said.

“Hit's watching us back,” said another, and now it seemed as if a gauntlet had been laid down, so that there was no way the old men would let the owl—this ruffled, yellow-eyed interloper—out-stare them, and they crouched forward, leaning over their steaming cups of coffee, and surveyed the owl, which was still squatting in similar fashion, hunch-shouldered, as suspicious of the events that had brought him to this place as were the old men.

Sissy and Russell settled in to eat: road-weary and ravenous, they settled slowly, firmly, back into the real world. Russell could not decide what to exclude from the menu, so he ordered one of everything—pancakes, grits, ham, fried eggs, ribs, bacon, biscuits, gravy—and as if to counterbalance his gluttony, Sissy ordered a cup of coffee and a thin piece of ham.

They ate in silence. A slash of morning sunlight fell across their table, and, after so much darkness on their drive through the night, the sunlight seemed now to carry extra sweetness and clarity.

Russell finished his first helpings and decided to focus thereafter on the fried eggs and ham. The waitress brought him another plate and he stretched—the cracking of tight ligaments in his back sounded almost musical—and told the waitress she'd better just start frying eggs, and that he'd tell her when to stop.

One of the old men noticed the new plate of food and marked a little tally of it on his napkin.

Russell ate steadily for over half an hour: two eggs, ham, two eggs, ham. The restaurant ran out of eggs after he had eaten twenty-four, though they still had some ribs and ham left; but finally Russell said he had had enough, and he leaned back and stretched and patted, then thumped, the taut skin of his belly.

He reached out and took Sissy's hand fondly, and they sat there for a while alongside the old men, in the mild sunlight, and watched the owl.

“Hit wants in to eat some ham, too,” one of them speculated.

“If a cat walks by, that owl'll kill it,” another warned, and now they began to look about almost eagerly, hoping for such a drama.

As if bored by
not
eating, Russell decided to order a single pancake for dessert, and when it arrived he doused it with syrup and then ate it slowly, with much satisfaction, and said, “Damn, I wish I had an egg to go on top of this,” and the old men laughed.

Russell finished and then got up to go to the bathroom. The waitress got on the phone and began ordering reinforcements for the larder. Sissy noticed that the phone was an old black rotary dial and felt again that they had driven into the past. The old men asked Sissy where they were from, and when Sissy said “Mississippi” the old men looked slightly troubled, as if concerned that there might be more coming just like them: invaders, insatiable infidels—a population of marauders who might devour the entire town.

In the bathroom, Russell settled in on the toilet and stared out the open window at the garden beyond. The lace curtains fluttered in the morning breeze. As Russell was gazing, a mule's enormous head appeared from out of nowhere, startling him considerably. The mule looked as if he had come to inspect something, and, not knowing what the mule wanted, Russell handed him one end of the roll of toilet paper, which the mule took in his enormous teeth and then walked away carefully, gently, drawing the toilet paper out in a steady unspooling.

Russell watched, mesmerized, as the mule wandered randomly around the garden and through the field and then around the corner, around toward the front of the restaurant, as if laying down the borders of some newly claimed territory—and it was not until the spool of paper was nearly unwound that Russell had the presence of mind to snap it off and save some for himself.

When he emerged, the old men and the waitress were staring at him as if wondering what he might do next, and he and Sissy went out and began gathering the toilet paper, even as the mule now moved along behind them, grazing on the paper.

At first the owl would not let them near their car, hissing and snapping at them, but Russell got a branch and was able to dislodge it; they watched as it launched itself hale and hearty into silent flight, and disappeared, a hunter, into the woods. They waved goodbye to the old men and the waitress and drove off, and as they were leaving the parking lot they saw another truck turning in, a beat-up old red truck carrying in the back of it a single immense hog, which looked none too excited about the journey, as if knowing—maybe from the odor of the smokehouse—what stage of life's journey he was now entering.

“Are you always like this?” Sissy asked as they drove on farther, deeper into the mountains, anticipating the day.

“Like what?” Russell asked.

W
HEN MASON WAS
sixteen, he traveled with a group of Explorer Scouts from Texas to all the great cultural landmarks along the East Coast, including Monticello. He remembers precious little from that trip and those long days. The fetid odor from the Greyhound bus's toilet, a disgusting mix of urine, feces, and antiseptic. A ravenous hunger for junk food. The incessant crunching of Doritos from every youth on the bus, at any and all hours—mandibles clacking as if a brigade of giant insects was on the move. A dull, pervasive homesickness—his first trip of any distance or length—that was at times overwhelming.

Of the grounds at Monticello, and the great house that was a dream made real, Mason remembers almost nothing, save for the vague and uneasy sense that Jefferson had been a crackpot, quite possibly a loser, or at best a bully—trying to impose his rigid principles on everybody around him.

Everyone kept raving about what a marvelous structure Monticello was, so democratic and modern, etc., but to Mason it just looked old and used-up, awkward and boring. Mason was neither strong nor smart for his age, and for much of the first twenty-five years or so of his life it seemed to him that he slept not just at night but through the days. Later in his life, the love of an exciting woman, different from any he had ever known, would be the one thing that most awakened him. But from that time, that trip to Monticello, he can't even remember if it was raining or if the sun was shining.

Only the perpetual smell of the toilet, mixed with the diesel fumes each time the bus would slosh forward from a stoplight. The crunching of the Doritos.

The steady homesickness. The first hint of the feeling that something hugely important—the great and vast reservoir of the essence of time itself, previously unerodable—was beginning, slowly and finally, to be consumed. A few days of his life, just a few but for the first time ever being nibbled away, as the ocean washes away at the sand grains poised at the edge of the tide's far reach.

It's been more than a quarter of a century, but now Mason finds himself back at Monticello, at the age of forty-two, in the company of that woman who helped awaken him and their two daughters, just-turned eight and five. Mason and his family live in Montana now, east of Great Falls, in the prairie, where Mason is a schoolteacher. It's spring break, and in Virginia, at Monticello, the sun is shining.

Huge dragon-headed clouds tower in an azure sky, and nine-masted schooners plow in all directions the eternal blue, trailing in their wake schools of leaping porpoises. Any thought that ever crossed a person's mind is represented in the towering swirl of clouds, this fine spring day. Anything a person wants to see can be found there in the sky, this beautiful breezy day.

After a winter of squabbling, the girls are playing, for the first time in a long time, like little angels; as if in that mild spring breeze some spirit is passing through the high branches of the great trees planted by the hand of the distant gentleman himself, so long ago. How he had wanted to control his world, and, for a little while, how he had succeeded. Jefferson had kept pet mockingbirds that were trained to fly in and out of his open windows. He had once owned a semidomesticated bull elk that would wander the grounds, not too tame and yet not too wild, either, moving along always in that blurred perimeter between the groomed orchard and the deeper woods, moving gracefully in that last wedge of each day's waning light and sliding-in dusk: the elk in that manner seeming poised perfectly between the land of dreams and the land of the specific, the knowable.