by Rick Bass
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 bringing in fresh-killed game—but with men and women it is needless to say 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 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 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 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.
Back to 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, just a tiny cabin which housed only the piano and a bench and a lantern and, of course, a stove. The little piano cabin was full of windows, and Amy would open them if it wasn’t raining, and play music to the swans—beautiful classical compositions like Pachelbel’s Canon and Mozart, but also church music. “Rock of Ages” was one of my favorites, and it carried the farthest. Sometimes I would walk through the woods at dusk and sit on a boulder on the hillside above the river and the pond and listen to the music rising from the trees below.
Other times I’d creep through the woods like an animal to get closer to the pond, and I’d look through the trees and see Amy playing by lantern-light, her face a perfect expression of serenity, playing hard (the thrown-open windows of the little cabin acting as a giant speaker, so that the sound carried across the hills, up into the mountains; and I liked to think of the mountains absorbing that music, the peace of it settling inches deep into the thin soil, to bedrock, and calming the wild mountains as darkness fell).
Sometimes Amy sang, ever so quietly. It occurred to me as I watched the swans all watch Amy (lined up, floating there on the water like children in a school recital, listening) that Amy had let go of her bakery job, and her music school, as easily as she let go of everything—tossing away all thoughts of controlling the moment (much less the wild future), as if tossing crumbs to the long-necked swans. Casting away all control, and simply being.
Billy had always taught me things. He would stop in and point to my fallen-down wandering fence (I had no livestock, and hence no need of repairing the fence) and tell me that if I’d lay it in a straighter line, that would somehow dissuade the moose from walking through and knocking it down.
“You can keep those same-sized replacement poles in your barn, too, instead of having to custom cut a new one each time a moose or elk herd walks through,” he said, but again, I didn’t really care if they knocked it down. I didn’t really care if there was a fence or not.
Other times Billy would drive up while I was splitting wood in the side yard and point out that the head of my ax was about to fly off at any moment—that the little splinter-wedge chuck I’d used to wedge it back on the first time was getting loose again.
“Soak the handle in salt water,” he said. “Then drive the wedges in.”
Everything could be controlled. I listened to Billy, and nodded, and learned some things.
But in the evenings, I listened to Amy.
I went over to Billy and Amy’s for supper about once a month. I felt safe in there, sitting at the kitchen table while Amy baked her tortes, quiches, breads, and pies—showing off, the way a person should probably do from time to time. The kitchen, and perhaps the entire valley, groaned with the bread’s scent, which enveloped the deer, the elk, the swans—all living things were aware of it. Yearling wolves fell asleep dreaming of man’s heaven, perhaps, not knowing what they were dreaming of, but surely just as at peace as if they had dreamed of their own.
Billy took me out to his barn at our October supper—the moon round and orange, and a breeze from the north—and we walked around in his barn looking at things while Amy baked. Billy had not yet started up the wood stoves in his barn—that would not happen until November or December, when the machines, like the animals, began to get cold. Instead, we just walked around inspecting his inventory—the rows of nuts and bolts, oil filters of various shapes and sizes, ignition coils.
Everything gleamed under the light of the shop’s lanterns. The concrete floor was spotless, with none of the drip and splatter of oil stains one usually sees in such a place. He picked up a set of packed wheel bearings and spun the s
mooth inside hub like a toy. He had a case of a dozen—a lifetime supply, perhaps—and when one set went bad, he’d just pull them off and stick in a new set. The bearings glistened with the faintest high-grade condensate of lubrication, of earnest readiness.
“If something happened to me,” he said, “you’d take care of her? Not just anybody could take my place. You’d have to learn things she doesn’t know, and kind of check in on her. Kind of make sure she had enough of everything.”
“Nobody could ever take your place, Billy.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” he said. The big barn was silent except for the flickering hiss of the lanterns; safe and clean and warm.
We blew out the lanterns and went back across the yard (so many stars above!) and into the warm small kitchen. We sat at the table, the three of us, said grace, and began to eat, closing our eyes in the bliss of the meal. The windows, as ever, were wide open, and the night’s cool breezes stirred against our arms and faces as we ate. The wood stove creaked as the fire died down and the cabin cooled.
Night and day; day and night. There is a perfect balance, a drawn and poised moment’s tension to everything. Is it peculiarly human, and perhaps wrong, to try to hang back—to try to shore up, pause, build a fortress against the inevitable snapping or release of that tension? Of trying to not allow the equation to roll forward, like riffle-water over, past, and around the river’s boulders?
When things started slipping for Billy, they didn’t seem like much, not at first: forgetting names, and forgetting the sequence of things—getting in the truck one morning, he told me, and not remembering to turn the ignition on—putting it in gear, easing the clutch out, and then wondering for several moments why the truck wasn’t moving. Those sorts of things were allowed up in this country and were fairly common, though I didn’t know why.
Billy was coming by to visit more frequently that fall, telling me things out of the blue—giving me knowledge the way someone else might pass out old clothes he no longer had any use for. Maybe Billy knew he was losing the race and was trying to give away as much as he could before it all seeped away. I didn’t know that, then. I just listened, and watched, and was glad he was my neighbor.
“You can put sixteen-inch tires on your truck in bad winters,” he said. “Gives you another three, four inches clearance. It won’t hurt nothin’.”
Later in the fall, when the larch needles turned gold and began falling, flying through the air, tiny and slender, covering the road with a soft gold matting, Billy began forgetting to go into the woods.
Instead, he would come over to my place, with his empty truck and his dog, to give me advice. We’d share a glass of iced tea, and I’d just listen. I could tell he had forgotten my name—the way he looked at me strangely and never used my name anymore. I’d often be wearing my camouflage clothes from having been out in the woods hunting deer, meat for the winter, and sometimes I still had my face painted with charcoal.
Billy would stare at my face for a full minute. His mind was going, almost gone—over the next ridge—and I wonder what he must have thought, looking at me, wondering if I was a devil, or an angel. I hope that he still recognized me as his neighbor.
“Cut those lodgepole pines behind your house as soon as they die,” he said, “those beetle-killed ones. Get ’em down on the ground where it’s damp, so’s the eggs can’t hatch and spread.”
Billy would stare out at my crooked, wandering fences. He’d open his mouth to say something else, but then would close it. We’d be out on my porch.
“Shit. I can’t remember what I was going to say.” Billy would rub his head, the side of his face. “Shit,” he’d sigh, and just sit there—having forgotten, as well, that he was on his way to go cut wood.
“Let me take you to a doctor,” I said once; a notion as foreign to Billy, surely, as taking him to Jamaica.
“No. No doctors. I’ve got to pull myself out of this one.”
It was exactly like slipping, like walking down a hill pasted with damp aspen and cottonwood leaves in the fall, going down too steep a trail. Your hand reached out and grabbed a tree, and you saved yourself from falling.
Billy’s body was still strong—his arms, and his saw-wielding, maul-splitting back as broad as ever—but he was talking slower, and his face looked older, and so did his eyes. They looked—gentler.
“Amy,” is what he’d say, sometimes, as he looked out at my half-assed fence—unable to remember what it was he wanted to say.
Instead of cutting wood, he’d go back toward his cabin, park on one side of the road, get out, and wander through the woods as if drawn by lodestone (or the smell of the bread) to the pond, where Amy might be sitting on the bench reading, or writing a letter back home, or feeding the expectant swans.
Billy would sit on the bench next to her as he must have when they first met, when they were young and so far from the end of anything.
Amy would come over to my cabin sometimes, on the days that Billy did manage to find his way back into the bottom to cut still more firewood. She was a strong and content and whole woman, her own life held together as completely as Billy’s, make no mistake about it, and with much more grace, much less muscle, but she was also worried, not so much for herself, but for Billy.
There is romantic nonsense these days about the beauty of death, about the terrible end becoming the lovely beginning, and I think that’s wrong, a diminution of the beauty of life. Death is as terrible as birth is wonderful. The laws of physics and nature—not romance—dictate this.
It occurs to me that sometimes even nature—raw, silent, solemn, and joyous nature—fears, even if only slightly, rot, and decay.
“I’m angry at him,” Amy said one day. “He’s getting worse.” Amy had brought a loaf of bread over and we were sitting on my porch. We could hear Billy’s saw running only intermittently—long pauses between work.
“I feel guilty,” Amy said. “I feel bad for being angry and afraid. I try to remember all we’ve had, but I can’t help it. He’s always been the same, and now that he’s changing, I’m angry.”
“Maybe he’ll get better,” I said.
“He’s changing so fast,” Amy said. “Never any change, and now so much.”
The times when Billy went into the woods to cut logs for all his various fires—the times when he went past my cabin without stopping—he would often miss the turnoff for the small road that went into his woods, and he would just keep going a mile or two. Then I’d hear him stop, and he’d back up the road in reverse, the engine groaning—backing all the way to the turnoff—embarrassed, at first, and telling me about it, laughing, on my front porch the next day (as if I’d not been able to see it clearly, with my own eyes, from where I was sitting); but then, as it happened more often, he stopped talking about it.
I’d sit there every day and watch him drive past in reverse, backing the big empty truck to a spot where he could turn around and go back into the woods and down onto the land his family had owned for more than a hundred years.
It must have struck some chord in Billy—going backwards like that, with the engine straining, things falling away from him, out the front windshield, getting smaller rather than larger. He took to doing it all the time—driving backwards—even while going to the mercantile for groceries.
It was real hard watching someone I admired and respected, whom I wanted to emulate, disappear, as if being claimed by the forest itself.
Other people, however, began to shy away from Billy, in the manner that animals will sometimes avoid another of their kind when it becomes sick.
He no longer seemed to be in that secret seam between wildness and gentleness—the hidden fissure. Amy seemed as ensconced there as ever, but Billy seemed to have suddenly jumped—in the flip of a heartbeat—out to the far end, the very edge of wildness.
I don’t mean he was tortured or even unhappy during this last sea change, the fluctuating tremors of the forest claiming him back; if anything, I think
there was more sweetness, wildness, and pure joy in it for him than ever—lying there listening to Amy’s masterful piano playing and watching out the open cabin door the ghostly shapes of the swans, watching them as if they had gathered, silently, to watch him.
The great coolness of the net of night, the safety of autumn evenings coming down on them again and again, with the days growing shorter, and less conflict, less ambition, less trouble in Billy’s mind as the coils and loops and convolutions of his brain smoothed out and erased themselves.
The smell in the valley, as always, of her bread baking.
People in town said that whenever Billy came into the mercantile for groceries, he would walk into the store and just stand there, unable to remember what he had come for.
He would have to borrow the mercantile’s radio and call Amy on the shortwave and ask her what it was she needed.
I could see the fright in Billy’s eyes, every time I saw him, and in Amy’s, too, as the fall progressed and the light snows began.
I remember walking one starry night after the snow was down—early November, and cold—just out walking, going down the road toward town, to the saloon for a beer or two and a breath of fresh air—and Billy’s truck came over the hill, sputtering and rattling, from a direction that was away from his cabin. I was glad to see that he was not driving backwards—not at night.
I was a long way past his cabin, a long way up the road. It had been more than an hour since I had gone across the bridge over the little creek by where he lived—the swans paddling in slow circles in the creek, white in the moonlight, with the moon’s blurry reflection wavering in their ripples, and ice beginning to form on the creek’s edges. I imagined that the swans were waiting for Amy’s next sonata, these beautiful birds for whom music was an impossibility.
