The Hermit's Story (20 page)

There's a grate welded over the top of the well to prevent people from falling inside, and their girls kneel before the grate and drop pebbles down into its vast darkness.

They can barely see the glint of the still water so far, far below. (The well is not used anymore; water is instead piped uphill from the Shenandoah River.)

They count the long, long moments it takes for each pebble to plink into the sky's reflection far below. It's astounding how deep the searchers had had to dig to arrive at even that meager and distant trickle; and in the number of seconds it takes for each pebble to splash, and in the distance of time it then takes for the sound of that splash to travel back up to them, the listeners above can measure precisely the frustration, and sometimes perhaps even terror, Mr. Jefferson must have felt, night and day, that he had built his home, his life, his dream, on a substrate that was not adequate for either his needs nor his desires.

How many countless days, and then years, was water instead hauled, bucket after bucket, from the distant shining river at the base of the mountain—hauled bucket by bucket in an endless and ceaseless procession of brute labor—curl of deltoid, sheen of broad back, and laboring mule?

Such folly! A beautiful edifice, but he should never have built here.

The girls take turns clutching their little twig. As Mason remembered next to nothing from his first trip to Monticello, what, in turn, will they remember?

Perhaps the light through the old glass. Perhaps the giant Osage orange tree, or perhaps the dry clink the pebbles made as they tumbled all the way down the nearly dry well to the distant water so far below. Waiting, in their child's game, to hear the tiny
plink!,
as long ago the anxious dreamer himself, with far less pleasure, might have leaned over this very well and listened likewise, watching and waiting for the well to recharge, so slowly, with so much other beauty all around him.

Mason and Alice glance at each other nervously. Always, Mason tells himself, we should remember what is at stake. Our little slaves.

Something catches the corner of his eye: some distant movement, back in the woods. Something blue and wild and powerful.

He turns away.

I
T WAS
JANUARY
when the first deer went through the ice. I was out in the barn working, and Martha came running out of the cabin to tell me.

I grabbed a rope and went running down to the lake. The deer, a doe, had gone out onto the new ice, all the way to the middle, and had crashed through. It was twenty below and supposed to get colder. The deer had punched a car-sized hole in the center and was swimming in circles, flailing and trying to pull herself up onto the ice with her black shiny hooves. She would work her front legs up and prop herself on the ice that way, like a woman resting her elbows at a table, and then she would kick and thrash, trying to pull herself back up, but would crash through again and slide back into the water. Then she would resume swimming in circles, panicked.

I hurried out onto the ice. The ice cracked under my feet; I slowed down. I knew my wife was watching from the window and I could feel her thinking,
stupid, stupid,
as I went out across the ice. We had a new baby.

The doe's eyes widened. She swam harder, certain that I was coming to leap on her back and bite her neck. The ice was making splintering sounds, so I got down on all fours and crept closer. I was almost close enough to throw the rope.

One knee punched through the ice, and I sank into the water up to midthigh. I lay spread-eagled to keep from sinking any deeper. Cold water swirled around my chest. I could feel the cake of ice I was lying on breaking away from the rest; it began to bob and float, and then sink. I figured I was going down as well, and it was a sour feeling to realize Martha and baby were watching me. I hoped they weren't filming me; we had gotten a new video camera because of the baby, and Martha was always filming everything. It would be a stupid death, captured on tape.

I rolled onto my back—water rushing all around me—and wriggled backwards from the floating ice onto the firmer shelf ice behind me, sliding away from the hole in the ice, away from the thing I was trying to save.

The deer was, I'm sure, wondering only if it would go under or be leapt upon.

***

The second deer leapt in front of my headlights in March. Another doe, it just came sailing up over a snowbank. Her feet never touched the road. I slammed on the brakes and tried to swerve but hit her in mid-flight, as if she were a bird. The truck struck her left shoulder and knocked her into the snowbank.

I stopped the truck and got out and picked up her limp body, and loaded her into the back of the truck with my dogs. She was heavy, and I had to wonder if she was pregnant from back in the fall, from the wild rut that goes on in November, deer chasing each other all over the place, a carnival of deer breeding.

The day before I hit the doe had been the first mild day since winter, the first one where you could feel the sun again, and I'd noticed all the animals walking around slowly, blinking and standing out in meadows as if marveling that such a thing as sun and grass, and open ground, existed.

This deer had eluded starvation, coyotes, and lions, had survived the long hard winter, and now I had snuffed her out, here on the cusp of spring. All of that brave suffering had been for nothing.

My dogs were in the back of the truck with her. It was just into nightfall—seven o'clock. At first the dogs were excited by the deer, but once we started down the road they calmed some, and by the time we got to the cabin those sweet hounds had moved over next to the deer and were lying with their heads resting on her shoulder and flanks, as if keeping her warm. I saw with some surprise that the deer had her head up and was looking around.

I whistled the dogs out and shone a light on the deer. She had just a little bump on her head, and I left the tailgate open, hoping she would jump out and run back into the woods. It was a clear night with stars, and later I crept out and laid a heavy blanket over her. I kept checking on her through the night.

Gradually her head went lower and lower, though, and her breathing grew more ragged. She began to cough, and in the morning she was dead, stiff, her eyes shaded to a dull and opaque blue.

I pulled her out of the truck and took her behind the barn and cleaned her. I was slightly sickened to discover upon gutting her that her shoulder was shattered hopelessly and that her stomach lining had ruptured, so that all of her intestines and other organs (except for the heart) had slid down into the lower half of her body. It was a terrible mess. And she'd just been holding up her head like nothing was wrong. It was dumb to think she could've been all right. I could scarcely believe, looking at her, my childish hopes of the night before—that she might hop down out of the truck and go back off into the woods, and survive, even prosper. I cleaned her and hung her in the barn to age for five days.

The third deer ran through my yard the very next day. I was in the barn trying to work, huddled over a quickly cooling cup of coffee, and I heard the dogs barking the way they do when they see coyotes. They were snarling and barking—Ann howling like a wolf—and I jumped up and ran out into the snow, nearly colliding with this deer, which was bounding through the deep drifts.

A big coyote was right on its tail, and my dogs were chasing the coyote as it chased the deer. We all arrived at the same place at the same time.

The coyote stopped in his tracks when he saw me, but the deer kept going. The coyote whirled and ran in the opposite direction. The dogs chased him a short distance, then turned and trotted back.

I felt like I'd saved that deer, which helped dull the guilt I'd been feeling about the other deer, but it wasn't an altogether clean trade, because I knew that coyotes had to eat. I had saved the deer but had messed up the coyote.

***

Our lives move deeper and slower—as if they are taking on weight. It's good weight, most of it, but it alarms us, I think, at the way it feels like that added weight tries to sink us.

It's like sinking through snow up to your ankles, or deeper. It's like not being sure, one day, that the ice will hold you—when every day before, it has. It may be my imagination, but it seems like Martha doesn't want to talk about this—perhaps does not even believe that this accrual of weight is happening. As if she believes that any day now—tomorrow, for instance—things will begin to get lighter and freer again—if she would even admit to this weight-gathering occurring in the first place.

Martha says all things are cyclic, and they are, but this thing—us—is somehow different.

The things outside of us seem never to change, beyond the constancy of the four seasons—birth, life, death, rebirth—but I'm convinced that our lives are different, just a tad above or below these constant cycles. As if we are on some march through the woods toward some final, newer place.

But Martha won't listen to this kind of talk. She says it's all one cycle, that nothing's changing. And still: despite the endlessness of the days, there are fractures and gaps where whole chunks of time will fall away—as if calving away from the core. Things that were assumed to lock-solid, rock-sure, weaken and fall away, leaving only loss, emptiness, and confusion.

And we start anew.

***

The thing that gets the deer in these woods most of the time is the wolves. There's usually just one pack at a time in this little valley. They keep the deer pruned back real nice, real healthy. None of our deer has ticks or other parasites. Nature's still working the way it's supposed to up here.

There are a lot of coyotes, too, but if the wolves find the coyotes in their territory they kill them as well, viewing the coyotes as competitors. We've seen a group of four wolves chase a pack of a dozen coyotes across a meadow, routing them.

Coyotes hunt the same prey as wolves but use a different style. The coyotes aren't as efficient as the wolves—a lot of times they'll only try to injure a deer, then stay near it for days, waiting for it to succumb—whereas the wolves just pretty much go after what they want and either get it or don't. And if they get it, they get almost all of it. They'll eat nearly everything—85 percent, 90 percent, sometimes 100 percent of the kill—bones, hooves, hide, everything. As if the thing never was.

***

Summer, and our slow days around the cabin: cutting some firewood to sell, or building rock walls for the neighbors; in the late summer, both of us canning fruit and making jam. The heat almost unbearable, boiling water on the wood stove, with which to sterilize the fruit jars. Huckleberries from the woods, and strawberries from the garden. Sweat pouring down us. Adding half a bag of sugar to the whole vat. Pouring it steaming into the jars, and sealing them, and then waiting for the lids to
pop!,
indicating they've swelled to a perfect tight seal. The sweat veeing down our chests and backs; the crackle of the fire in the wood stove, and the baby asleep in the bedroom. Martha and I slipping down to the pond, undressing, and going for a swim to clean off. Making love in the pond—too hot out in the sun—and then climbing up onto the bank to dry in the faintest of breezes—late August, September—and no sound in the world, other than the silence of the baby sleeping and the faintest leaf clatter of the aspens—the sound of a cloud—and the irregular, soothing
pop
of each fruit jar.

Winter at full arm's length: coming, but still a full arm's length away. Dry brown grasses drying in the sun; our lazy arms around each other, our milky skin. A ninety-day growing season.

***

The deer that I hit with the truck, and carried home—the one that I hung out in the barn: on the fifth day of aging it, I went out to butcher her. I'd been walking past to check her every day—to make sure the coyotes hadn't gotten her. And every day when I'd gone by, the deer had been untouched. The doe had been hanging there the same as I'd left her, with her back to me, neck outstretched by the rope, hanging from the rafters with all four legs drooping at her sides, drawn by gravity.

I'd assumed she was still all there, and I'd begun to look forward to the meat. I was going down to the desert to camp and was looking forward to baking the two big glistening red loins in the coals of a campfire, and I was going to marinate great long red strips of the backstrap.

I went into the barn with the butcher knife, but when I swung the doe around to begin skinning the hide, the carcass felt as light as a coat on a coat hanger, and as I spun her to face me I saw that there was only a skeleton beneath the hide, that a coyote had gotten into the barn and had eaten the meat off of her hindquarters, had eaten out all of the butt steaks, had eaten up into the carcass as far as it could reach—standing on its hind legs to do so—eating all the way up to the bottom half of the backstrap, so that only the shoulders and neck were left untouched. I was stunned, and ashamed. I thought I knew better. You can't keep a coyote away from meat. It'll get it—whatever it takes, it'll get it, just as the wolves do.

***

Martha studied whitetails in college, got her doctorate in ungulate nutrition, specialized in winter range requirements. We used to talk about deer all the time—about almost nothing but deer. The bucks we'd seen. When we thought the fawns would drop. When the rut would start: that one week of the year when the bucks run wild, dashing through the forest day and night looking for does to breed, intent on only one thing. Totally unaware of their mortality. Road-hunters cruising the snowy lanes in big trucks, knocking down the bucks as the bucks run right past them, ignoring the trucks, ignoring everything but the sweet scent of deer vulva and buck jism, which has always reminded me of the holidays.

Roadside gut piles and gleaming red carcasses left behind then, and coyotes slipping out of the woods to join in the feast, and ravens cawing all over the valley in what can only be called pagan glee, swooping in and out of the trees with gobbets of red flesh dangling from their beaks, and the snow coming down, sealing off the old world and making the new one, the clean white beautiful one...