Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
The Hermit’s Story
Swans
The Prisoners
The Fireman
The Cave
Presidents’ Day
Real Town
Eating
The Distance
Two Deer
Read More from Rick Bass
About the Author
Connect with HMH
FIRST MARINER BOOKS EDITION 2003
Copyright © 2002 by Rick Bass
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Bass, Rick, date.
The hermit’s story : stories / by Rick Bass,
p. cm.
Contents: The hermit’s story—Swans—The prisoners—The fireman—The cave—Presidents’ Day—Real town—Eating—The distance—Two deer.
ISBN: 978-0-618-38044-2
1. United States—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.A8213 H47 2002
813'.54—dc21 2001051616
eISBN 978-0-547-34668-7
v3.1216
Elizabeth
Acknowledgments
I’m very grateful to my family—Elizabeth, Mary Katherine, and Lowry—for their support, and to my editors who worked on these stories—Harry Foster, Camille Hykes, Elizabeth Kluck-hohn, Tara Masih, and Alison Kerr Miller—and to Julie Burns for her help, as well, and to my agent, Bob Dattila, and typist, Angi Young. I’m proud to have Russell Chatham’s painting on the cover, and I appreciate his cover design and the book design by Anne Chalmers. Thanks also for editorial help to George Plimpton, James Linville, Michael Griffith, and Lois Rosenthal, and to the editors of magazines in which these stories first appeared, in various forms: “The Hermit’s Story,” “The Cave,” and “Two Deer” in the Paris Review; “Swans” in Story; “The Prisoners” in Hayden’s Ferry Review; “The Fireman” in the Kenyon Review; “Presidents’ Day” in Southwest Review; “Real Town” in Epoch; “Eating” in the Southern Review; and “The Distance” in the Black Warrior Review. “The Hermit’s Story” and “The Fireman” also appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1999 and 2001, respectively, and “The Fireman” appeared in Pushcart Prize 2002.
These stories are based on the imagination and the characters in them do not represent any persons known to me, living or not.
The Hermit’s Story
AN ICE STORM, following seven days of snow; the vast fields and drifts of snow turning to sheets of glazed ice that shine and shimmer blue in the moonlight, as if the color is being fabricated not by the bending and absorption of light but by some chemical reaction within the glossy ice; as if the source of all blueness lies somewhere up here in the north—the core of it beneath one of those frozen fields; as if blue is a thing that emerges, in some parts of the world, from the soil itself, after the sun goes down.
Blue creeping up fissures and cracks from depths of several hundred feet; blue working its way up through the gleaming ribs of Ann’s buried dogs; blue trailing like smoke from the dogs’ empty eye sockets and nostrils—blue rising as if from deep-dug chimneys until it reaches the surface and spreads laterally and becomes entombed, or trapped—but still alive, and drifting—within those moonstruck fields of ice.
Blue like a scent trapped in the ice, waiting for some soft re-lease, some thawing, so that it can continue spreading.
It’s Thanksgiving. Susan and I are over at Ann and Roger’s house for dinner. The storm has knocked out all the power down in town—it’s a clear, cold, starry night, and if you were to climb one of the mountains on snowshoes and look forty miles south toward where town lies, instead of seeing the usual small scatterings of light—like fallen stars, stars sunken to the bottom of a lake, but still glowing—you would see nothing but darkness—a bowl of silence and darkness in balance for once with the mountains up here, rather than opposing or complementing our darkness, our peace.
As it is, we do not climb up on snowshoes to look down at the dark town—the power lines dragged down by the clutches of ice—but can tell instead just by the way there is no faint glow over the mountains to the south that the power is out: that this Thanksgiving, life for those in town is the same as it always is for us in the mountains, and it is a good feeling, a familial one, coming on the holiday as it does—though doubtless too the townspeople are feeling less snug and cozy about it than we are.
We’ve got our lanterns and candles burning. A fire’s going in the stove, as it will all winter long and into the spring. Ann’s dogs are asleep in their straw nests, breathing in that same blue light that is being exhaled from the skeletons of their ancestors just beneath and all around them. There is the faint smell of cold-storage meat—slabs and slabs of it—coming from down in the basement, and we have just finished off an entire chocolate pie and three bottles of wine. Roger, who does not know how to read, is examining the empty bottles, trying to read some of the words on the labels. He recognizes the words the and in and USA. It may be that he will never learn to read—that he will be unable to—but we are in no rush; he has all of his life to accomplish this. I for one believe that he will learn.
Ann has a story for us. It’s about a fellow named Gray Owl, up in Canada, who owned half a dozen speckled German shorthaired pointers and who hired Ann to train them all at once. It was twenty years ago, she says—her last good job.
She worked the dogs all summer and into the autumn, and finally had them ready for field trials. She took them back up to Gray Owl—way up in Saskatchewan—driving all day and night in her old truck, which was old even then, with dogs piled up on top of one another, sleeping and snoring: dogs on her lap, dogs on the seat, dogs on the floorboard.
Ann was taking the dogs up there to show Gray Owl how to work them: how to take advantage of their newfound talents. She could be a sculptor or some other kind of artist, in that she speaks of her work as if
