“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 yellow 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.
His 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 eager, expectant swans.
Billy would sit on the bench next to her as he must have when they first met, when they were so raw and unquestionably young and so far from danger.
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 for herself, or about being left alone, 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.
…
“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—and all that he’s given me—but I can’t help it. He’s always been the same, and now that he’s changing, I’m angry.”
“Maybe he will get better,” I said lamely.
“He’s changing so fast,” Amy said. “Never any change before, and now so much of it.”
…
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, I suppose. Then I’d hear him stop, and he’d back up the road in reverse, 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 him whom 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 safely and permanently 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
