The Rustling -- Part Four: Always Men

Sixty years of men at his fire, and not one of them ever told. He explains why -- and admits the one wound that never closed.

The sky over the crowns had gone from black to that deep iron-blue before dawn. He'd been awake all night and felt none of it.

"Why tell me?" he asked. "Sixty years of being a story. Why let one camper see the man?"

"You think you're the first," I said. It wasn't quite a question. "You're not. Far from it. I've lost the count, honestly. A trapper, before you were born, who I sat with the way I'm sitting with you. A surveyor. Two brothers, once, who'd come up to scatter their father's ashes and couldn't find the words, and I sat between them while they found them. A boy, eighteen, who meant to walk into the lake with his pockets full of stones, and didn't. Every few years, somebody who's wandered up off the map carrying something too heavy. I find them at their fires. I keep them a night. And I send them back down."

He stared. "All those people. And not one of them ever — there'd be photographs. Books. You'd be the most famous man alive."

"And yet." I spread my hands at the silence of the woods, the whole unbroken legend of myself. "Not one ever said a word. And I never asked it of them — it would spoil the thing to ask. They just don't. They go back down and carry it the rest of their lives." I leaned to the coals. "It's how you got seen up here. A man spends his whole life being looked at and never once seen — and then one night, the worst night of it, a stranger looks straight at the true size of him and isn't afraid. The way I saw you, when you came crashing through that hemlock with your little light. The seeing is the gift. The telling would be the spending of it — and a man would sooner cut off his hand." I smiled. "So the myth goes on eating its own tail down in the valley, and I am free. The only thing I've ever taken from any of them."

"Always men," he said then. Slow. He didn't seem to know why he'd noticed. "Every one you named. Men."

And there it was — the thing none of them think to say, said plain across my own fire. I felt it go through me like a cloud crossing the sun on a still day.

"Always men," I agreed. Quiet.

"You've never —"

"Twice in sixty years a woman's wandered up to a fire of mine — and don't think they came empty. The second one sat down not thirty feet from where I stood in the dark and wept like the end of the world, the same weeping I've held the other end of for a hundred men. Both times I stayed in the trees, and let her think the rustling was a bear, and let her carry every ounce of it back down." I was looking at the coals, not at him. "I can sit with any man alive. I can take his grief and hold the other end of it and never feel the floor go out from under me. But a woman comes toward me through the dark with that particular gentleness — the way they have, not afraid, coming toward the thing everyone else runs from, the way Marta came toward me under that deadfall with a fence tool in her hand and no sense at all —" and my voice had gone rough, and I let it — "and I am eighty years old and I weep like a child. Every time. It opens the whole of it. Her, and the leg she set, and forty years, and the larch on the south slope. For a man I can be a marvel. For a grieving woman I am only a coward in the trees, who lets her walk back down alone in the dark with the very weight I was put here to lift — because in that one place I am too broken to reach for it. Don't call it wisdom, son. It's the one wound on me that never closed." I looked up at him, and my eyes were wet, and I was not ashamed of it. "We all keep our secrets up here. Even from the people who'd be gentlest with them. Especially from them."

Neither of us said anything for a while. The creek talked to itself. The first bird tried out the morning.

"So that's your answer," I said, lighter, gathering myself up. "Why tell you. Because I know the look of a man who's come up the mountain to be left alone — I wore it four years before I learned what it costs. And because you've got a nine-year-old down there walking into an empty room every other weekend, hoping her father's in it." I rose, unfolding up and up until I blotted out a column of the paling stars, and the trunk groaned its relief. "Be left alone a while. It's good medicine, the quiet — I'd be the last to say otherwise. But don't make a season into a life, the way I did. I had eighty years and four generations and I still nearly let the mountain keep me. You've got a daughter who's only nine. You don't have my margins, son. Go back down before left alone turns into the other thing. The one with the same map."

I stepped back toward the trees, and the dark came forward to take me.

"You'll hear me tomorrow night," I told him, already half wind. "Pay it no mind. Only an old man, keeping a little company. And if you camp under the walnut in October —" I started the rustling up, slow and deliberate, almost delicate, drawing off to the east the way it always goes — "mind your head."

---

I watched him break camp at first light, from the trees, the way I'd watched him come. It was a Thursday — I keep the days even when I pretend I don't — which meant if he drove straight through he'd have his girl by Saturday. I like to think he didn't make a plan for it. No zoo. No pancakes. No production. I like to think he took her somewhere quiet, and the two of them sat in it together and found out it was nothing to be afraid of.

You learn to read a man's gait, watching as many of them go down as I have — the one fleeing and the one going home. He did not walk like a man fleeing. And he didn't tell it. I knew he wouldn't.

But here is the part I never used to know, in all my years of sending men down the mountain and letting the world close over them.

They come back.