The Rustling -- Part Three: The Quiet Is Just a Room

An old man, a wife named Marta, and the only piece of advice worth carrying back down.

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"So I'll ask you the question you're too polite to ask me," I said. "Did I marry. Did an eight-foot hermit find himself a wife in the high timber." I let him see the smile again. "I did. Her name was Marta."

A rancher's daughter from the dry side of the range, out checking a fence line gone slack when she found me laid up with a leg broken under a deadfall, two days from dying of it. A smaller woman would have run. Marta looked at the largest, strangest, most pitiful thing she'd ever seen pinned under a log, and she said — I laughed telling him this — "Well, you're no use to anybody down there," and set the leg, and stayed to see it knit, and somehow never quite left.

"She saw me," I told him. "First one in twenty years who looked at me and saw a man and not a measurement. We had a life up here. A real one — and I mean a life, son, not a hermit's hole scratched in a hillside. I was a faller's son; I knew timber the way some men know horses. I felled the cedar and hewed it square and notched it and raised a cabin with these two hands, and when one room wouldn't hold a family I raised another, and a barn behind it. I'd learned the forge in the camps — every outfit kept a smith to keep the saws toothed and the tools whole, and a boy who does the work of three men gets put next to the fire that needs feeding — so I built my own. A stone firebox, a bellows, an anvil I carried up this mountain on my back a piece at a time. After that I could make what I needed: hinges and nails, a froe, knife blades, the very kettle there in the coals. I rigged a pit saw and cut rough plank for the floors and the doors. Marta kept goats and a garden that had no business growing at that altitude and grew anyway, out of pure stubbornness — the garden and the woman both. We hunted, we smoked the meat against the winter, we tanned the hides. Some of what I'm wearing now is older than you are. What we couldn't make or grow, the children carried a list down for, once or twice a year, and carried back up: salt, powder and shot, coffee, a bolt of cloth, a paper of needles. And nobody in the valley ever thought twice about a quiet family that kept to itself in the high country — that's half the souls in these mountains.

"Raised four children up here. Raised them wild and raised them well, and they grew and went down into the world, most of them, the way children are supposed to, and they did fine. Better than fine. The people down there never knew their father was the thing in the campfire stories, and that's how I wanted it."

He asked about her. About Marta. He was gentle in the asking, which is more than I can say for most.

Eleven years, I told him. She's under a larch on the south slope where the sun gets to it early. I go up most mornings. I said it the way you'd report the weather to a man who hadn't been outside, because that is the only way I can say it and stay where I'm sitting.

"So no," I said. "I'm not the lonely monster in the woods. Not anymore, and not for a long time. My oldest girl is a grandmother herself now — which makes me a great-grandfather, if you can believe it. They come up summers. The little ones aren't afraid of me at all; you have to be taught to be afraid of a thing like me, and nobody's taught them yet. They climb me like I'm scenery." I shook my old head at him. "Four generations. Eighty years. And the legend they tell down in the valley about the terrible thing in the mountains — the truth of it is an old man who misses his wife and is waiting on his grandchildren to come up in July."

He looked into the fire a while.

"I had a marriage," he said. He hadn't meant to; I could see that. The dark and the size of me and the hour had loosened something. "Sixteen years. It ended this spring. Not in a fire, nothing dramatic — it just got quiet, and then it got quieter, and one day there wasn't anything left to be quiet about." He turned a coal with his stick. "I've got a daughter. Nora. She's nine. Every other weekend. And I keep doing this thing where I make it perfect — I plan it, the zoo, the pancakes, the whole production, because I'm so afraid of the silence with her now. And she can feel it. Kids feel it." He laughed, and there was no humor in it. "So I figured I'd come up here. Where the quiet was at least mine. Where I chose it."

I let that sit between us a moment, because some things you damage by answering too quick.

"My Marta used to say the quiet between two people isn't the trouble," I told him. "The quiet is just a room. The trouble is when you stop walking into the room. Your girl is nine. She is still walking into it, son — every other weekend, and finding you've filled it up with zoos and pancakes so neither of you has to sit in it." I put another branch on the fire. "Sit in it. That's all. You don't have to fill the quiet. You just can't leave her in there alone."