The Hermit's Story by Rick Bass (the best ebook reader for android txt) 📕

A thousand times, ten thousand times, he’d pleaded with Karen to let go of her disappointment with his multitudinous flaws and her decision (he was convinced it was a conscious choice) to remain bored. He had pleaded with her to pick up the oars and begin rowing—to strike for the far shore, even though it was unseen—even as he was slowly beginning to understand more fully each day that the issue was out of his hands.

A wind would pick up out over the water and catch the sail, or it would not. She had thrown her oars away, and when in the spirit of hope and conciliation he had handed her his, she had thrown them away, too.

Did she think she was going to live to be a hundred?

Did she think there was going to be another chance? Wake up, he wanted to tell her.

Memory, scudding in beneath him:

In their mid-thirties, they had gone up to northern Michigan to visit the Great Lakes. They had gone late in the year, to avoid all the tourists, and had rented a cabin far back in the woods, on the frozen western shore of Lake Superior. The golden leaves of birch trees had already been stripped, as had the oranging needles of the tamarack, though no snow had fallen yet. They had stayed there three days, with a fire burning constantly in the wood stove, and had dressed warmly and gone for walks along the beach, wandering slowly and stopping often to examine the wave-polished stones, collecting the prettier ones in burlap sacks to take back home.

Their next-to-last night, a storm blew in from the north, tearing not just the last of the leaves from the trees but entire limbs and branches, so that in the morning, when they went for their walk, they had to step carefully over an incredible latticework of fallen branches, with the scent of freshly crushed boughs’ thick sap sweet upon the colder air. Then, farther on, once they were out on the open beach and past the wreckage of the trees, they began to encounter a curious clustering of little birds, some bruised and battered but others appearing to be only asleep, though they were frozen stiff. They were mostly warblers, bright colorful blue and yellow and green and gold birds that neither of them recognized, and Jerry theorized that the storm had come in so quickly that it had caught and crashed into a migrating wave of them. Walking along the beach, they could discern now a sort of strand line, as if those birds had landed in the waves and been washed ashore, though they could not have been, for the waves of the lake were frozen mid-curl, and Jerry and Karen saw how the currents of flinging ice needles and poisonously cold air above had crushed and forced the tiny birds to the ground, where they died in a staggering line that seemed somehow nonetheless precise, with no one bird making it much farther than any of the others, and they all appeared to be strung as if on some imaginary thread, a macabre and beautiful necklace of the lake’s, or the storm’s, brutal making.

They had gathered the less crushed of the little birds and put them in one of their burlap bags, intending to save some of the incredible feathers. Upon returning to their cabin, they set the bag by the stove, and later in the day they heard faint cheeping. Opening the bag, they found that about half of the birds had recovered, and after releasing those, they decided not to take any feathers from the dead birds but instead chipped and chopped a large hole in the frozen ground at the edge of the great lake and buried them there, while the setting orange sun bounced its broken reflection across those opaque, frozen waves. Jerry was aware, in that moment, how strangely lucky or fortunate he felt to be standing there with Karen, and loved, and in love—how fortunate or lucky he had been to find her—and that night, their last night, they had cooked a big steak on the outdoor grill, despite the deep cold, and had each drunk a bottle of red wine, and had fallen asleep in each other’s arms after murmuring the most intimate of endearments; back then, there had been no fear, no anger, no boredom—only bright newness and wonder.

Restless in the noisy little apartment at the naval base, Jerry had rolled over and thought, as if able to send some message telepathically to Karen, Give it up, I’m not going anywhere. Wake up, he thought, for the ten thousandth time, wake up and come back; this is all there is. He stared at the ceiling and listened to Jim’s moans. Finally, he fell asleep briefly and dreamed an uninteresting but calming dream about one of his stone walls. In the dream, he was merely sitting there, staring at it, and feeling calmed and hopeful.

Near dawn, a long train passed near the apartment, rattling not just the windowpanes and furniture but even the floor. Jerry awoke and could feel the tingling in his bones, and wondered how that felt inside Jim’s skull.

Shortly after that—Jerry had just dozed back off to sleep in the first gray light of morning—he was reawakened by the twin howls of fighter jets shrieking just overhead—Warthogs, or F-15S, piercing the sky with tremendous velocity—and, a few moments after that, a sonic boom that sounded like nothing less than the end of the world. Particles of plaster drifted in crumbles and motes from the ceiling.

Jerry got up, stiff from his night on the couch, and began making coffee. Jim emerged from his room like a bear coming out of stuporous hibernation, head tipped downward as if in penance, and sat down at the table wordlessly. Jerry asked how he was feeling, and Jim said, “Better,” saying it in a way that