The long periods of work were relieved by brief flurries of idleness which were worse than the labor. They gave me time to think, and remembrance brought with it an aching loneliness. Then Valerie would dance uninvited but provocative across the mirror of my mind, and I’d try anything to shatter the image.

Even Quillet’s company was preferable. “I’ve got to go to Paxton’s,” he’d say. “Care to come along?”

We’d park beside the lumber-loading platform under a sign that proclaimed Paxton’s slightly veiled contempt for the summer people:

as if anyone in his right mind would venture into the redundant cold without armors of insulation. I’d heft the plywood or the siding or whatever onto the truck bed, adding to my already substantial collection of splinters, scars, and calluses, while Quillet stood well to the side, observing, supervising, knocking the dottle from his pipe. “Interesting place,” he would say as I busted a nut struggling with a four-by-twelve. Interesting place indeed, but only if you happened to be a woodpecker.

In the evening I’d sit perishingly close to the fireplace, staring at the red embers in a rapture of exhaustion. The varnished room was full of reflections from the flames that threw a soft luminosity on the books on the shelves, books I was too tranced out to read. Mother sat embracing a legal pad, cultivating not her poesies but a long list of horse and hound groceries that I was to fetch in the morning. Quillet in a thronelike chair exercised his sovereignty, editing copy for his magazine, pausing now and again to discourse learnedly on our ecosystem with a tutorial, ironed-out smile on his face. Lee Roy lay at his feet, snuffling and farting in an excess of contentment, competing with the gale that roared down the high valley.

It was Quillet’s passion to embrace all the diverse manifestations of nature that characterized his realm. He knew the names of all the local animals, vegetables, and minerals in three languages—English, Latin, and Arapaho—and he shared his knowledge with us. It didn’t take much to get him going.