On Bear Mountain

by Deborah Smith

  I often sat in the sculpture’s shadow while Daddy scraped graffiti off it. He taught me that life was a work of art we build on crudely welded turning points and hopeful imagination. He said every birth, every death, every joy, and every heartache shaped our destinies from thin air, while we were busy pretending we were in charge of our own construction.

  “The world is full of ordinary riches,” he said as he cleaned and painted his beloved Bear. “There’s nothin’ money can buy for you if you aren’t happy. Better to do without it.”

  We did without.

  Daddy didn’t care about money, and as long as he could make enough for our basic needs and the mortgage payments on his chicken houses he gladly gave the rest to neighbors with even less than we had. Mama didn’t have any use for money and comfort either. Her soft brown hair hung in a braid to her knees, she wore no makeup around large eyes the color of a new green leaf, and she was always scented with fresh cornbread and talcum powder, her only perfume. She’d been raised in a family of snake-handling, faith-healing tent evangelists from the hot swamps of south Georgia, followers of a small fundamentalist sect so strict in their avoidance of the modern world that they made Luddites look soft.

  She met Daddy during her family’s traveling revival show, which set up at the state campground on the outskirts of town one summer. He grew outraged during a sermon when her parents held out a box to her, filled with rattlesnakes. Mama had just turned sixteen. In their eyes it was time for her to test her faith. Daddy watched her put her shaking hand in the box. She didn’t make a sound when a snake bit her on the finger, but Daddy yelled.

  He pushed his way to the pulpit, grabbed her in his arms, and rushed her to the county hospital with her whole furious family in hot pursuit. He stood off her murderous, faith-healing kin until Mama woozily admitted she wanted a doctor to treat her. Regardless of being a lost soul, she wanted to live. Her family disowned her on the spot. She married Daddy a week later at the county courthouse, but she vowed never to set foot in a hospital, again. She had to honor her lost heritage as much as she could.

  She not only didn’t care about money, she distrusted the slightest hint of greed as an evil worthy of Satan’s worst demons. “Hold one end of this here dollar bill,” she said to me when I was five years old. I held the paper’s edges, wide-eyed. “Hold on tight! Shut your eyes.”

  “They’re shut! I’m holding on, Mama!”

  “Feel the pull on the other end?” She was doing the pulling, but under the spell of her drama I didn’t notice.

  “Yes!” I was hypnotized.

  “That’s Satan!”

  I dropped the bill, stared at it in horror, and refused to pick it back up. “He can have it!”

  Mama nodded proudly. “The harder you hold on to money, girl, the harder him and his demons pull. And they’ll pull until they suck you down to the fires of hell with ’em.” I didn’t touch cash money for years after that.

  Tibers, she said, were to be pitied; their lust for money and acclaim doomed them. They tempted the devil every day with their fine homes and luxuries. “Their good works are naught but ashes,” Mama insisted, “because they cain’t beat down the sin of pride, and no gift is godly if’n it’s give with a reward in mind.”

  It was true that Tibers branded everything they built for the town with their name, and the walls of Mr. John’s office at Tiber Poultry were crowded with plaques and certificates praising his charitable work. But it was also true that Mama had come from people so downtrodden that they used religion like an opiate to dull the pain. I didn’t feel poor, and so none of this made any difference to me.

  I had the most incredible home in the universe. Our farmhouse, barn, pastures, and outbuildings sat at the end of a trail so ancient that I found arrowheads along it far older than any Cherokee had left there. Before the settlers hunted them to distraction, bears had wintered in the farm’s impenetrable creek bottoms and granite caves. I could scoot under rock overhangs and crouch in an imagined cloak of fur and claws, the ruler of every wild soul.

  Including me. There were many untamed places both inside and out where children have to find their way, alone.

  • • •

  There was no kindergarten in Tiberville when I was a child, no preschool or daycare centers sporting candy-colored playground equipment built of pliable plastics with rounded edges. Daddy began dropping me off at the community center playground behind the Tiber Poultry plant one day a week. There I rampaged happily with about three dozen other five-year-olds, risking my life on the sharp metal swings and metal slides.

  This glorious weekly event, called Little Citizens Playtime, was created and sponsored by Tiber Poultry, which provided cookies, punch, and indoctrination. Little Citizens Playtime was designed to lure the most isolated farm families into the civilized world of town, where their children could be brainwashed into believing that Tibers were benevolent and progressive employers.

  I suppose John Tiber insisted that his five-year-old daughter Janine attend Little Citizens Playtime because he wanted everyone to believe that Tibers, despite their virtual control over the town, were just ordinary folks. But Janine already understood her place in the world. She was a princess of poultry. The rest of us were mere peckers.

  She wore beautiful jumpers and playsuits, her blond hair was swept back in perfect ponytails, and she screeched when the least speck of grime dusted her ruffled socks. She snatched anything she wanted — a cookie, a place in line at the swing sets, or another child’s toy. “Mine,” she’d say firmly, and shove the victim out of her way.

  I tried not to notice her. Pitiful, doomed sinner, that’s what she was. I was better than her, more righteous. When the ladies handed out packets of jelly beans — my favorite food in the world — I gave mine away, elevated by a vow of poverty, self-sacrifice, and a meandering hope that God would be so impressed He’d give me more jelly beans. It didn’t happen.

  At first Janine seemed to sense that I was someone to leave alone. I was a tall and strongly built child, with muscles already honed by hours spent helping Mama and Daddy shovel out the chicken houses. But Janine was fast, small, and shrewd, so when she finally moved in on me one day, she was able to snatch the one belonging that no one should ever try to pry out of my possession. My ’Twas the Night Before Christmas book. The little hardcover book of the classic poem had been a gift from Daddy on Christmas Eve. I’d already memorized the entire poem. Christmas was six months past, but I carried the book everywhere.

  “Mine,” she hissed, then grabbed my book and ran. I chased her to the door of the community house, where she darted inside. Her mother, John’s elegant Atlanta-socialite wife, Audrey Tiber, stopped me from entering. “Now, now,” Mrs. Tiber cooed, waving a diamond-backed hand holding a long cigarette, “you stay out in the yard. You’re too dirty to come inside.”

  “Janine took my book, ma’am.” I said.

  “Well, I’m sure she’ll bring it back.” She shut the door.

  I waited urgently near the swing sets, my mind a silent, seething volcano. I was surrounded by a hubbub of unsuspecting children at play, none of whom realized they were future Tiber contract farmers and plant workers. That was my destiny, too, or so the Tibers believed. My stomach knotted in fury and anxiety. My book. My beloved book. Books were sacred. Daddy said so. Finally, Janine wandered back outdoors. My book was nowhere in sight. “Where’s my book?” I demanded in a low voice.

  “It’s mine,” she said, and flounced away.

  I went blind with vengeance. I pulled back a heavy metal swing as far as I could, and let it go. It caught her in the back of the head, knocked her down, and knocked her out. I ran over and stared down at her. She didn’t move for a few seconds. Blood stained the blond hair beneath her ponytail. Not a creature was stirring, I thought, petrified. Not even a Tiber.

  I’d given Janine a concussion and put a gash in her head that required ten stitches. Mrs. Tiber permanently banned me from Little Citizens Playtime. In t
he midst of the hysteria and accusations that were hurled at me that afternoon I earned a reputation as a stubborn, tearless, unremorseful soldier for literary justice, although in fact I was just so worried I could barely speak.

  But far worse than anything else was the way Mrs. Tiber humiliated my father when he arrived. “Tom Powell,” she lectured, “If you know what side your bread’s buttered on you’ll teach your child to behave. A measure of goodwill and gracious manners is little enough to ask from employees of my husband’s business.”

  “Ma’am,” he said in his deepest voice, “I’m sorry for my daughter’s choice of methods.”

  “That’s an excuse, not an apology!”

  “All I can grant you is the unbuttered side of my bread, ma’am.”

  “I’ll have your grower contract canceled, mister. We’ll just see how you feel when you can’t pay your bills and the sheriff comes out to take your farm!”

  “There’s no need for that kind of talk, Mrs. Tiber,” Daddy replied calmly, but I remember the worried look in his eyes and the way he held his sweat-stained straw hat in his hands, as if he were standing before a judge. And I knew I would never, never again commit an act that might put him at the mercy of a Tiber.

  On the way home in his truck, I burst into tears. “Here, now, you didn’t do anything so bad,” he said gently, not understanding at all. “Let’s go over to campus and talk to the Bear.”

  The sculpture was his inspiration in all times of trouble. That day its pot-headed face was smeared with a sickly spray of purple paint, and someone had hung a dead mouse from its behind. Daddy tossed the mouse carcass aside, and we sat down on the administration building’s lawn beside the Bear’s feet. “You think the Bear’s ashamed of itself for looking this way?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It knows what it’s made of. Nobody can change that.” Maybe he did suspect that I’d seen him humbled. Daddy lit one of the cigarettes he carried in a soft leather sack tucked in his shirt pocket. He smoked contentedly, as if sharing a peace pipe with the sculpture. “On the inside, it’s fine.”

  I stared up at the hulking creation. I could imagine the sculpture coming to life and lumbering down the roads toward Tiber Crest, the large white-columned home where Janine lived. I pictured it eating her in one squeaking, rattling gulp. After a moment spent savoring that sinful fantasy, I took my father’s hand. “I’m going to hell,” I said.

  He smiled. “No, you’re not. The Bear says you’re righteous.”

  “You really think it can talk?”

  “Sure. But it says there’s power in silence and power in stillness. The power of keeping your own thoughts, and walking your own path. The Bear doesn’t talk to us the way you think. It tells us ideas we’re too stubborn to believe. The Bear won’t put up with ignorance.”

  New tears stung my eyes. I hid them from Daddy and silently asked the Bear a question. Tell me how I can make people proud of us. There was no answer, or at least none I was ready to hear.

  Later he asked Mr. John about my book, and it turned out that Janine’s mother had thrown it away. Mr. John didn’t offer to replace it, either, because his wife had yelled at him for making their daughter play with white trash, and she had stormed off to her mother’s house in Atlanta after he refused to cancel Daddy’s broiler contract.

  “I just wanted my book back,” I told Mama. “It’s not fair.”

  She fixed her stern green eyes on me as she kneaded biscuit dough in a wooden bowl. Her strong hands worked the soft dough with an unerring determination, just as she worked my soul. “The Lord is teachin’ you a lesson about want and need, girl. You ain’t lost your book — it’s still in your head. It don’t matter that Janine Tiber’s got hold of its body, because you’ve still got hold of its spirit. Nobody can take that away from you. If you give your heart to physical belongin’s you will always be worryin’ about ’em and hatin’ somebody for messin’ with ’em.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said dully. Her lesson was hard to swallow. A person had to be raised in hopeless submission to believe that martyrdom was a substitute for justice. Rationalized acceptance of oppression was the meek way out. I wasn’t a pacifist.

  Janine Tiber was a speck of rough gravel who would remain stuck in my craw, seeding layers of unfulfilled revenge. She went out of her way to say hateful things, and do hateful things, to me, which I tolerated with the sly patience of a hibernating flesh-eater. But I came into an understanding of my low place in the world of people like Janine Tiber, and there were days when I was miserably convinced that whole world sniffed the chicken shit of poverty on me.

  I formed a shield of bony attitude. Badly camouflaged by hair that exploded in energized curls, a serious face with a clamped jaw, and blue eyes that were always narrowed in a shrewd squint, I quietly made plans to conquer my fate. I took heart in the fact that I was a small hero to every poor kid Janine had victimized, and that buoyed me to keep trying.

  My reputation as a Powell had begun, a fact of no small consequence in Tiber County. Powell notoriety stretched back across the generations like a rubber band. One snap, and the old stories returned to people’s tongues.

  It started with a Welshman and a mule.

  • • •

  In 1847 Erim Powell walked off a ship from Wales, traded a book of his poetry for an elderly mule, then headed inland from the Georgia coast. A month later, using up a last, large dollop of his good luck in a card game, he won a hundred acres of land in the mountains above Atlanta. In the old country he’d earned his living as a schoolteacher, but preferred writing poetry. Yet he dreamed of prospering in the American wilderness. Of owning land.

  He rode the mule to a mountain crossroads, where the Tiber family and their slaves had already built several large cabins and a general store. The Tibers were well-educated gentry, from long-established English Tiber clans in South Carolina. Already they’d begun busily lining off streets and lots.

  The mule collapsed and died. Erim walked the last five miles to his land, following a trail that for centuries had led bears to their winter sanctuaries. Not being a farmer, he didn’t mind that most of his property was dotted with caves, hooded in craggy, laurel-shrouded hillsides, or consumed by tiny glens where blackberries grew in tall, thorny thickets every summer.

  The Tibers could have their civilized town; Erim named his kingdom Bear Creek. Who can say whether fate or poetic justice had brought him there to begin our American dynasty?

  Sometimes, it’s just a matter of where the mule dies.

  • • •

  Our first real trouble with Tibers came within a year of Erim’s arrival in Tiber County, when Erim seduced their cook. Her name was Annie Walker. She was three-quarters Irish and one-quarter Cherokee Indian, and had been trained in the culinary arts by a Frenchwoman from elegant coastal Savannah. Annie’s frontiersmen brothers kept the Tibers from hanging Erim when he married her.

  Undaunted, Erim and Annie built a homestead. He made and sold superlative corn whiskey, wrote dozens of epic poems that somehow didn’t survive on paper, then set up a log schoolhouse and began educating every child and adult who wanted to learn to read and cipher. Anyone could come — white, black, slave or free, and the few mixed-blood Cherokee natives, such as Annie’s family, who had managed to hang on after the government removal in the 1830s.

  Again, the Tibers were unhappy with him. They had brought with them a slave named Daniel Washington, and his family. Daniel was a skilled blacksmith, and therefore commanded a certain respect. Slaves easily disappeared into the mountains and could never be found, the Tibers had already discovered. To make certain Daniel remained happy, they allowed him to set up his own forge and keep the money he earned. Daniel promptly bought land beside the Powell farm at Bear Creek.

  Erim and Annie welcomed the Washingtons, and Erim secretly taught Daniel’s children to read. The Tibers, who probably suspected that Erim was a provocative influence, quickly started the private Tiberville Academy in tow
n, and allowed Daniel’s children to be taught there — a stunning compromise. That academy later became Mountain State College.

  Erim and Annie birthed five babies, one of whom wandered away as a boy and was never found. For years after that Annie and Erim carved heartfelt messages into trees throughout the Powell homestead, as if their lost son might still be trying to find his way back. Sitting in our living room was a section of trunk Grandpa Joshua had cut from the last surviving oak. Dear boy we are waiting, it said.

  Around 1900, when she was an old woman of at least seventy, Annie disappeared herself. A group of Oklahoma Cherokees were passing through town on their way to a reunion on the North Carolina reservation, so maybe she went with them, since she had kin on the reservation. Or maybe she went for one of her long, tree-carving walks and collapsed in some hollow, or stumbled over a cliff.

  Erim, heartbroken, insisted he knew the truth. She’d turned into a mother bear. Annie came from the Cherokee bear clan, and considered the bears sacred. Hadn’t she made him and their children promise years ago that no Powell would ever hunt them? So she’d transformed herself before his eyes and disappeared into the blackberry thickets of Bear Creek, where she would watch over all the Powell children to come, always searching for her own lost boy.

  Erim’s penchant for storytelling helped establish this news all over the county. The Tibers said, Oh well, you know how a Welshman sees things when he drinks. Bear or wife, Annie never came back. After Erim died, a joking account of his tale was chronicled in the Tiberville Weekly News as part of a history column titled “Old Ways and Crazy Days.” The columns were eventually collected, along with other disrespectful tall tales about Powells and other mountain families the townsfolk thought of as quaint, and the Tibers published a book in the 1930s. The book had been sold in local shops ever since, a matter of insult that no Powell would forget.