On Bear Mountain

by Deborah Smith

  • • •

  Bethina Grace Powell Tiber was Erim and Annie’s youngest daughter. By Powell family accounts she was strong, smart, and beautiful, and had been driven to despair by a Tiber husband who beat her and dragged her by her auburn Powell hair down the hall of their big Elm Street Victorian. By Tiber accounts she was shrewd, conniving, and a social-climbing harlot. Whatever the truth, she was her mother’s daughter, an adventurer looking for a lost soul, and the soul happened to be her own.

  Bethina Grace turned forty-one years old in 1910, when she packed her bags, climbed on a passenger train, and left town, deserting her Tiber husband, who was president of the Tiber County Bank, and their half-grown children, including Miss Betty, who remembered her kindly, nonetheless. The Tibers hired detectives to track her down. Those investigators discovered that she had gone to Brazil with a man, and the man was one of our own — Nathan Washington, Daniel Washington’s eldest grandson. A black man, of course.

  He and Bethina Grace had grown up a short walk away from each other at Bear Creek, playing together as children, probably in love with each other as teenagers, but knowing that love was hopeless. Nathan left home for Cuba as a young man and became a sea captain, but never forgot her, or she, him, obviously.

  The uproar that followed word of this scandal roused the Klan and brought misery on the whole county for several years. Crosses were burned at Bear Creek, the school house Erim had built went up in flames, the Washingtons lost a teenage boy to a lynch mob, and the shunning of Powells became a Tiber family tradition.

  Powells did not prosper, after that. Only the toughest and most stubborn stayed to carry on, and there wasn’t much to draw the rest back.

  • • •

  As time went by, Miss Betty was the only Tiber who refused to blame us for her Powell mother’s running away with black Nathan Washington. Tall and stocky, with ruddy skin, red hair, and a laugh like a clarinet, Miss Betty did not look like a prophet, but she knew the depths of human misery, and she did not want to see such misery visited on any other soul.

  In her younger years she had led a reasonably ordinary Tiberville life — attending the Young Women’s Academy at the college, taking a graduation voyage to England, bringing home Dr. John Vinton Habersham, an English veterinarian she’d married during the long sea trip back. He and she started the Tiber poultry business and hatched a house full of children.

  But in the summer of 1928 Dr. Habersham died from polio, along with three of their daughters. Heartbroken, Miss Betty embarked on a crusade to protect the rest of her brood and every child in Tiber County. She chaired the mountain volunteer health society and she built a polio clinic in town, so that local victims would not have to be shipped away for treatment. She drove the rutted country roads distributing hygiene and prevention pamphlets to every family, and read the pamphlets to those who were illiterate. She had the local swimming ponds drained or fenced off, and she formed a chapter of the March of Dimes.

  All of those were reasonable civic actions, in light of her loss and the desperate situation in general. But she also stopped going to church, began studying Buddhism and other eastern religions, brought in a Cherokee shaman from North Carolina to hang protective talismans all over her house, consulted numerous psychics and palm readers, and engaged in various and sundry other worrisome rituals to ward off the cycles of epidemic death and fear that possessed Tiberville and the entire county. She became an embarrassment to the Tibers. She had gone funny. It’s the Powell in her, they said.

  By the time Daddy was born in 1940 her reputation for oddity had become the stuff of local legend. She firmly believed that her potent combination of science, faith, and outright magic had saved Tiber County from a plague of biblical proportions. After all, the county had the lowest polio rates in the South, and the disease had not dared strike her family in a generation.

  Despite the disapproval of Tiber relatives who would just as soon the last few Powells fell off the county map, Miss Betty took Daddy along during her and John’s regular car tours of the county, and so he and his cousin grew up sharing the front seat of a dusty Cadillac and helping Miss Betty collect March of Dimes money.

  The summer of 1953 was hot and steamy, the land seeming to shrink from the sun. Dogs hid under cool porches, deer retreated to the deepest coves, flower beds shriveled, young chickens suffocated by the thousands. Daddy’s gentle father, Joshua, who taught high-school English, and his younger brothers, Davy and Albert, came down with polio, and all three died. A month later, both Daddy and John Tiber became feverish, as well.

  Miss Betty and Daddy’s mother, Mary, waited in agony to see whether the teenagers would recuperate or sink into fatal paralysis. Miss Betty drove to the farm and walked down to the creek bottom. She had played at Bear Creek as a little girl, roaming the laurel thickets with her Powell cousins and the neighboring Washington children until her mother’s infamy exploded in their lives.

  She knew the legend of Granny Annie’s restless ghost-spirit. “I’m searching for help in the spirit world,” she told Mary. “If Granny Annie really is roaming around down there, I intend to ask her for protection. It was said she would always look after our children. She didn’t save my girls and she didn’t save your Davy and Albert, so she must have some quarrel with us. I intend to find out.”

  “Well, all right,” Mary said carefully, because she was afraid of Miss Betty. “I’ll make some iced tea while you talk to the ghost.”

  An hour later Betty staggered back up the hill waving her arms and shouting. Her face was flushed with excitement, her graying hair, wild. Briers and leaves clung to her dress and nylon stockings as if she’d been magnetized. “Our boys will live,” she told Mary. “I’ve seen the bear spirit! Granny Annie spoke to me! Tommy and Johnny are going to be all right! And there’s a cure for polio coming soon! I’ve promised to honor the bears, you see! We have to bring the bears back to Bear Creek, Mary! The curse is over, Mary!”

  She was right. Within a week, Daddy and John Tiber were well. But there are other kinds of curses, and my poor future father, who was only thirteen, would have to live with them. Miss Betty wanted to keep him in school and eventually send him to college to study art, but my prideful grandmother said no. He was the man of the family now, so he would have to work. There were bills to pay.

  Miss Betty reluctantly cosigned a bank loan so Mary could build two chicken houses at Bear Creek and got her a grower’s contract. Tiber Poultry supplied the chicks, their feed, and medicine. The farmer supplied the chicken houses and the unending, backbreaking work. After mortgage payments and general expenses, a year’s income would barely pay a family’s bills. Daddy and his mother became two more Tiber indentured servants, shackled to a mortgage and a long-term broiler deal.

  Soon, Daddy painted his first artwork — bears trapped in circus cages — on the side of a chicken house. Grandmother painted over them and whipped him as if he’d lost his mind. He painted the bears again. She whipped him again. He couldn’t help himself — his grief, his frustration, were too great. The third time he painted the bears, she realized that he wouldn’t survive without decorating the grim future he’d been handed.

  Within a year, the Salk and Sabin vaccines began to eradicate polio, just as Granny Annie had promised. Miss Betty began a full-scale campaign to restore the hunted-out bear population to Tiber County. For more than a decade she hired men to capture bears higher in the mountains and turn them loose in our midst, to the absolute horror of her family and most other citizens. Daddy became her stalwart young assistant, putting out corn for the newcomer bears when the winters were hard, and trying to ward off hunters, to no avail. The bears were quietly killed or driven off, often under the discreet direction of Miss Betty’s own relatives, including Mr. John. With every passing year Miss Betty and Daddy grew more disgusted, and despaired of ever fulfilling their mission.

  But then they got the idea for a sculpture. In a booklet published by the national office of the March of
Dimes, they discovered a short article about charity volunteers from other parts of the country. One of those volunteers was Richard Riconni. He’d recently donated a modern art sculpture to a charity auction. He’d made it from the leg braces of polio victims. The sculpture, tellingly, was not described in anything but the vaguest and most diplomatic terms, with no account of how much it sold for, or if it sold at all. But when Daddy showed Betty the pamphlet, he and she both lit up with inspiration. She wrote to Richard Riconni about her ideas for a bear sculpture. She wanted to place it on the campus of Mountain State College.

  “I wish to celebrate the victory of science and technology over ignorance and fear,” she wrote. “I wish to celebrate our oneness with Mother Nature, and thus pay tender homage to the grand black bear who watches over us all. I want to make people THINK. And I intend that there will be at least one bear in this county that no one can EVER get rid of.”

  Richard Riconni wrote back excitedly. “I’ve been waiting for a chance like this all my life.” Soon Daddy and Miss Betty sent him a freight car filled with local junk and iron lungs.

  “That’s the Powell in her,” her Tiber relatives said darkly, when they learned what Betty had done.

  The rest was history, just waiting to catch up with us.

  CHAPTER 3

  Quentin’s mother almost never raised her voice, but when the scores were announced in the structural design category of the Junior Regional Engineering Competition, she shrieked. Then she cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled like a dockworker across the crowded floor of the Boston convention center. “He won! Father Aleksandr, Quentin won!”

  Father Aleksandr hustled outside the hall to the men’s room, where Quentin had just finished washing his face and rinsing his mouth at a sink. “Quintus the Magnificent, aren’t you done throwing up?” the cheerful Polish priest joked, pulling a packet of tissues from his black trousers. “Hurry up! Carpe diem!”

  Quentin wiped his mouth with the tissue then asked hoarsely, “Who won?”

  Father Aleksandr chortled. “You did!” Quentin yelled in amazement. The priest grabbed him by one arm and they ran back to the huge hall, where high school students from all over the northeast were gathered with their projects. Now thirteen, he was almost six feet tall, a heartbreaker with long-lashed gray eyes, dark, almost black hair, and fine, golden skin marred only by two fine scars from fistfights, one that bisected the edge of his lower lip, and another at the bridge of his nose. He had already begun to develop his father’s lean-hipped, broad-shouldered physique, and he played football for St. Vincent’s.

  Mother threw her arms around him and they posed for pictures beside a gleaming steel model of the expansion bridge he’d designed. “We have to call Papa!” Quentin said.

  “No you don’t,” his father said, behind him. “I made it.”

  Quentin spun around in surprise and saw his father standing there grinning at him, his coat dripping melted snow, his dark hair flecked with ice. The truck had broken down a mile away, and he’d walked. He and Quentin grabbed each other in a brawny hug, his father slapping his back joyfully. Quentin had spent all of Christmas break at the warehouse with him, building the contest model under his father’s careful supervision. In a sense, it was a shared victory.

  When the officials handed Quentin a trophy, a certificate, and a check for a thousand dollars, he stared at the check, his heart pounding so hard that he could barely believe it. Mother had said that any money he won would go straight into his college fund, but he desperately wished he could buy presents for her and his father. Just knowing that he could was a rare satisfaction.

  He had been the youngest competitor to make the regional finals. No one but they had expected him to win. “My two geniuses,” Mother said proudly, with one arm around him and the other around his father.

  “Yeah, he’s got his old man’s talent with metal,” Papa added, and looked at Quentin with joy.

  Quentin nodded and hugged him, again. He would remember that night as one of the few truly happy moments he shared with his father.

  • • •

  Life was not going as Papa had planned. Six years after leaving home he still commuted from upstate New York, spending an average of only four days a month at the apartment in Brooklyn. His sculptures sold barely enough to pay his expenses, and often didn’t. “It’s just a matter of time,” Angele insisted. But there had not been another triumph like the bear sculpture.

  “Dreamers,” their blue-collar neighbors said of Quentin’s parents. “What do they think they’ll accomplish?”

  “Ars gratia artis,” Quentin said grimly, in return. Art for the sake of art alone. He had learned to speak up but to speak softly, never giving his emotions away. He had very little trouble with the bullies in his neighborhood, now. He’d put his knife to Johnny Martin’s throat one night and warned in a low, clear tone that he would slit it from ear to ear if Johnny ever fucked with him again.

  Johnny left him alone, after that.

  With every passing year Quentin was growing more like his father — quieter, less patient, his eyes more intense, his moods bleaker. Without Papa’s income at the garage, life in the apartment veered from one money crisis to the next. Mother never let Papa know, and he thought she was managing. Nil desperandum, she scribbled on a bill folder Quentin happened to see. Never give up hope.

  “I can get a job delivering groceries after school,” Quentin told her. “And I bet Goots would hire me to sweep floors and clean paint filters.” Quentin didn’t add that Goots had already told him he could have a job at his other garage when he was a little older, if he wanted it. Mother didn’t know Goots ran a chop shop in the basement of an old building a few blocks over. When Quentin thanked him but turned down the chop shop offer, the big German shook his head sadly and said, “Your papa always turned me down for that work, too. He could have made such good money working with, hmmm, used cars! What do you Riconnis expect? A miracle?”

  Quentin had laughed and said nothing. Yet his family did need a miracle.

  “I could sweep floors for Goots,” he repeated.

  Angele shook her head firmly. “Your job is to be the finest student possible. Your job is to earn a full scholarship to an excellent college.”

  “I can do that and still sweep floors or deliver groceries.”

  “No. We can make do with the money we have. We can’t make do with half measures when it comes to your education.” He looked at her mournfully, but she didn’t waver.

  At every opportunity he secluded himself in his bedroom, at a desk Papa had made for him out of corrugated steel roofing with slender legs of corroded rebar. He wrote in his journal, rubbed his hand on himself and fantasized about dark-haired, teasing Carla Esposito, who was a budding sexpot. Carla’s mother had died when Carla was small, leaving Carla to design her own role model for womanhood. In Carla’s world, most men and boys were just like her doting, widowed father, Alfonse. They could be wrapped around her little finger at will.

  She kept luring Quentin over to her brownstone when Alfonse worked late at the precinct, and Quentin didn’t put up much resistance. Yet when Carla had him and herself half-naked in her frilly bedroom, he suddenly said, We can’t do this, yet, and got up. She was a year younger than him, only twelve. He felt courageous for his self-control. She flung a fit and called him queer, but apologized later and admitted she had been afraid her father would kill them both. Quentin had thought about that, too. And what his mother would do.

  He told himself he was a man, with all the noble connotations of the word. A man had to control himself around women. No matter how crude or rough Papa behaved in the company of other men, Quentin had never seen him treat women with anything less than gallant concern.

  So Quentin channeled his energies into school and books, contemplating heroic futures, reading constantly, but also sharpening the switchblade his father had given him. He lived with a gnawing worry that his family was in danger from forces he couldn’t pre
dict or even describe. Papa’s moods and struggles formed a vague, dark cloud, always promising rain.

  In a box under his bed were old toys his father had made for him years earlier — rattling monsters of steel wire, nuts, and bolts; take-apart cars with small pulleys for wheels, and dozens of intricate building blocks in fantastic shapes and forms, all made of pipe, big brass washers, and other odds and ends Papa had scavenged from the Dumpster of a machine shop.

  This uneven metal world clanked and shifted and refused to stay in one place, just like the real world. Quentin got out the building blocks sometimes and tried, to no avail, to build even one thing that wouldn’t fall down when he turned his back.

  Yet, like his father, the ability to see patterns and discern hidden structures came instinctively to him. As a child he’d pried apart his wobbling nightstand and glued it back together. When it no longer wobbled, Mother thought his bedroom floor had settled. While Quentin watched in strangled amusement, she checked all the baseboards worriedly. “Oh, you,” she said proudly, when he confessed. “You’re a born builder. I’m just sure.”

  He announced he would become an architect, and his mother looked at him without a shred of doubt. “A master architect,” she corrected. As his need for order grew stronger, he studied each piece of the metal contraptions endlessly, as if playing chess with strange pieces. One wrong move might send the whole game tumbling — his whole life, out of control.

  Don’t let it fall, Quentin prayed silently.

  • • •

  “Hey, Riconni!” Meyer Bratlemater yelled with a grin of cruel delight on his scrawny face. Meyer was the kind of pipsqueak who lobbed taunts from a distance, then scurried away. “Your old man better sell some freakin’ art pretty soon, ’cause you got kicked outta your apartment!” Meyer ducked inside the door of his parents’ bakery.