We left Mr. John sitting there with his own regrets. We took ours with us.
• • •
Arthur sat listlessly in a lawn chair as Quentin, Oswald, and I, standing on ladders, guided the Bear’s head back into place. Dr. Washington and the tenants watched anxiously. The abstract iron head hung from the hoist of a huge tow truck designed to pull tractor-trailer cabs. The operator was the son of a neighbor who had insisted on helping. It seemed that everyone in the county had come to visit and offer assistance in the few days since Quentin’s return.
“Another inch, that’s it, hold it there,” Quentin called from atop a wooden ladder leaning against the Bear’s shoulder. He waved the rest of us away, pulled a welding visor over his face, and ignited the slender welding torch he held in one thickly gloved hand.
“Don’t look at the torch, just look at the pretty sparks,” I called to Arthur. At my quick nod, Liza hurried over to him. “Look at the lovely fireflies, Arthur,” she crooned, dropping down beside his chair in the browning pasture grass.
He said nothing. When Quentin had entered his hospital room the first day his eyes brightened. Brother Bear, he whispered. I knew you’d come back. I still had rocks. Then he sank back on his pillow and whimpered, But it’s too late. Mama Bear’s gone. And nothing either Quentin or I could say to him would shake his conviction.
Quentin touched the tip of the torch to one of several dozen fissures between the sculpture’s body and head. Sparks cascaded around him like small fireworks. Slowly, fresh metal scars began to heal the Bear’s wounds.
Arthur huddled deeper inside the light quilt I’d wrapped around him, though the late-September day was mild. I moved to stand behind him, stroking his hair back from his forehead. “This reminds me of the day Daddy brought the Bear home,” I told him. “He welded her feet to the metal stobs he put in the concrete. Mama and I sat right about here, watching the sparks that night. It was the most beautiful thing. Wouldn’t you like to hear that story again, sweetie?”
“No. It makes me sad, now.” He shivered under my hands. I went around in front of him and dropped to one knee. “Why, sweetie?”
He looked down at me with tragic eyes. “Because Mama Bear can’t talk to me anymore. She’s not coming back. We need to have a funeral for her.”
“No. No, she’s just fine. Look at her. She’s almost her old self. The good Tweens are helping Quentin fix her.” Arthur frowned, thinking this through. His hands lay limply atop the quilt. I gently gripped one of them. “Sweetie, the Bear doesn’t live by ordinary rules. Cutting her apart can’t kill her. She lives up here.” I pointed to my head, and then to his. “And she’s still waiting for Quentin to give her a friend of her own kind to love.”
He listened intently, but only sighed.
Liza and I guided him indoors for a nap late that afternoon. He slept in his boyhood bed under a down comforter Mrs. Green had loaned us, because Arthur had admired the comforter at her house once. Quentin finished restoring the Bear just after sunset. In the cool, pink-and-purple dusk the last sparks showered to the ground, the brilliant flare of the welding torch vanished. He climbed down from the ladder. We stood there, just the two of us, in the wistful semidarkness poets and mourners call the gloaming.
The Bear gazed at us, and beyond us, as grandly as before. I hugged myself. “The difference between Arthur and me is that I grew up wishing I could tear this sculpture apart,” I confessed. “I thought I’d always feel that way. But I’m glad to see it put back together.”
Quentin went very still beside me. The slope of his shoulders said he was bone tired. He tucked his welding gloves into the waistband of his trousers like forgotten gauntlets. “I’m worse than you. I always wished I could tear apart every sculpture my father made.” His troubled tone made me gaze at him sadly. “It makes no difference now,” he went on, “but there was a time when I loved everything he touched.”
You still do. It’s so obvious, I thought. I faced him, reached out a hand, then just as quickly brought it back to my side. An almost imperceptible angling of his body said he’d felt the incomplete caress. I kept my distance, and he didn’t encourage me. But the raw tension was there, the deep and urgent stream of awareness always circling us, swirling between our bodies, filling the night, our dreams, the simple acts of conversation and cooperation. “Why did you come back?” I asked. “Why did you change your mind about building a second sculpture?”
“I have a responsibility to this situation. I started it.”
“I see.”
“There’s no other solution.” He’d already told me about his father’s former student, Joe Araiza, and Joe’s unsuccessful efforts to find a suitable artist to create another sculpture. He jerked his head toward the Bear. “I still intend to buy this thing. If it means slapping together some kind of copy for Arthur to love, then so be it.” The last shimmer of light caught his most cynical smile, making me think he was still as cold-blooded as ever. “I might even ask for a discount,” he warned, “now that it’s damaged.”
We were back to business. I feigned a laugh. “No way. You fixed it beautifully.”
We walked toward the house. I frowned. “What if Arthur doesn’t care anymore? The circumstances have changed. He’s not insisting you build a friend for Mama Bear, now.” Quentin put a hand on my arm and brought us both to a stop. We stood in the side yard, screened by tall camellias and crepe myrtles, whose foliage broke up the light from the windows. In that fractured darkness I could see the taut line of his jaw. “Are you giving up?” he asked.
“I’m offering us both an easy way out. We could talk to him. You might be able to take the original, now.”
“Is it that unpleasant to be around me?”
“Not if we keep our hands off each other. That’s not easy.” Silence. The look that came into his eyes, and I’m sure into mine, almost brought us together then. I took a step back, weak-kneed. “I wouldn’t want Arthur to think you’re permanent. I can’t risk adding that fantasy to his repertoire.”
“I agree. But I promised your brother I’d do a certain job, and I intend to do it. If the sculpture’s effect is as powerful as everyone around here seems to think, then it’ll lure Arthur back.”
“You know it won’t be easy to build another one.”
“It isn’t going to be a work of art.”
The fact that he’d returned, that he was determined to try, made the enterprise itself a rare masterpiece. I looked at him pensively. “I think you’ll surprise yourself.”
I told him goodnight and walked inside. We had no comfort zone, no rules, no familiar questions. We were a flexing cocoon containing two strangers trying to transform each other. He lingered outside my windows in the darkness, shielded by the faithful old shrubs, looking up into the light.
CHAPTER 20
Quentin called Popeye and told him what he intended to do. He would spend the autumn building a second sculpture, hoping to make a trade. The old sarge shocked him. “Son, you been needin’ to do that all your life. Don’t worry about business up here. I’ll put on a smiley face and keep it rollin’.” He paused. “Just don’t pick up more than you can carry, dammit.”
Next he called Joe Araiza and canceled the search for a sculptor. “Change of plans” was his only explanation.
Joe sounded more curious than angry. “The mystery deepens.”
“It’s complicated, but you’ll understand eventually.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m doing some work out of state.”
“Somewhere down South, again? You’re buying? You’re doing some salvage work?”
“Joe, do me a favor. Don’t ask questions, and if my mother comes to you with questions of her own, don’t tell her anything.”
“I’ve been dancing on thin air with her for weeks. I’ve perfected my technique.”
“Keep dancing, then.”
Quentin settled back in a chair in his motel room after those conversations. He continued to hold
the phone in his hand, thinking he should call the front desk and book the room for the rest of the month, at least. He had no desire to set up long-term housekeeping in the tiny chicken-house apartment, as before.
I should stay here in town. Treat this project like a job. Go out to the farm, work, come back here every day. Eat my meals at the diner, and sit in this room, alone, at night. Stay away from temptation. From Ursula.
He spent some time looking around the antiseptic motel room, trying to convince himself that his efforts to live there would make any real difference. On the lighted sign outside the Tiberville Methodist Church he’d read the weekly words to live by: THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR A STRONG SPIRIT.
He put the phone down, closed out his bill, and drove to Bear Creek.
• • •
As October began and the mountains went from green to a patchwork of gold and red, he set up a base camp next to the Iron Bear. He pitched a large green Army tent on a platform he built at the edge of the oak grove, and installed a small potbellied stove Dr. Washington dug out of storage in his top-heavy barn. The stovepipe angled through a vent in the tent’s roof like the silver spire on a small church. He hung lanterns from the tent’s ceiling, and carpeted the floor with braided rugs he bought at the Tiberville Flea Market, where he also bought an old, whitewashed wooden table and a heavy armchair that just needed to be refinished. He didn’t refinish it, but when he set it next to the table the combination worked. He placed a laptop computer and a small printer on the table, alongside a tall stack of textbooks on art theory and design.
He arranged his clothes and other possessions — which Popeye shipped to him, along with Hammer, who seemed thrilled to be back — in an old armoire he found in town at the New and Used Furniture Barn.
He ran a power line from the farmhouse’s circuit box, plugged in a miniature refrigerator and a pair of hot plates, but also dug a fire pit outside and set up a cooking area for a cast-iron skillet and a coffeepot. We were all mesmerized. Even Arthur crept outside to watch. It was clear that he still adored Quentin. Most days, watching him work was the only incentive that got Arthur out of bed.
But everyone else gawked at Quentin’s elegantly utilitarian camp, too. Bartow Ledbetter leaned on a cane with the bushy-browed scrutiny of a gentle troll. “I guess he spent a lot of time learnin’ how to live outdoors in the Army. He may not be no artist, but he’s got outdoor livin’ down to a art.”
“The Army doesn’t let you put rugs on your tent floor,” Oswald snorted. He turned to me. “You sure he’s not gay?”
“I’m sure,” I said.
Next he used my discarded barn timbers to construct a high base for a large bed at the center of his tent. He filled that bed with a luxurious mattress, which he then outfitted in flannel sheets and a collection of heavy, colorful quilts I loaned him from the Powell quilt chest. On top of this bed he placed a half-dozen fat pillows.
Finally, he leased a portable toilet and had the delivery men set it discreetly behind his tent, shielded from indiscriminate sight by a rough wooden screen he built. He’d return to the chicken-house apartment to shower, but otherwise, he would be self-sufficient at the edge of my pasture. Him and the Bear.
“I want to buy a used truck,” he told me. Oswald and I took him down to the Tiber County Auction, where we mingled with farmers, merchants, tobacco-spitting bikers, and women in skin-tight shirts bearing slogans. Backseat Mama. Do It With Four On The Floor. Tune Me Up And Grease Me.
He bought an old National Guard convoy truck, stripped of its olive green cover and painted a lovely shade of primer-rust-red. “What do you need something that big for?” Oswald demanded.
“To haul sheet metal and scrap iron.” Secretly, he just liked the plain majesty of commanding all that horsepower and riding high across the earth, viewing it from a tall perspective. He proceeded to buy welding equipment, power cords, an anvil, tongs, hammers, grinders, sanders, other tools I could not recognize and more, plus a large boom box he hung from the bottom limb of an oak. He tuned it to a pure jazz station in Atlanta.
He accomplished all of his buying, building, and decorating in an amazing two weeks’ time, and then he moved in.
Early one morning, I walked out there to share biscuits and bacon with him. The weather verged on a mild frost, so everything had a glittering sheen in the dawn sunshine. A coffeepot steamed above his campfire. His chimney pipe puffed fragrant pine smoke.
Quentin sat in his armchair by the fire, with Hammer dozing Sphinx-like beside his feet. Quentin’s dark hair was still ruffled from sleep. The maturity in his face and the bits of gray at his temples only made him look better. He was dressed in old jeans and a flannel shirt over a thermal one. He stretched his long legs in front of him and crossed them at the ankles, without looking up from the book he was reading. I squinted at it and realized in surprise it was one he’d borrowed from me. One of my authors.
My senses filled with the brisk, pine-scented air, the aroma of the coffee, the pride of seeing him read a Powell Press book, the comfortable scene, how well he fit there, and him, most of all, him. Desire for him. Every bit of me wanted to slip inside his world and into his homemade bed, under the quilts that had warmed several generations of Powell wives and husbands.
I stopped in the middle of the path. I cradled the forgotten bacon-biscuits in a tin bread pan covered with a dish towel. I was drunk with emotion and need. When he looked up, my face flushed and I looked away. He laid the book aside and stood. “Spying?” he called.
“Yeah, that’s it.” My momentum restored, I took a deep breath, then walked into his campsite and nodded at the book. “Tell me what you really think of The Strangled Willow.” It was, after all, a difficult collection of essays on women’s emotional connection to the environment.
“I like the parts about women having sex with trees.”
“That’s called magical realism. It’s a metaphor about nature.”
“No, Moby-Dick is a metaphor about nature. The Strangled Willow is a book about women being a little too interested in the wrong kind of roots.”
“Men never get the point of the book.”
His humor faded. “That’s not true. I respect it. I respect your judgment in picking the author, and I respect the way you published it. And your other book, too. You’re very good at what you do.”
He held out a hand for the biscuits, and as I gave the pan to him our hands touched and our eyes met. The mood was suddenly so heated, so tender, that either of us could have seduced the other, at will. A thousand moments tempted us every day — a shared look, the slow motion of his hand passing mine over a meal, the way he leaned back contentedly in front of the crackling logs in my fireplace on the cool evenings, the way I walked on the balls of my feet around him.
He exhaled, and I realized I’d been holding my breath, too. “I’ll have to have a talk with your little teenage peach tree,” he said with melodramatic rebuke. “Find out if it’s got a crush on you. Or vice versa.” The tree, which had dropped all its leaves for fall, was now a robust four-footer. I’d planted it in layers of chicken-enriched soil beside Daddy’s garden spot. It would be a giant.
I feigned disgust. “You leave my little friend out of this.”
“Friend? Jail bait.” He arched a brow at me. “Cradle robber.”
I couldn’t help laughing. I couldn’t help myself at all, around him.
I hurried back to the house. He never took his eyes off me. His thoughts churned. Every impulse wanted to overwhelm the rules he’d set for himself long ago. Never love what you might lose.
• • •
I asked Janine about Esme. “She’s about like Arthur,” Janine confessed wearily. “Depressed by everything that’s happened. Afraid that her world’s falling down around her. Hurt. She’s still got a cast on her wrist. I’ll bring her to visit when she seems to be up to it. Right now she just cries at everything.”
I drove to Tiber Crest, taking along a box of Liza’s peanut-butter
cookies for Esme. When I rang, Tricky swung the ornate front doors open with a grimace and a smile. “Guess you know Mr. John’s not here right now.”
I nodded. “I heard Janine sent him on a cruise.”
“Yeah. All them islands in the Bahamas. He didn’t want to go. She sent a couple of his old-man cousins with him. Like parole officers, he said.”
“Maybe I’ll see him when he gets back.” He had written me a long, apologetic letter, and had already presented Quentin with a more formal one to give to Angele. Will you come to see me? he’d added at the bottom of his letter to me. I had not answered. The quality of my mercy had been strained as far as it would go, for then.
“You oughta come visit him when he gets back,” Tricky lectured. “Yeah, he’s a high-handed old bastard, but he’s just about ruint himself and his family reputation with what he did, and he knows it. Janine says he’s officially in retirement now. She’s took over running the business. He is being punished.”
This made me feel bad, but I wanted to have no sympathy for Mr. John. “Look, I came here about Esme. Janine said I could visit her.”
“Sure, but she won’t come out of her room. Her nerves are shot, the doc says. She’s taking mood pills, but it ain’t helpin’.”
“I’ll sit outside her door, then.”
“All righty, all righty, come on in, Bearclaw.” She paused, looking at me with glittering eyes. “You’re meetin’ with the board of the growers’ group next week, I hear.”
“That’s right. I’ve been working with them on a new standard contract with Tiber Poultry. It’s just about finished. We’ll present it to all of you at the November meeting.”
She put a hard-worked hand on my arm. “It’s gonna make a big difference to me and my kin. To a lot of folks in this county. Thank you. Your daddy’d be proud.”
“Thank him. And thank the Bear,” I said quietly. She gave me a puzzled look but led me up a handsome staircase to the second-floor bedrooms. I knocked on a pristine white door. “Esme? It’s Ursula.”
On Bear Mountain Page 27
