On Bear Mountain

by Deborah Smith

  When Quentin read that he’d been anointed a fellow artist, he told me very quietly that he never wanted to see another word published about himself or his plans. I called the editor, who had been a dear friend of my father’s, and explained as best I could. “Is he shy?” the man asked.

  “No, he’s just not an artist. He’s an engineer. He doesn’t want to mislead people.”

  “How’s he going to build a sculpture as creatively complex as his daddy’s, then?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  • • •

  How can these people just assume I know what I’m doing? Quentin thought. His father’s legacy was so strong, the Bear’s effect so potent, that strangers were willing to accept his own reverence on faith. He feared the local publicity would generate more media, and word might get back to New York.

  When he went into town, people left gentle, hand-drawn cards on his truck’s windshield, containing photos of themselves or their kin with the Iron Bear. God bless you and Ursula for keeping up the good work, they said.

  Admirers came to the farm so often that he began to head for the woods with Arthur in tow every time a car rumbled into the yard. They pinned notes to him on the big canvas Army tent. And then, without warning, old Powell friends and neighbors began to show up at Bear Creek carrying contributions for the new sculpture — ancient car axles, discarded hand tools, rusty iron cookware. Each present came with a personal story.

  Arthur and Esme studiously pondered the junk pile in the pasture every day, often sitting beside it cross-legged for hours. Quentin stared at the hodgepodge with growing unease. When he analyzed his father’s sculpture, he saw, of course, that its bones were made from a dozen scrap sources. Yet each piece had been cut, shaped, and machined into something unique, the essence of its original form. How did Papa fit all that together to make something coherent?

  He spread every piece of collected junk in a circle around his camp and the Iron Bear. He set aside, he tore apart, he selected like pieces and collected them in different piles, then resorted them into other piles. Like a scientist contemplating a Frankenstein project or a paleontologist plotting the skeleton of some animal no modern eye had ever seen, he looked for patterns in strange bones. He even commandeered my wrecked sedan one day and towed it to the worksite.

  He began to sketch — drawing constantly on thick yellow pads he kept to himself. I made a point to avoid blatantly peering over his shoulder when he was nearby; since he rarely took time to come to the house and ate the food I brought him standing up, my honor wasn’t tested very often.

  “We have to go on a hunt for more bear parts,” Arthur announced. He took Esme by the hand and they walked through the woods to Dr. Washington’s. I followed them an hour later, curious.

  “They’re sitting in the old corn crib pondering a keg of nails,” Dr. Washington told me solemnly, as we stood outside his barn.

  “Maybe Quentin can make a porcupine.”

  He laughed. I peered into the barn, where I could just make out Arthur’s and Esme’s bowed heads over a pile of rusty nails. “I’ll come back and check on them again, later. You’re very kind to my brother, and I appreciate all you’ve done.”

  “Arthur is finding his way in the world without a father, slowly but surely, just like Quentin, and like you. He’ll be all right.”

  I had my doubts.

  • • •

  He couldn’t put it off any longer. He had to begin building a sculpture.

  The Iron Bear cast weird shadows across the pasture in the firelight. Quentin rose in the middle of the night, sweating and dreaming of his father with bloody hands. He hoped that starting a fresh fire would chase the memories away, but it didn’t. I’m surrounded by ghosts, he thought, looking at the piles of scrap and castoffs that circled the camp, shifting shapes in the high blaze. Some of them seemed to move, or to gaze at him with hollow eyes, the way the Iron Bear always did. What are you waiting for? I know you, it said. I own you. Until you find yourself in me, I always will.

  His father’s sculpture had finally spoken to him, just as he’d always feared it would. He doused the fire, took a long swallow from a bottle of Scotch, and sat the rest of the night in untempered darkness, daring the jagged shapes of his past and future to come after him.

  * * *

  I woke up at dawn, my heart racing. I slept with a window open most nights, even in the cold autumn air. Outside my screen came the shushing sound that woke me. I hurried to look, somehow knowing that this was one of Quentin’s noises.

  I was right.

  Out in the pasture, he was digging a foundation for his sculpture. He’d stretched lines of twine in neat grids outlining a 12-by-12-foot site for the concrete pad. The lines were perfectly parallel to the ground and he’d attached them with surgical precision to small pine stakes. Beside him sat one of the farm’s deep metal wheelbarrows with the garden hose draped over it, and a gray pile of rocky concrete, waiting to be mixed. Nearby lay a carpenter’s level and a plumb bob. He would measure everything. Every detail had to be perfect.

  I threw on some clothes, peeked into Arthur’s room to check on him, then went downstairs to make coffee. Arthur’s squirrels scampered around me, taking nuts from a bowl on the counter.

  When the coffee was done I hurried outside carrying two cups and trailed by the squirrels, who met Hammer in the front yard with fearless chatter. He and they caravaned behind me across the frosty grass like a coffee-presenting procession. “Good morning,” I called to Quentin. “How can I help? I’m good with concrete. I helped my father build the first pad, although frankly his engineering standards weren’t as high as yours.”

  “You can’t help me.” He kept digging.

  I watched him with concern. “How about a coffee break? Followed by a biscuit break?”

  “No. I need to get this part done. I don’t want a crowd. I’ll finish pouring the concrete before everyone else wanders out here.” He raised his head to scowl at me and I almost gasped.

  He looked haggard. Even building the foundation had set off some altered state, opened some door he’d never wanted to open. Distracted, he plunged his shovel into the dirt askance. It hit one of his taut lines and neatly cut the twine. The ends jumped back like startled kittens. He cursed loudly and obscenely, which was not at all like him. The squirrels ran. Hammer whimpered. I stood there assessing this dark side of his personality, seeing so much pain I’d never imagined.

  “You don’t have to work on this alone,” I said. “Whatever’s driving you, you can talk to me about it. I swear to you, whatever you tell me will never be repeated.”

  “It’s not your problem.”

  “Oh, yes it is. This is all about my family and my family’s future, as much as yours. And if you don’t trust me, then we have nothing. Not even friendship.”

  “We have nothing, then,” he said.

  After a stunned moment, I simply turned and walked back into the house.

  • • •

  Two days later, Arthur ran into the kitchen. I was fixing lunch. “He’s made a paw,” Arthur exclaimed. “The first paw!”

  I walked out to the worksite. Quentin raised up from the concrete pad, a welding torch in one gloved hand, a welding helmet pushed up to reveal his face, already streaked with sweat and grime despite the cool air. On the pad, anchored by the rebar, stood a paw-like conglomeration of metal pieces.

  “It’s alive,” he said.

  I refused to offer help, though he looked worse every day, and I was worried. “Lunch is available if you want it,” I said, and left him at his own misery.

  • • •

  You wanted to make her back away from you, and she has, he told himself with bleak satisfaction. He wearily turned his attention to the dismembered limb before him. Now it can stalk me, just like Papa’s sculptures stalked him. Let’s see who survives.

  After that day, Quentin belonged in spirit and fact to the mystery of his father’s lonely work. No one could h
elp him, and no one could get in his way. He performed the most methodical, painstaking labor on the new sculpture — cutting, hammering, shaping pieces of metal into curves and angles, fitting, welding, fitting again. The sculpture progressed from paws to complete legs.

  He decided suddenly that none of it looked right. He fired up a torch, and cut everything apart. Bear Two vanished, leaving only empty concrete stained with Quentin’s sweat and a few antenna-like prongs of rebar, waiting to anchor the next version.

  “Where’d Bear Two go?” Arthur asked worriedly.

  “Back to Iron Bear heaven,” Esme offered.

  This disturbed him profoundly. Bear Two, as he called it, had not spoken yet, so he didn’t know if it was the right friend for Mama Bear or not, but he knew this much: Quentin hadn’t even given it a chance.

  CHAPTER 22

  I asked Liza to help me transcribe Dr. Washington’s tapes, having learned that her skills from some past life enabled her to type at whirlwind speed. We holed up in the house for a day and tag-teamed the effort at my computer. I liked having her in my office, for company. She realized something terribly wrong was happening between me and Quentin, but she didn’t pry. Her extravagant blond hair and odd outfits — baggy white overalls and a pink sweatshirt, that day — had become a familiar and comforting sight.

  During a break I couldn’t find her, and wandered upstairs, searching. She was so lost in thought she didn’t hear me. I glanced into Daddy’s room. She was standing at the foot of his bed with her head bowed. I backed away but stepped on a creaking board, and she heard. When she turned, I saw tears on her face. She wiped them away quickly. “I’m sorry.”

  The suspicion I’d harbored for months just slapped me in the face. “Were you sleeping with him?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  Something irrational boiled inside me. Goddammit, all I ask is a little peace of mind inside my own home. “How long did this go on?”

  “More than two years.”

  “He should have told me. I had a right to know.” I didn’t, really, but I spoke out of anger and hurt.

  “He wanted to tell you. We both did. But you didn’t know me — or anything about me. You wouldn’t have approved. He didn’t want to drive you further away.”

  “That’s no excuse.” My voice rose. “I have a right to know who’s screwing my father in my mother’s bed!”

  Her face blanched. “Ursula, please — ”

  But I was already headed downstairs. I strode out the kitchen door, grabbing a coat and a knapsack I sometimes carried on walks. I had to get away from the images of her and Daddy rising in my mind.

  • • •

  I sat by Bear Creek, in a spot thick with matted autumn leaves, where a finger of the water seeped among exposed tree roots and smooth boulders. Quentin found me there and sat down beside me. I held my notepad on my lap to feign activity, but no doubt he could tell I’d just been sitting there, crying. “Everyone was afraid you’d been eaten by a bear,” he said.

  “There haven’t been any bears here for decades. And black bears don’t eat people.”

  “I told them I’d check, anyway.”

  “How’s Liza?”

  “Upset. And worried about you.”

  I stared into the quiet, naked forest, broken only by groves of evergreen laurel and a few large pines. “I was cruel. I’ve calmed down, now. It was just a shock. Thinking of her and my father sharing the bed I was born in.”

  “You don’t have to explain. I’m an expert on being cruel when everything closes in on me.”

  “Look, Quentin, you don’t have to say — ”

  “I hated the way my father lived his life. He was gone from the time I was eight years old. My mother’s life centered around supporting his ambitions. There was never enough money, and when he was at home he never looked hard enough to see how badly we were doing.”

  I took a deep breath. “I grew up the same way, the only difference being that my father didn’t leave home to chase his dreams. He chased them right here.” I looked down at the notepad in my lap. “I guess I’m no smarter. Talk about a fantasy. I come to this spot to draw sketches of a house I’ll probably never build. But I can picture it.” I gestured behind me. “Up there on the top of the ridge, looking down on this spot.”

  “Will you let me see your drawings?”

  “Don’t laugh.” I handed him the sketch pad and he opened it slowly. He studied my rough pencil drawings of a handsome house of deep porches and wide windows, somehow old-fashioned and familiar and warm. “It’d look good with a fieldstone foundation and shingled siding,” he said, with clear approval. “What’s this?” He pointed to an area where I’d scribbled SEA VIEW.

  “A spot for a special bay window looking over the creek. You know, the creek goes to the river, and the river to the sea. So it’s a sea view.” I felt my face growing warm.

  “I like it. I know the perfect window for it. I’ve got one in my inventory. It came out of a villa by the ocean. It’s a huge oval with stained-glass trim by Tiffany.”

  I managed a tired laugh. “I think that would be worth more than my entire construction budget.”

  “Think big, Rose.”

  Silence. I stared at him. “Rose?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “My mother gathered enough information to wonder about you intensely. I gave her a name to chew on. Sorry.”

  “No. I . . . I like it. It’s all right.”

  He looked back down at the sketches. “If you want blueprints drawn, I can do them for you.”

  “You can?”

  “I’m a civil engineer. That’s architecture without the glamour.” He’d leave for New York one day and never look back, but we both wanted to pretend we’d stay in touch. “I’ll think about your offer,” I said.

  He broke a twig between his fingers and held the two pieces out. “Draw. Short end says we’ll both get what we want.”

  I plucked a piece of twig from his fingertips. He held up his half. “Short end,” he said. “We win.”

  I tossed my half away. “Never put your faith in wood. It rots.”

  “I’m putting my faith in you. You know what you’ve got here. You’re holding on to a paradise by its short end, and you know it, and if you have to beg, borrow, kill, or steal, you’ll never let go. Liza ruffled your idea of home today, but it’s still home.”

  The cool creek air, moss and remnants of fern and quieting autumn life, his appeal, this moment, his heartfelt words, filled me with sharp hope for futures unknown. “Sometimes I think you like it here, yourself.”

  We were silent for a minute, his cool silver eyes boring into me, me staring back, hot-faced. “You believe that for both of us,” he said softly. “I like the way you believe in things.”

  • • •

  “Please talk to me,” Liza said. She met me on the back porch.

  I tossed my knapsack on a wall hook. “It’s all right. You just caught me off guard. Sorry I hurt your feelings.”

  “Nobody could take your mother’s place. Your father knew that. He and I never talked about marriage. I’m not making any claims, but I did love him — I still do — and I believe he loved me. I’ve come to think of this farm as my home, too.”

  I took a deep breath and said nothing. Daddy should have put her in his will, made his wishes clear. If only fathers would do that about everything their children still needed to know, to hear. Dear Daughter, here are all the instructions I always meant to give you and all the things we needed to settle between us, so you can get on with your life and stop wishing we could talk to each other even one more time.

  Liza watched me worriedly. “He never forgave himself for what happened to your mother. I didn’t take her place. She was always here, with us. I knew that.” I sat down on the porch swing, and she sat down beside me. “He loved you so much. He understood your feelings.”

  “I couldn’t change him. I shouldn’t have tried. If you only love someone after they’ve changed to su
it your tastes, then what did you love about them to begin with?”

  “That’s always the question, isn’t it?” Her voice broke. “When I met him I knew I’d found a man who was true to himself. No false goodness. No false pride. Take it or leave it, he was the purest soul I’ve ever met. I work so closely with fire that I’m a little capricious about small burns. I have the scars to prove it, too.” Her softening face constricted in sorrow. “Thomas was the only man I ever knew who didn’t leave a single ugly mark.”

  “You’ll always have a home here. I’m sure that’s what he’d want. But it’s what I want, too.”

  Tears streamed down her face. She wiped them away and faced forward, pulling her hands into her lap. “I owe it to you to tell you about myself.”

  “No, there’s no need — ”

  “I come from New Orleans. I was not a good person there. I was a party girl when I was young, and I had a serious drug habit. I was married twice, both times to rich men who treated me badly, and I let them. I had a child with my second husband, but I was a drunk and a drug addict, and the baby died from postnatal complications. That changed me. I gave up everything. Even my real name. I wanted to be someone new.”

  After a moment I said, “How long ago?”

  “It’s been ten years.”

  “Did my father know all about your past?”

  “Yes. I told him. He said — ” her voice broke — “he said that was just an old layer of my life, one I’d painted over a long time ago. It makes you who you are today, he said. And I love that person.” She hesitated. “I thank you for taking a chance on me — and on the other tenants.”

  We sat in silence for a minute, letting everything sink in. I was still thinking about Quentin, too, with an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. If we could only hurry to the people we care about and tell them what amazes us about them, and how wrong they are to believe the worst. If they’d only listen. “Are you glad to know about me?” Liza asked. “Or do you wish you’d gone on just wondering?”