On Bear Mountain

by Deborah Smith

  “I already knew who you were.”

  “What do you mean?” She looked at me anxiously.

  I got up. “You’re the second woman my father loved. He didn’t choose his loves lightly. That’s all that’s important.”

  The beatific look on her face said thank you.

  • • •

  The next day I knocked on Oswald’s lurid pink door. Taking chances. Trying to believe in the people around me, as if I could build up steam to help Quentin.

  Oswald appeared to feel as wary as I was. We sat across from each other on a plaid couch under one of his paintings, a huge naked woman standing in a cornfield. The ears of corn bore a distinct resemblance to penises. I pretended not to notice. “I have a manuscript for you.” In my hands were the neatly transcribed pages of Dr. Washington’s stories. I explained what they were about. “I want you to read these and let me know if you can illustrate them. You could start with a few trial sketches to see if we can come up with something that works.”

  He was nearly speechless. “Oh, hell, I’ll give it a try,” he said, finally. For all I knew he’d draw naked toddlers skewering monsters with sharpened crucifixes. But the next day he handed me a sheaf of sketches in which graceful black children played among the handsome farm setting of Dr. Washington’s Bear Creek tales. When I showed the beautiful drawings to Dr. Washington and everyone else, we all looked at each other as if this new Oswald had emerged from some crusty shell, like a crayfish.

  The world was changing.

  • • •

  It was time, Arthur decided, to share his secret with Esme, and see if she approved. Down in the creek bottoms one warm afternoon just after Thanksgiving, he and Esme sat on a large log, idly kicking piles of fallen leaves. Between them, spread on one of Mama’s faded, hand-embroidered kitchen towels, perched the last of the peanut-butter cookies Liza baked for their daily sojourn to the wilds. Esme darted flirtatious glances at him, knowing that when they both reached for the last cookie some handholding would ensue.

  Suddenly she heard loud, rhythmic footsteps, and gave Arthur a worried look. “That’s my heart beating for you,” he answered with all the gravitas of a bad actor reciting a line. Quentin had told him that when he couldn’t think of anything else to say, to say his heart was beating for her. Excited by the coming revelation, he stood, unafraid. No animal in his woods was frightening to him, or frightened of him. He knew, according to the legends, who and what had always lived in the hollow of Bear Creek.

  The tall evergreen laurel began to wave wildly. Without any warning, a large female black bear and her cub shuffled from the thick green shield and halted, gazing at Arthur. He took the cookie from Esme’s trembling hand, approached the bears without the least inhibition, broke the cookie into two pieces, and laid it on a rock. The mother and her cub ate the pieces eagerly. The female bear weighed several hundred pounds and easily could have mauled Arthur. Instead, she licked his hand. He scratched her behind the ears, then did the same with the cub.

  Arthur returned to the log and sat down beside a wide-eyed Esme. “That’s Granny Annie and her little boy,” he explained calmly. “She found him.” Spirit bears and real bears were the same, to him. All were Powell family. “Are you scared?” he asked Esme.

  She looked up at him with trusting eyes. “Not if you tell me it’s all right.”

  His chest swelled with pride. He slid down into a cushion of leaves, and Esme sat beside him. He put his arm around her, and then they kissed. “This is how you chase the bad Tweens away,” he told her. “The bad Tweens got Mama Bear. We can’t let ’em get Granny Annie and her son.”

  Esme stared at the mother and cub. “What do you mean? What’s going to happen to them?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. I just know bad things happen to bears when they get around people. Iron Bears and regular bears, too. We’ve gotta figure out how to save them.”

  She nodded earnestly. “I’ll help.” They bent their heads together.

  • • •

  So the bears had returned to Bear Creek — or had never left. We were converging on the sharpest winter in a decade, filled with the poignancy of endings and change, even more than winters usually are. I looked for my namesakes, Ursa Major and Minor, in the night skies. The constellations shifted into place, and so many paths, long forgotten or dreamed only in the hardest sleep, began to forge into one.

  • • •

  December arrived. Bear Two evolved into four paws and legs again, then disappeared again. Quentin grew quieter and angrier, more frustrated every day.

  Arthur kept his own vigil, hovering nearby while Quentin worked, listening feverishly as Quentin instructed him about women, life, and how to weld. Quentin built legs again, then took them down. This set was number five. We were all on edge now — me, Arthur, the tenants, and Quentin, worst of all. We got an early snow, just an inch or two, but it formed a nasty, icy slush. Quentin worked without stopping, his face and hands growing chapped, his breath making white clouds in the air, the muddy slush spattering the rubber boots he wore.

  Four paws, four legs, and the beginnings of an underbelly emerged next, although none of it looking remotely like a bear. When she came to pick up Esme one day Janine gazed unhappily across the field, where the scene had taken on the appearance of a strange carnival. Sparks flew as Quentin finished cutting what was left of my sedan’s axle apart. “Is he doing this just to prove that he can?”

  “I don’t think he has much choice. It’s become an obsession.”

  “Well, it’s sucking everyone else into its black hole.” She sighed as we watched Esme and Arthur sitting together contentedly in the cab of Quentin’s truck. “What are they doing?”

  “Esme’s been learning to drive it. They just go up and down the dirt road. One of us rides with them. She’s actually progressed very well. She can shift gears like a pro.”

  “I don’t understand why she has this fascination with mechanical things, but I suppose it’s harmless.”

  “Better than playing with guns.”

  “Oh, we never give her any bullets.”

  “Isn’t that sweet,” I deadpanned.

  She frowned. “Fuck you, and your growers’ contract, too.”

  “Aren’t you glad it’s settled? It was a nice compromise. Admit it.”

  “It’ll do. Daddy hates it, but he’s resigned to the situation.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Not well. He’s playing a lot of golf. He hates golf.”

  “You ought to find him something else to occupy his time.”

  She turned to me hotly. “Don’t give me any more advice on running my family or my business. I’ve had your praises crammed down my throat since we were little girls, and since Mother died Daddy has become your biggest fan. Mother was a snob, all right? He was just a rich, smalltown nobody to her, and she always acted as if she’d married beneath herself. He adored her but she gave him a hard time about a lot of things — including his ties to your family. He wants to make up for keeping your family out of our social circle all those years. But you know what? I don’t give a shit.”

  “Ditto, cousin. But look — we should be able to mend some fences and get your daddy back to his old self.”

  “I’ll work it out in my own way.”

  On that note, she marched over to the convoy truck, opened the driver’s door, and gazed up at Esme. “Breaker, breaker, c’mon,” Janine drawled with exaggerated truckstop drama, as if talking over a CB radio. “Is that my cousin Esme at the wheel of that big rig? I don’t believe it. Over.”

  Esme blinked in confusion. “I can drive this truck anywhere,” she said merrily. “You’ll be surprised.”

  She and Arthur smiled.

  • • •

  Just after sunset one evening not long before Christmas I began putting up ancient strands of holiday garland on the living room windows. My arms ached from stacking a ten-foot-tall mound of firewood on the back porch. I had ordered more propan
e for the room heaters and gotten out all the quilts. The house was filled with the scent of cornbread baking in the oven. Turnip greens simmered in a pot on the stove, with stewed apples in a casserole dish next to them. My omelet pan hung on a kitchen peg next to my grandmother’s iron skillet. Liza was setting the table for dinner. I was trying to secure my nest not only for the winter, but against some unseen doom that haunted my thoughts.

  “Come quick!” Arthur shouted. His eyes were glazed with fear as he dashed into the house. “Quentin’s beating up his Bear!”

  Liza and I ran outside. Quentin was slugging at the latest half-finished sculpture with a sledgehammer. Small pieces of metal flew in the fading light, but the larger sections were too strongly welded. He couldn’t break apart something he’d built to outlast everything but his own frustration. He looked wild and enraged.

  “Stop it,” I ordered. “Quentin, I said stop!” He staggered to a halt like a beaten boxer, drenched in sweat, steam rising off him in the cold air, the long hammer hanging in his hands. “I’m starting over again. Just stay out of my way.”

  Arthur began crying. “You’re killing it. Killing it. And I liked this one. It’s got good feet.”

  I put my arms around my brother. “He’s not killing it. I’m going to talk to him and everything will be fine. Go in the house with Liza. Okay? Liza, take him inside and fix him some dinner. Don’t let him come back out here tonight.”

  “Come on, honey,” she crooned, and led Arthur away.

  I hurried to Quentin and held out both hands. “Give me that sledgehammer.”

  “This one isn’t working, either. Just leave me alone and I’ll tear it apart like the others.”

  “You don’t have any perspective, anymore. This sculpture is fine. You’re the one who’s being torn apart.” I eased my hands between his and gripped the hammer’s long handle. “I’m asking you to calm down and talk this over with me. Please.”

  His shoulders sagged. He tossed the heavy hammer aside, then sat down wearily on the concrete pad. I crouched in front of him and took his dirty, blistered hands tightly in mine. “You’re making yourself sick over this. You’ve lost weight. You don’t sleep right, you don’t eat right, you’ve got half-healed welding blisters all over your arms. You look like hell and I haven’t seen you smile in weeks.”

  His mouth crooked slightly beneath exhausted eyes. “Are you just trying to flatter me?”

  “I’m sorry I ever agreed to this idea. It’s destroying you.”

  “I haven’t been killed by the damned sculpture — yet.”

  “Don’t talk that way.” My voice rose. I stared at him, suddenly understanding something. “You want it to hurt you. Quentin, why? What do you think you did to your father to deserve this guilt? What’s happening to you out here?”

  “I remember my father more every day.” He spoke slowly, struggling. “Every goddamn day out here in the cold, every burn mark, every drop of sweat — he comes back to me a little more. Things he said, things he did when I visited him at his warehouse. Teaching me to play cards, telling me what to say to girls, teaching me honor and self-discipline, showing me how to be a man the way he believed a man should be.”

  “Good. Those are wonderful memories.”

  He shook his head. “I also remember him sitting in front of a fan on a hot day with his head in his hands, dripping sweat. He’d have little cuts all over his hands and blisters from the welding torch. And he’d sit there like he didn’t have the energy to move. It wasn’t just physical exhaustion. It was his heart. His soul.”

  He was also describing himself, lately. “You never realized how much his work took out of him?”

  “Not the way I’ve learned by trying to copy him.” He scrubbed a hand over his hair, and I noticed a burn welt at the edge of his forehead. He had welts and scrapes all over his hands and arms, too. “I’ll be right back,” I said. I ran to the house and returned with a can of Udder Balm. “You need teat salve,” I said.

  He stared at me then laughed darkly. “You think that heals everything.”

  “It’s a start.” I took his hands, one at a time, and massaged the thick ointment into them. I pretended to examine his palm.

  “You read palms? What do you see?” He spoke with the acidic tone of a nonbeliever. I didn’t believe in palm-reading either, but I took the opportunity to skewer him. “Fear of responsibility. Fear of commitment. Fear of sleeping with only one woman the rest of your life. The usual.”

  “No.” He turned his hand inside mine, closed it around mine, and looked at me quietly. “Fear of dying,” he corrected.

  A heartbeat passed in measured silence. I said finally, “Tell me why.”

  “Men in my family die young. Always have. Killed in wars, or on the job — ” He hesitated, a cynical appeal coming to his mouth. “Riconnis have a death wish, maybe. My father saved himself the trouble of wondering how he’d go. Have to give him credit for taking charge.”

  I stared at him. “If I believed — ” I had to stop and clear the knot in my throat, and then I said loudly, “I have to believe there is a way to change a family’s traditions, or fate, or stupid bad luck or poor judgment — whatever you want to call it. I am going to change my family’s future. And you’re going to change yours.”

  “As long as I work on the sculpture I’ve got a chance of understanding who my father was. Every time I tear down a sculpture and start over it’s because I still don’t know.”

  “You may never understand why he killed himself.”

  He raised his head. His eyes burned into me. “You’re wrong.” He hesitated. The secret he’d held inside himself since he was eighteen years old had never been dragged out of him before. She deserves to know who I am, he thought. “I broke his heart. I killed him.”

  I went very still. “Tell me how.” The story poured out of him. The woman who’d become his father’s predatory mentor. His father’s adultery. The unpaid bills, the struggle, the stolen cars. How it had all led to that confrontation in a cemetery, that brutal revelation of a son’s loss of faith, and a father’s tragedy. When he finished he sat with his head bowed. Relief coursed through me. I could comprehend guilt. I could help him.

  I took his face between my hands, and lifted it. “There are so many times when I go off by myself and cry about my father. I hurt when I think about all the things I’ll never get to say to him. I expect years from now I’ll still hurt. It was like that with my mother. Even now — and it’s been over twenty years — I pick up the phone in the kitchen sometimes and think, I should have called the doctor. It’s something I have to live with. I asked Dr. L-J about that once, and she said, Who told you you’d go through life with no unanswered questions and no regrets? Half the answer is learning to live with the questions.

  “You do your best, Quentin, you make mistakes, you learn, you go on stronger than before, so you don’t make the same mistake again. The trick is that we grow up telling ourselves we’ll never make our parents’ mistakes, but then we realize we’re making a whole set of our own. Nobody warned us.”

  He shook his head. “I owe him.”

  “He owed you, too. It’s not a matter of who made mistakes, of who hurt the other. It just happened.”

  “I can’t tell my mother. I’ve never told her what I said to him. And I never want her to know about the woman. But because of that, she can’t understand why I don’t worship my father the way she does. That secret’s been a wall between us since I was a boy.”

  “All you have to tell her is that you do worship your father. Because it’s true.” Denial rose in his eyes. I went on quickly. “Everything you’re doing here is for him.”

  “No,” he said quietly. “It’s for you.”

  I kissed him. It was quick and easy, a soft press of my lips against his mouth, then drawing back. He shut his eyes then opened them slowly, savoring me. I saw nothing to promise that one word I’d spoken had changed his feelings, but I kissed him again. “You’re wrong,” I whi
spered. “But I like the way you believe it.”

  We stood. The light of a rising moon cast mysterious shadows from the Iron Bear and its tormented, half-finished companion, their shapes as unfathomable as the destiny that had brought us together. There was only one way Riconnis and Powells would ever have met in the world, and we stood before it. Our future was evolving or ending. We could not know which, that night.

  He and I went into each other’s arms, and after a while we walked together to the tent. He built a fire in the potbellied stove. I pulled the covers back on his bed. The night was closing in, it would be cold, but not between us. He came to me. I put my hands on his shoulders, his on my waist, then sliding around me. I hadn’t answered his dilemma, I’d only opened a door to answers that might never come. I knew that. “Make it easy to forget,” he ordered in a low voice.

  “You do the same for me,” I whispered.

  We made love like thieves after pleasure has become its own kind of stolen virtue. He moved over me and I moved over him, our hands linked, our breath rough and sweet, sometimes intensely silent, at others whispering commands and compliments. All during that long, turbulent night it was easy to forget there would be hard decisions.

  The second sculpture would never be finished. I wouldn’t let Quentin try anymore. I didn’t know what I’d say to Arthur, or how he’d react.

  All I knew, throughout that night, was that I loved Quentin Riconni and I would always love him, even when he left me forever.

  CHAPTER 23

  The mother bear and her cub had come to some understanding with Arthur, who told them it was time for them to move where they’d be safe. Quentin’s misery and violence toward the second sculpture confirmed the plan. This was no place for bears.

  And so, under the light of the moon, during some brief period when Quentin and I slept with the stove-fire crackling and quilts pulled over us like a cocoon that muffled all sound, Arthur coaxed the bear and her cub into the covered back of the convoy truck. Soon Esme trundled down the dirt road behind the toylike lights of her golf cart. Carrying a knapsack with her gun and a package of cookies in it, she kissed him, then climbed, trembling, into the truck’s driver’s seat. He settled beside her and squeezed her hand.