On Bear Mountain Read online

  I heard mad rustling in the laurel on the opposite creek bank and snapped the camera. Our neighbor, Fred Washington, popped his black, grizzled head out of the laurel, grabbed for a spindly limb that wouldn’t support his rotund bulk, then lost his balance and sat down hard. Mr. Fred had been heading to the creek to catch minnows for bait. His bait bucket landed in the laurel, like a tin crown.

  “What in the world you doin’, child?” he bellowed at me.

  I was only eight years old, extremely bright but no match for the social horror that gripped me at that moment. “Bear!” I yelled, as if I’d seen something. He looked around wildly. “Run, child!” I dropped the camera and fled, scrambling up the steep hillside to the safety of our small pasture, rimmed in good, strong barbed-wire fence.

  Later, Daddy and I walked over to the Washington farm and I presented Mr. Fred with one of Mama’s homemade pound cakes and an apology. He accepted both with good grace. Mr. Fred was a widower, and childless, retired from forty years of milking cows for a white farmer who owned a commercial dairy. His hands were knotted with arthritis from all those decades of squeezing teats, and his stiff knees remembered every long day sitting at a milk stool.

  We sat on his porch awhile, eating sliced pound cake and drinking glasses of rich, raw milk from Mr. Fred’s milk cow. It was his teenage brother whom the Klan hung during the bad years after Bethina Grace and his uncle Nathan ran away together. There had been a lot of Washingtons in the county then, but the Klan bullied most of them into leaving, until only Mr. Fred’s stubborn parents were left. They vowed that they would raise their other two sons in Tiber County to spite their boy’s killers, and that those sons would triumph.

  When the boys grew up there was only enough money to send one of them down to Atlanta to attend Morehouse College. It was decided that Jonah, Mr. Fred’s younger brother, would go. Jonah had earned a Ph.D. in history and was now a professor at Columbia. He sent money and gifts to Mr. Fred but hardly ever returned from New York to visit their old home.

  Mr. Fred gazed at me somberly. “I ain’t no kind of bear, child, and don’t you try to take no more pictures of me.” I nodded urgently. “Yes, sir.” He spotted a long brier scratch on my arm, went inside, and came back with a can of salve. “Doctor Akin’s Udder Balm,” he said, and smeared some on my arm. “Good for sore cow teats and brier scratches.”

  Teat salve. I suppressed my giggles and solemnly sniffed my arm. From then on, the mentholated scent of the ointment would mean forgiveness, to me.

  “Thank you, Mr. Fred,” Daddy said quietly. “Why don’t you come on over and have dinner tonight, if you want.” He always offered, and Mr. Fred never accepted. He didn’t accept, now, even though we probably had kin somewhere if Bethina Grace and Nathan had managed to produce even one child together. Our blood might be mixed in caramel-colored people dancing a rumba under a Brazilian sky, but Mr. Fred and my family would never share a meal.

  I thought about that as Daddy and I walked home. The Powells’ and Washingtons’ only legacies lay in the land and a notorious ability to think up interesting ideas and wander away on adventures, like Granny Annie and the others. So one way or another, we shifted shapes and disappeared.

  I vowed that I would never do that.

  • • •

  Miss Betty was dying. Everyone knew it, including her. She waited peacefully in bed at the stately house where she had been born, listening to the inviting whispers of her lost mother, daughters, and husband. Daddy and I went to see her, and I stood beside her canopied bed, trying not to look at her shrunken face, but instead at the mementos of her life. I was ten years old now, old enough to have mastered the art of pretending to be nonchalant when I was scared to death of death.

  On her wicker nightstands were black bear dolls, black bear statuary, and photographs of the Iron Bear. Beside those were sepia-tinted miniatures of her husband and lost daughters, and of John, her favorite great-nephew, whom the bear spirit of Granny Annie Powell had saved from polio, whether he believed it or not.

  “I’ve got some news for you, Miss Betty,” Daddy said gently. “Victoria’s going to have another baby. We’re not going to lose this one. I can feel it in my bones.”

  “Oh, how wonderful,” she murmured weakly. “You all have wanted more children for so long. I bet this one will be fine.”

  I beamed. “I’m hoping for a sister.”

  “I hope you get your wish. A sister as fine and strong as you are.” Miss Betty was so blind with cataracts she could barely see me. She put her thin, cool hands on either side of my face, examined my features with her fingertips, then confirmed her findings to Daddy. “Tommy,” she whispered in her elegant up-country drawl, “you were right about her.”

  “That’s so, Miss Betty.”

  “She’s a wise child, Tommy. She listens.” My silences were often mistaken for thoughtful reverie when they simply seethed with bound-up anger and fervent schemes. As usual, I couldn’t help myself. I had always wanted to ask her a question on matters of Powell pride, and this might be my last chance. “Do you hate your Powell mama for running away?” I asked.

  Her cloudy eyes gleamed. “Hate her? Oh, my dear girl. I’ll tell you a secret nobody else knows. Not my brothers and sisters, not my children or my grandchildren.” Miss Betty held my hands and looked straight at me. “She told me she had to leave,” she whispered. “And I told her to go.”

  I gaped at her. Beside me, Daddy said in low wonder, “Miss Betty?”

  “Papa was mean to her. There was no other escape.”

  “But she was your mama,” I insisted.

  “I knew she loved me. Just because someone leaves or disappoints you doesn’t mean the love is gone. Sometimes that’s when it’s the strongest. When you feel it so much it hurts.” My silence made it clear this explanation was beyond me. The weakest smile crept across Miss Betty’s wrinkled face. “You’ll understand someday, I’m afraid. Everyone comes to that conclusion whether they want to or not. Our Bear knows, doesn’t it, Tommy?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he nodded.

  I blinked. “Miss Betty, do you think the Iron Bear talks to people?”

  “Of course. How do you think I got so wise?”

  “It doesn’t talk to me.”

  “Oh, my, yes it does. It’s full of life, darling. It’s teaching, and you are learning. Never stop trying to hear what it’s telling you to remember. Never stop listening to your heart.” She sighed deeply. Her nurse and Mr. John’s middle-aged sister, the stately and stout Luzanne Tiber Lee, who was not that friendly to us, entered the room and bustled around. “Time for her nap,” Luzanne said brusquely, trailing the fragrance of Chanel No. Five and the faint odor of dog. She held her beloved beagle, Royal Hamilton — named for her sons, Royal and Hamilton, RH for short. RH, a retired field trial champion, wagged his stubby tail at us, at least.

  “You take care,” Daddy whispered to Miss Betty, bending to kiss her forehead.

  “You take care of yourself and all you love, including our Bear,” she whispered to him, but looked at me.

  “I will,” I whispered back.

  As we walked down the shady sidewalk to the truck, I caught Daddy wiping the corner of one eye. “Don’t cry,” I said urgently, squeezing his big, work-roughened hand, as tears filled my own eyes.

  “You first,” he said, and smiled.

  “Where do you think people go when they die?”

  He thought for a moment as we walked, and I found myself counting the rhythm of our feet as if it were a time meter. “I think we can go anywhere we want,” he answered. “I’m betting that Miss Betty will go down to the creek bottoms and keep Granny Annie company.”

  I still believed that I’d look up from skimming rocks across the creek one day and see Granny Annie gazing back at me with a snout and black fur, so this news made me feel better. “Then I guess I’ll be watching out for two old lady bears.” He laughed, picked me up, and kissed me on the cheek.

  • • •<
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  Miss Betty passed on near midnight, without ever waking up. I camped out with Daddy and about twenty other men around the Iron Bear. Rumor had leaked that Mr. John intended to send a crew with cutting torches to dismember the sculpture before dawn, now that his great-aunt was dead and had left the sculpture to him, trusting him to do what was right. This was right, in his eyes.

  My head buzzed with fatigue. I leaned against Daddy, who had wrapped me in a blanket against the late-summer dew. I kept nodding off or seeing weird shadows on the Bear from the light of the lanterns the men had set around it. These men were rough-looking characters, a few chicken farmers but mostly grim backwoodsmen, modern outsiders who’d rather piss on a town than live in one. They smoked, they chewed, they spit, and some drank from flasks. They had come there because they heard Tom Powell needed help.

  I didn’t comprehend any of this, and was about to say so when a truck arrived. All the men stood. Me, too. I clutched my blanket and watched as Mr. John and several workmen strode toward us. Mr. John looked grim and waved both hands in firm gestures of dismissal. “Tommy, that sculpture’s going back where it belongs. To the junkyard. Get out of my way.”

  Daddy stepped forward. “I can’t let you do this, cousin.” All the men around him closed ranks, staring evenly at Mr. John. One tall, bearded frontiersman said in a guttural drawl, “What Tom Powell says, goes.”

  Mr. John’s face got redder by the second. He halted, nervously glancing at the hands of the men with Daddy, knowing that every one of them had a pistol or a knife hidden in their overalls or their hunting trousers, and that they wouldn’t be shy about pulling the weapons out. “Now, look here, boys, this isn’t a fight and it isn’t your problem. I own this sculpture. I have a right to do with it as I please. And I intend to get it out of my sight forever.”

  “I’ll take it off your hands,” Daddy said. “I’ll cart it away. Move it tonight. I’ll set it out at my place. You can tell everybody it turned into thin air, if you want to.”

  “I want it destroyed.”

  “Your great-aunt isn’t cold yet, and you’re willing to tear down something you know she loved?”

  “I honored her by allowing it to stay here for ten long years. I’ve done my duty.”

  “A duty like this isn’t ever finished, Johnny. If you tear up this sculpture, there’ll be hard feelings around here for years to come. You’re not thinking real good right now.”

  “What would you do with the thing?”

  “I’d look at it, think about it, feel about it. You may hate the Bear, but that’s okay, too. You want to know the only thing that’s unforgivable about a work of art? When it doesn’t make you care one way or the other.”

  Mr. John said nothing. A man built security. He built a name for himself and his family. He didn’t go around feeling one way or the other about art.

  “I’ll sell it to you,” he said suddenly. “If you believe in it so much, then you’ll pay for it.”

  Daddy had earned the value of the Bear with his devotion and caretaking for ten years, but he quickly said, “I’ll pay. Name your price.”

  “Two hundred dollars.”

  “I don’t have that kind of money up front. I can pay you twenty dollars a month.”

  “Forty a month. Take it or leave it. And the bear stays here until you make the last payment.”

  Mr. John was carving out his pound of flesh, reclaiming the authority Daddy had taken from him in front of the men. Daddy swallowed hard. “Forty a month. Agreed. And I take the Bear with me in the fall.” They shook hands in the lantern light, as the chorus of wild-looking men stood witness to the strangest deal in the history of Tiberville. I felt woozy with surprise, and I had a bad taste in my mouth. Forty dollars a month seemed a fortune, and what if Mama needed medicine? She’d lost three babies before this one.

  The world was moving too fast for me, and I was afraid, for some reason. Miss Betty had passed on to who-knew-where. I tried to imagine her gently roaming Bear Creek in spirit form, united finally with her family of all kinds, including the bears. But what good had come out of all this misery? I looked up at the Iron Bear. Tell me, I begged. But I heard nothing.

  • • •

  Fall finally arrived, after an eternity, and the Bear came to live at Bear Creek. We’d done without even the most ordinary pleasures and necessities to scratch out the forty dollars Daddy gave Mr. John each month. In the early weeks of her pregnancy Mama seemed to get by well enough and often placed my hands on her stomach. “You feel our baby moving, honey?” she would say. “That’s your little bubba or sister in there. I got the light of angels inside me, again.” But now she was seven months along, bloated and pale. She and I sat cross-legged on the ground under a backyard oak tree that shed brilliant red leaves on us with every whisper of breeze.

  Mr. Fred put his tractor in high gear and pulled the Iron Bear down the ramp of a borrowed flatbed timber truck parked just beyond our backyard shade trees. “A little more to the left,” Daddy shouted over the chug of the tractor engine and the scrape of the Bear’s massive metal paws on the wooden ramp. Sweat ran down his face. His overalls were covered in gray concrete dust and mud. Only that morning he’d put the finishing touches on a pad he’d poured for the Bear. I had blisters on my palms from helping him stir batches of concrete in a wheelbarrow, and specks of white paint through my hair.

  He stood atop the pristine white foundation, his legs spread and his arms raised in the air as he guided Mr. Fred’s towing progress. A huge smile lit his face. He was conducting a symphony. He was standing before a Degas in the Louvre. He was giving thanks to heaven. He was a holy man invoking all the unappreciated beauty of the world to settle there, on our farm, because we were special.

  I never loved my father more than I did that day.

  Low afternoon sunshine cut through the Bear’s sides, casting its weird, skeletal shadow our way. Mama drew back. She clutched my hand atop one knee of my overalls and prayed silently, her lips moving as her worried eyes stayed on Daddy. She stroked her other hand over her bulging stomach, as if soothing the baby inside.

  Each time the wind shifted, more leaves rattled down and our personal stink rose up. I smelled the pungent nastiness of chicken house chores on her brogans and my dirty tennis shoes — the scent of hard work and low returns. I worried that the scent might make her vomit again.

  Her dazed attention never left Daddy. “I reckon the man who made the Bear is off somewhere laughin’ at us for carin’ so much.” It was the first and last time I ever heard her say anything less than obedient and supportive. Not that Daddy asked her for submissive loyalty. It was just how she’d been raised to treat a husband. “I just hope it’s not got the evil eye,” she said, then pulled her frayed sweater tighter over her stomach.

  I squeezed Mama’s hand patiently.

  Twilight came. I was soothed by the glorious hail of yellow sparks floating upward like a thousand dancing fireflies as Daddy welded the Bear’s black iron paws into permanent promenade on its new foundation. I watched the welding sparks rise and fly away among the stars in the purple-black autumn sky.

  “Why did you marry Daddy?” I asked Mama. “Do you think he’s got moondust in his head?” Someone at school had said that to me.

  “If’n he’s got moondust, then the moon oughta be proud,” she told me. “Some men’s got great big empty heads and hearts like shrunk-up tomaters. Your Daddy’s got a heart as big as the world. That’s why I married him.”

  “Do we have any money left? Daddy’s giving money to people right and left.”

  “Why, sure.” She looked away from my scrutiny. “We got more than enough.”

  I overheard Daddy tell an old man one day that his dream was to turn the chicken houses into working art studios for all his friends to use.

  How would we pay bills? I thought. How would we eat? I began to gnaw my fingernails and count pennies I saved. I wish the Bear could have warned me that this was the last autumn my sorrows wo
uld be that kind.

  • • •

  It was the coldest December in years. Ice rimmed the drinking water in the old bathtub Daddy had set in the pasture for the milk cow we’d bought from Mr. Fred. Daddy thought it would be a good idea to have our own supply of rich milk, now that there would soon be two growing children in the house.

  That Saturday he got up before dawn, and so did I, and together we fed the chickens and milked the cow. Mama was almost due, and so tired she hadn’t gotten out of bed in a week. She wouldn’t let Daddy take her to a doctor, and he not only abided by her wishes, he celebrated them. “Everybody’s got their own idea of god,” I remember him telling me. “Your mama walked as far out on the limb of worldliness as she is ever gonna go, back when I took to have her snakebite treated. In her way of thinking, she can’t rile god again.”

  “Maybe you oughta make her go to the doctor,” I said worriedly. “And then god could just fuss at you about it. How’s about I tell god that I made her go to the doctor? I betcha god wouldn’t pick on a kid.”

  Daddy laughed until he cried. “Do you know that god is a work of art, and you can’t paint god any color you want? Your mama’s god is red in the face right now, from grinning over your good sense.”

  On that Saturday he signed up for a day’s work moving a load of hay for a farmer in a neighboring town. The job paid well, though of course Daddy never said we needed the money. Anything that took him away from chicken farming gave him pleasure. Before he left that morning he posted the boss’s phone number on the big black wall phone in the kitchen.

  “If your mama gets sick,” he told me, “or anything about her makes you scared that she’s not feeling good, you call the man I’m working for, and he’ll tell me I’m needed at home, and I’ll come right along.”

  “I’ll take care of Mama,” I promised firmly, trying to appear a little bored by the anxiety in his eyes, although my heart was racing with the fear of being left alone with such responsibility. After he left I made toast in the oven and took Mama a plateful, with gobs of her homemade scuppernong jelly and a glass of fresh milk. She nibbled half a piece of toast and sipped the milk. When she refused the rest, I stared at the leftovers as if they’d betrayed me. “I’ll make you some pancakes,” I said to Mama. “Pancakes won’t turn your stomach.”