“No petition signature, no giraffe,” I said, intercepting both long-necked cookies, which were wrapped in cellophane. I tucked them in my blazer pocket. I could not abide the parasites of the world. Every one of them was a Janine Tiber, filled with gall, grabbing my book. Mine, they said.
Not in this generation, I answered. “Sorry, ladies, but there are rules of social activism around here. Come on now, won’t y’all sign our petition and help us out?”
“You can keep your cookies,” the first woman retorted in a flat midwestern tone. I took a menacing step toward them. The woman’s brows shot up. Her friend said quickly, “Tiffany, she’s not kidding,” and pulled her into the crowd.
Harriet stared up at me like a pleased rabbit. “I’m glad you use your powers for doing good instead of evil, Supergirl. I wish I had your courage.”
“Sometimes even to live is an act of courage,” I quoted.
“Who said so?”
“Seneca.”
“Oh. One of your Roman philosophers. He never had to protect gingerbread cookies.”
I returned to my petition work. “Ursula, I need some background on you,” called a reporter from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I had cultivated the media so much as a small bookstore owner hunting for publicity that I was on a first-name basis with half the reporters in town. “Terry, you don’t need to know anything about me. It’ll rate about two lines at the bottom of your piece on this rally.”
“Yeah, but I’m thinking of freelancing an article to Atlanta Magazine on the in-town independent bookstore scene.”
“There is no in-town independent bookstore scene. I’m about the only one left.”
“Exactly. And now you’re fighting developers who want to put in a strip shopping center. The big bookstore chains couldn’t take you down, but the malling of America might. Isn’t that ironic?”
“I hate irony. I promise you, nobody’s going to build a discount pharmacy and a video store on the same stretch of earth where Margaret Mitchell autographed a copy of Gone With the Wind in 1939 and Maya Angelou recited poetry last year. My bookstore isn’t just a landmark, it’s a sixty-year icon of the southern literary community. Nobody’s going to sell hemorrhoid creams and rent out Adam Sandler movies where Truman Capote spent a whole afternoon sipping toddies and reading out loud from his books. I promise you.”
“Background,” she said again. “Don’t change the subject.”
I gave her the nickel spiel — president of the Peachtree Lane merchants’ association, president of the regional booksellers’ association, scholarship graduate with honors of Emory, and I made certain to plug my back-room publishing empire, Powell Press, which consisted of two fledgling authors no one had heard of.
“More personal,” she insisted.
“On a good day people tell me I look a little like Julia Roberts. On a bad day they admit they were wrong.”
“Somebody told me your father runs some kind of artists’ co-op in the mountains.”
I fixed a long, quiet look on her. “He has tenants who call themselves folk artists. They live in what used to be his chicken houses, which he converted to crappy apartments after I left for college. His tenants cheat him, steal from him, and mooch off his generosity. One of them got arrested for selling redneck cocaine and the government nearly confiscated our entire farm. I told him to shut down the apartments or I wouldn’t come home again. He didn’t and I haven’t. That was two years ago.”
“Oh. Uh, I see. Sorry.”
“I have to go, now. I’ve got rabble to rouse. I’ll meet you for a glass of wine at the Rib Shack tomorrow.”
She smiled awkwardly as I walked away. The mere mention of Daddy had put a knot in the pit of my stomach. My Atlanta friends vaguely realized I regularly sent money to a father and an autistic brother in the mountains, but they had never visited my home, and they had no idea that I was far from where I belonged, and that I had finally broken Daddy’s heart, just as he had broken mine when Mama died.
After I’d bought the business from Edythe I installed a striped awning over the stoop and a handsome iron railing around the edges of its plain concrete block. I set out a small wrought-iron café table and two heavy iron chairs, where I ate my meals, even in cold weather. I craved the outdoors, and if I shut my eyes, I was at Bear Creek.
During an afternoon break Dr. Cesara Lopez-Jones sat outside on the stoop with me, her aching pen hand soaking in a silver bowl of warm, mentholated water that I provided. Dr. L-J, as the public called her, was a bestselling author of self-help books and a nationally syndicated radio therapist. “This feels wonderful,” she said.
“I put some old-fashioned salve in the water,” I told her. “It’s something I buy when I go home to visit.” As if I had been home, lately. “A neighbor of my father’s used it this way. He said it was the only thing that helped his arthritis.”
“I must get a supply. What’s the name?”
“It’s Doctor Akin’s Udder Balm.” And then I confirmed, “It’s meant for sore cow teats.”
Dr. L-J’s eyes widened, and she burst out laughing.
“Well, cows like it.” She laughed again. I took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. She peered at me. “So you’ve become a smoker. Doesn’t your pristine Gregory hate that?”
I smiled as I drooped my cigarette-holding hand over the stoop’s railing. I’d let the cigarette burn to the filter without taking another puff. “There’s nothing sinister about this.”
“Any marriage date, yet?”
“We’re in no hurry.”
“I see. Well. He’s out of town this weekend?”
“Presenting a paper.”
“Out of sight, out of mind.”
“Dr. L-J, you’re prying.”
“You bet. I’ve watched you become harder and more driven over the years. It worries me.”
All right, this was going to be my personal counseling session, no matter how much I tried to avoid that fact. I looked at her squarely. “My love life is not important. But I would like some advice on my father.”
“Ahah. Go ahead. The doctor is in.” She leaned forward, set her wineglass down, and collected a handful of my homemade cheese straws from the platter. The pungent smell of mentholated Udder Balm filled my nose. Home.
I took a deep breath, and told her how things were with Daddy. That I had finally told him how I felt about Mama’s death. That he’d looked at me as if I’d ripped his heart out, and we hadn’t spoken since. Dr. L-J studied me sympathetically. “Honesty can be painful, but it’s usually worth it in the long run. Not always, but usually.”
I shook my head and chuckled wearily. “I’m tired of honesty.”
“Did you say anything to him that you don’t sincerely believe, then and now?”
After a dull moment, I exhaled wearily. “No. I’ve been mad at him since I was a little girl. Mad and hurt.”
“Go see your father. Put your arms around him. Tell him that it’s time to move forward. Just tell him you love him. You don’t have to accept everything he does.”
“Too easy,” I insisted. “That won’t solve the larger issues.”
“Well, of course not. You have to learn to butt out of his business and accept him the way he is, and he has to respect your difference of opinion, and both of you have to compromise, and that could take the rest of your lives. But you can start the process, at least. Are you going to be happy if you don’t try?”
“Listen, happy is a word I look up regularly just to see if I understand the definition.”
“You’re looking in the wrong dictionary. It takes work, trial and error, and risks.”
“I’ll drive up tomorrow and take him to lunch,” I said slowly, my words already attaching themselves to anchors.
“And tell him you love him,” she insisted.
“I’ll have to think about that.” I couldn’t even repeat the words now, so I didn’t know how I’d get them out tomorrow, but I’d work at it.
“Pr
omise me,” Dr. L-J growled.
I arched a brow. “You have my word that I’ll try.”
She laughed. “You are wrapped in steel. Aren’t you suffocating inside that armor?”
“I’ve cut breathing holes.”
We talked on for a while, of fears and compromises and loved ones and communicating with the dead, that is, the memories of every person you represent in the world, hearing their voices as well as your own.
“You’re pretty good at this advice business,” I said.
She lifted her soaking hand and smiled. “My next book should be titled Teat Salve for the Soul.”
We heard the chimes on the store’s front door. I assumed one of my clerks had come in to use the bathroom. I got up and walked inside. “How’s it going out there?”
Dr. Jonah Washington gazed back at me gently. Mr. Fred had died a few years before. In the past year Jonah had retired from teaching at Columbia and shocked everyone by moving back to his brother’s homestead at Bear Creek.
And now, without explanation, he had driven two hours from Tiber County and stood in my bookstore. He was a short, rotund, brown-black man with a neat gray beard and pepper-gray hair — always a very dapper dresser in his photographs, but on that day he looked harried in old corduroy trousers with leather suspenders, a flannel shirt, muddy walking shoes, and a rumpled windbreaker.
“Dr. Washington, I’m so glad you came to the rally!” Bewildered, I hurried toward him with one hand outstretched. Suddenly, something kind and sad in his face sank into me with warning. Suddenly, I knew. I stopped a few feet away from him, afraid. I lowered my hand to my side. “Is it my father, or is it Arthur?” I asked.
He spoke in a deep, resonant voice, the voice of souls forged in quiet sorrows. “It’s your father,” he said.
CHAPTER 8
At the funeral home I cupped my hands around Daddy’s peaceful, homely face and begged him to open his eyes. When he didn’t, I rested my head on his chest and sang a lullaby to him. As strange as that sounds, it kept me from breaking down. I had Arthur to think about. I feared the depths of my own panic and despair.
Daddy’s tenants told me he sank to his hands and knees without warning, while crossing the pasture just below the Bear to retrieve a ladder stored in the barn. As everyone ran to him he put one hand over his heart, turned himself, and managed to stretch out atop the soft winter grass. He had been planning to clean the house gutters, which were overflowing with autumn leaves, fallen tree branches, and the dried brown fringe of summer weeds that had taken root there. I knew what he had said before he went for the ladder, because every winter, when I was a child, he offered the house an apology. Time to take your necklace off, old gal.
Arthur was away in the creek hollow on one of his daily searches for any number of small wild animals and birds he called friends, and so he didn’t see our father collapse. Just before Daddy went for the ladder he told the tenants to help him watch all the local Atlanta television stations that evening, in case I was interviewed at the rally. He’d called everyone he knew to brag about the event. He was always proud, always hoping I’d come home. He had his pride. I inherited it.
And so Daddy died where he most likely wanted most to die, under the gaze of the Iron Bear. Did it speak to him finally, the way Arthur claimed it could? I’d never know.
And I could never tell him I was sorry.
* * *
Arthur and I slept in Daddy’s big bed that first night after he died, me wrapped up in a quilt atop the covers, Arthur huddled beneath them. We’d slept together many times as children when he was frightened or confused, which was often. When he’d gotten old enough I’d methodically explained to him about sex, sisters, taboos, and politeness. He understood. He had such an anxious sense of his own spaces and boundaries that he didn’t want me to so much as brush a hand near him when he slept.
But now he burrowed his head against my shoulder and cried. My gently autistic brother was a shapeshifter. Usually he went through his days as a small, harmless mammal — a mouse, a squirrel, a rabbit — and sometimes as a bird, a snake, or a fish, rarely anything dangerous. More often than not, he was a bear cub. He was twenty-two years old and over six feet tall, slender, elfish, and beautiful, with a congregation of tender animal psyches inside him. That night, he was a heartbroken puppy. “Tell me stories about us,” he whispered.
I retold all our legends for him, and for me. Erim and Granny Annie, Miss Betty, Mama and the snakes, Mr. Fred’s encounter with me down at the creek, Daddy’s salvation from the polio epidemic, and then the Iron Bear — how it came to be, how it came to town, and how Richard Riconni, a man we had never met, had looked into our hearts. This was Daddy’s version of the Bear’s story, not mine.
As I talked I stroked Arthur’s hair, which was long and glossy brown, Mama’s color. He cried for hours. After he fell asleep I stared at the ceiling, where the narrow, slatted boards of an old design seemed to sway in the darkness. I was looking for patterns, for answers, but there were none, or I didn’t know how to see them.
The next morning Arthur pulled me outside to the Bear. He gazed hollow-eyed at the sculpture, holding on to its sides, his knuckles white. My skin crawled; he seemed to be lost in some silent, frantic communication. Suddenly he leaped back from the sculpture, his mouth gaping, his hands curled to his chest. He whirled toward me. “Sister, you went away,” he said, his voice breaking. “You didn’t want us anymore. Daddy was sad. He cried. Where did you go? Where’s he gone?”
For one irrational moment I thought, What is that thing telling you about me? It’s a lie. “Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ll try to explain it all to you. All that matters is that I’ve come back. I took care of you when you were little and I’m going to take care of you now. Don’t worry.”
He lifted both hands toward the Iron Bear. He trembled. A new torrent of words poured out. “Lonely lonely lonely. Mama Bear’s so lonely. She’s all empty inside her ribs. My ribs are empty, too. I don’t know what I ought to do! Nobody loves her anymore. She’ll die! Just like Daddy!”
I held him in my arms, and looked up with weary disgust at the sculpture. I was ten years old again, vowing to fight it in the name of common sense and Powell family redemption. Liar, killer, thief of hearts.
Daddy had stored his will in an empty fruit jar in a dresser drawer of his and Mama’s bedroom, and it was very simple.
I leave everything I own and love to my daughter, Ursula. I trust her to take care of her brother, the farm, and the Iron Bear. I leave her all the good and the bad that our family has been and will be. I leave her my mistakes, my sadness, my faith, and my love. She has her mama’s angel looking over her, and the heart to make some sense of it all.
Mr. John came to the funeral home every night. I suddenly appreciated his friendly, gray-fringed bald head, his hearty, put-women-on-pedestals manners, and his silk ties emblazoned with tiny Tiber Poultry logos. He had only grown older, not different. “You call on me when you feel like it,” he urged kindly. “I don’t want you to think you’re taking on your daddy’s woes without a friend in the world. I’m good for plenty of advice and assistance.”
I’d never accept help from a Tiber, but I didn’t tell him that.
Janine came by, too, signed the guest book, and pressed my hand with her cool, beautiful fingers. “Your daddy was certainly unique.” As if unique were an ailment.
“He knew how to put up with people’s weaknesses,” I replied. “He even tolerated fake piety and polite bullshit.” That was ungracious and uncalled for, but all I could think was that she still had her father, and that life was goddamned unfair. Plus exhaustion and grief had narrowed one channel in my mind to an unending refrain of the old Billy Joel song. Only the good die young, he sang in an obsessive chant. I blinked and Janine was glaring at me worse than before. I had spoken the words out loud.
“Nonetheless, I am so sorry for your loss,” she said coldly, and walked off.
A few m
inutes later I glimpsed her peeling away in a late-model Jeep with chromed fog lights and a Tiber Poultry logo on the side, her honey-hued hair floating, her slender control accented by a dark-blue executive suitdress. She’d take over as president of the Tiber chicken empire some year soon. Mr. John had raised her to do it, she’d earned a business degree, just like me, and she was now his second-in-command. She’d built a handsome house on a beautiful, wooded lot in town.
The weather turned freakishly cold on the day of Daddy’s funeral — below freezing even in the afternoon. Church bells rang all over town as we drove from the stately Victorian funeral home off the courthouse square in a long procession led by the sheriff, with the cars’ headlights shining. Oncoming drivers pulled their cars over as a courtesy.
Finally the procession reached the steepled, white-brick grandeur of the Tiberville Methodist Church and its large cemetery. I stared. The cemetery was filled with people. Parked cars and trucks lined the road for a half mile on either side. I’d expected no more than two dozen old friends to brave the cold for the graveside service beside Mama’s burial plot.
“What’s happening?” I said aloud. Arthur and I were alone in my car, and Arthur hadn’t said a word all day. He sank down in the seat and covered his face.
I saw colorful outfits, bizarre hats decorated with plastic flowers, large crucifixes held above aging heads, a brightly handpainted sign saying RIP Brother Powell, and another saying The Iron Bear Lives Forever, which made me shiver. These peculiar folk were part of Daddy’s vast network of folk artists and crafts people from all parts of the South.
In the front of the crowd, standing just across Daddy’s grave from Arthur and me, were John Tiber and a handful of elderly Tiber kin, all respectful, sincere, and extremely well dressed. They stared at the rest in disbelief.
I caught Dr. Washington’s somber gaze and nodded my thanks to him for being there. He nodded back. Jonah Washington had tremendous presence and dignity, with his jowly, bearded face composed behind his steel-rimmed glasses. This was probably the first time in the 150-year history of our families that a Washington had stood openly, up front in public, as a Powell’s welcomed neighbor.
On Bear Mountain Page 11