On Bear Mountain

by Deborah Smith

  CHAPTER 10

  I was alone at Bear Creek on that Fourth of July, the day of the storm. Liza, Arthur, and the others had gone to the Old Tiberville Independence Festival, an annual event celebrating not only the Fourth but also the founding of the town in 1847. Daddy and his tenants always rented booth space at the arts-and-crafts show. Bear Creek Farm Artists Gallery, Daddy’s colorful homemade banner proclaimed atop the booth’s tent poles.

  I stayed at the farm, filling my time with a project that already had Oswald grumbling and Liza giving me wounded looks. I was fencing in the backyard. “I’m building a fence for a dog. I intend to get a dog,” I told everyone. I just wanted to keep them out, and they suspected it.

  I dug postholes, set and tamped and straightened the posts in them, measured, dug more holes, and was grateful for fatigue that kept at bay a restlessness so deep even the song of a robin made me feel lost. For weeks I’d tried to scrub, repair, and organize the homeplace into good grace, again, but the list of chores kept growing.

  I didn’t care how I looked; I wore a faded cotton skirt and an old white T-shirt. Barefoot, with my damp hair pulled up in a long curly ponytail, I toted boards to my posts and began nailing them into place. I still had half the fence posts to set, but I was bored with posthole digging. The chicken wire would come last.

  Black clouds rolled over the mountains and piled up in the sky behind the barn, and thunder began to rumble. I shivered and began to think I sensed some odd change in the air, even though I knew to beware the false portents mountain storms always brought with them. Every collection of Appalachian stories included storms, for good reason. They conjured magic and ghosts.

  That day’s storm seemed deeper, richer, more insistent than most, dredging up sensations. The air turned brisk with ozone like cold butter on my skin, making me feel slippery and anxious as I hammered long galvanized nails into the soft pine fencing. Yellow lightning began to flicker. A clap of thunder made me shiver.

  A fat gray squirrel bounded across the yard. Her name was Lassie. She was an old squirrel, one of Arthur’s pets, the latest of many orphans he’d discovered in the wild then tamed and raised.

  Lassie was nursing her newest litter of two babies in the loft of the barn. I fed her a few sunflower seeds I’d stored in my skirt pocket. When she finished eating, Lassie hurried to the edge of the yard oaks, which were darkening to emerald green in the failing light. She paused to assess the pasture between her and the barn, then went sprinting toward her destination, her fuzzy gray tail streaming behind her. I’d seen Arthur’s pet squirrels race that treeless distance a thousand times, and I silently counted the seconds from oaks to barn. The record was ten. With the wind pushing her, Lassie had a chance of breaking it.

  A dark shape plunged from the gray sky. I saw the hawk a heartbeat before Lassie must have felt its talons break her back. In the next moment she was just a limp, dangling little form being carried skyward.

  Oh, no, no, no, not this.

  I ran out through the sheltering oaks, into the pasture, waving my arms, screaming, but that only made the hawk disappear faster over the forest at the pasture’s far rim. I halted in shock, lightning flickering around me. This was unbelievable. This kind of thing could not be happening on top of everything else. Hawks didn’t hunt during storms. Small horrors had been added to larger ones, small deaths were everywhere.

  I sprinted to the barn, while the wind died down in an ominous way I should have noticed, just as I should have noticed the way the clouds had begun to twist, and how the light had gone gray-purple, as if filtered through a bruise. I had to get Lassie’s babies, and bring them to the house. Arthur would take care of them, and he wouldn’t blame the hawk for Lassie’s death. The hawk had to live, too. Probably had babies of its own to feed. Mothers had to be killers, for their children’s sake.

  No, he’d blame me.

  Poor mama squirrel, I’m so sorry. So sorry. I’ll take care of your babies. I can do that much. My mind whirling, I went inside the barn and climbed an old wooden ladder up about thirty feet, to the loft. Decades of sifted hay formed a thick mat on the loft floor. I found the young squirrels curled deep in the center of a snug nest of hay, twigs, and leaves Lassie had built in a wire egg basket hanging from a rafter. The babies had most of their fur and looked like miniatures of their mother. I spoke softly to them. It’s all right, you’re coming with me, it’s okay, babies. They peered up at me in petrified terror.

  The wind suddenly roared, making the heavyset old barn tremble a little. Now I looked up worriedly. I closed the basket’s wire top, latched it, then turned to climb back down the ladder as quickly as I could.

  At that moment a tornado flicked its thin, curving tongue down to earth about fifty feet away, slapping a pair of massive poplars. The tall trees uprooted and fell, hitting one side of the barn’s roof with the force of giant baseball bats. Timbers groaned and gave way, nails shrieked as they were pulled from tough chestnut beams, and sections of the tin roof tore open like paper. I yelled and dropped to my knees on the loft floor, huddling over the squirrels and flinging up both arms to cover my head.

  I was one second too late. A ripped board cracked me over one ear. I didn’t faint, but I saw a universe of stars and lay very still for a while. By the time I recovered enough to sit up, the tornado had retreated and the world was starkly quiet, accented only by benign gusts of wind and spatters of rain. I dabbed my fingers in a thin stream of blood trickling down the right side of my face, then touched the hard, wet knot under my hair, setting off pain that throbbed through my entire skull. I checked the young squirrels. They had burrowed deeper into their nest and were safe. I envied them.

  I squinted up at the sky through jagged beams, streamers of torn tin, and the leafy green top of a downed poplar. A few raindrops fell on my head, hurting like tiny, sharp rocks. Shaking, I crept to the far wall and looked out a gaping hole. A dozen feet below me, the second poplar tree lay atop the barn’s lean-to. Under the roof of that crumpled shed, under the crushing weight of that giant poplar tree, I had parked my car.

  My car.

  I found some heavy baling twine, tied it around my waist, then anchored the basket of squirrels to my makeshift twine belt. I was climbing down the rickety loft ladder when its last two rungs snapped. I sprawled on my back. The squirrels, safe in their basket anchored to my stomach, made small, squeaking sounds. I untied the basket and set it aside.

  Everything hurt. I was dizzy and covered in sweat. I began to laugh at the bleak craziness of life, then suddenly, with a force that surprised me, I sobbed. I cried for myself, my car, for Arthur, for Daddy, for poor Lassie and her motherless babies, for every creature and every ancestor of mine who had been caught up in the cycle of life and death at Bear Creek. When I finally quieted I shut my eyes and rested in a daze of surrender.

  Suddenly, a cold, canine nose and warm tongue touched my face. I opened my eyes. Large, ugly, and covered in damp, shaggy, golden fur, an unfamiliar dog stood over me, wagging his tail as he began licking the blood off my right cheekbone.

  I scooted backward, every muscle aching, until I leaned against the rough planks of a stall door, exhausted. The dog happily followed me, wagging its tail. “Either you’re lost or somebody dumped you on my road,” I said grimly. My new friend noticed the egg basket and began snuffling it, woofing softly. The unseen squirrels chattered with alarm.

  Beyond the barn’s broad open hallway, rain began to fall in sheets, pounding on the remnants of the roof, drowning out sound. The dog, unconcerned, licked my bloody hair. There was some purpose in all this, I told myself. I had been pretending to build a dog fence, so the universe had sent me a dog. “All right, you can stay,” I said. I shut my eyes, again.

  A few seconds later there came two sounds — heavy footsteps on the hard clay floor, and then the thump of my head hitting the planks behind me as I jerked back from the firm touch of a man’s hand on my face. As I opened my eyes a dark-haired stranger dropped to a
squat in front of me, balanced on one large hiking boot he planted outside my left thigh. He settled his other foot firmly between my knees. We were nearly nose to nose, and I drew a sharp breath from his effect.

  He smelled of rain and good cigar smoke; he wasn’t old, wasn’t young, but I felt incredibly innocent next to him. It was his face — hard, handsome and serious — and his eyes, which were steel gray and very cynical. He wore rumpled khakis and a plain work shirt. He seemed very tall, even sitting on his heels.

  “May I help you?” I asked absurdly. He didn’t answer. Never taking his eyes off the rafters above us, he clamped one hand around my wrist. “Hold on to your basket,” he ordered in a low voice, as if the barn were listening. Then he pulled me forward, levered me over his right shoulder, and staggered to his feet with me draped over his back.

  Stars danced in my vision as he carried me outside. He set me down about fifty feet from the barn, with his arms around me tightly. Once I had solid earth beneath me I braced my legs and stiffened, insulted by his patronage, blinking hard in the rain. His dog huddled beside us, forlornly dripping water. The man gazed down at me with the sharpest scrutiny I had ever felt in my life. “Stop bleeding,” he ordered.

  “It took a tornado to knock a piece out of that barn,” I announced, trying to step away from him. “That barn has been here as long as this farm, and it’s built out of strong chestnut wood. We can certainly — ” Stand in there out of the rain, I would have finished, except that at that moment another piece of the roof caved in, dumping thick beams, boards, and torn tin on the spot where I had been sitting sixty seconds earlier.

  My knees buckled. The stranger caught me, and we sank to the ground, together. He held me in his arms as we both stared into the barn’s jumbled hallway. Cold sweat and blood mingled with the rain on my face. “Memento mori,” I murmured.

  “What did you say?” he asked.

  “Memento mori. It’s Latin. It means — ”

  “Remember that you’re mortal,” he supplied.

  Silence. We gazed at each other with stunned gratitude. Drops of rain clung to his eyelashes and mine, blurring my vision, uneasily melting us together. Yes, we knew we were mortal, and that we were very much alive, and together.

  And there, in that moment, our past, present, and future took an abrupt turn down a new path.

  • • •

  Quentin hadn’t meant to lay his hands on the grown woman who had been the child in the photograph, or to be anyone’s rescuer. She hadn’t meant to be rescued. Quentin introduced himself and was amazed when the Riconni name made her gaze at him with blue-eyed wonder.

  The sky cleared and the rain became a warm white mist rising from the earth, sifting with ethereal grace through a patch of sunlight between us in the pasture. They walked among fairy circles of clover, serenaded by the low coo of a dove. The land welcomed him with all its mysteries and enchantments. He felt a little drunk, somehow taken by surprise, aroused by the land and by Ursula Powell.

  “Your family name is a legend here,” she said.

  I saved her life, and she’s just grateful, he told himself, as they both tried to act as if nothing had happened.

  When they reached the Iron Bear he stood for a long moment just looking at it. Then he circled the sculpture, studying, touching, pulling on a section here and there, as if he were only interested in testing its seams and structure. Ursula stayed back, sitting in the grass a dozen yards away.

  Before he’d turned into the tunnel of forest and flowers that led to Bear Creek, he’d spent fourteen hours on an interstate highway headed down the eastern seaboard. He’d wanted time to study the territory, get the feel of the land and its people. He wanted to know what kind of people would set his father’s abstract sculpture in their field and love it.

  His city-raised dog, equally curious, sat on the Bear’s concrete base with its attention riveted to a small herd of goats and a flock of chickens in a high-fenced chicken yard. The goats stared back. The chickens did not. Chickens were rarely curious and never impressed.

  Quentin gazed up into the sculpture’s massive face, those hollow, see-through eyes looking down at him, and he remembered the sculpture’s effect clearly as a boy, or thought he did. I was young, then, maybe I’m just reaching. But a glimmer of memory rose in his mind, vivid and heartrending, and he was once again looking up, so far up, at the marvelous, half-formed thing looming in the shadows of Goots’s garage. He saw the flash of his father’s jaunty smile as Papa worked on it, his face streaked with grime and sweat, his big hands spread in joy.

  “Balance,” Papa had shouted. “It’s all about finding the balance! And this one is perfect!” Balance. For that one, brief time, he had been perfectly in sync with himself and his son, his wife, his life, their love. Quentin’s gaze remained riveted to the sculpture, now. He wanted to remember his father this way. He wanted to present this sculpture to his mother as an offering.

  He turned away, met Ursula’s intense and blatant scrutiny, and slid every emotion behind a shield. He wondered what, exactly, a hillbilly was, or a redneck, and if she qualified. He knew southern culture only through Popeye, books, and movies. As he gazed at her and then around her at the farm shadowed by blue-green mountains, his chest expanded with a strange sense of excitement. He wondered if she suspected how easy it would be for him to look at her the way she was looking at him.

  He walked over. She sat up straighter, and he noticed. He pulled a photo from his pants pocket and held it out. When she took the old snapshot her breath caught. She and her father stood before the Bear so happily all those years ago.

  Now she looked protectively at her small, innocent self, then up at the amazing man who had carried her own memory back to her with such obviously conflicting emotions.

  “You still say you don’t want to see a doctor?” he asked brusquely.

  “Yep. I feel fine.”

  “Mind if I look at the wound?”

  “Go ahead. If you don’t see sunlight, it’s not that bad.”

  He uttered a soft, tense sound that might have been a laugh, then dropped to his heels beside her and probed her hair. “The bleeding’s stopped. No sunlight.” His hand grazed the side of her neck as he drew it away. Her body contracted in a deep, pleasant breath, like a cat stretching. She got up and moved away from him as easily as she could without insulting him. “Thank you, then. I’ll live.”

  At that moment he was preparing to tell her what he wanted from her. Or at least, what he hoped he could buy.

  He had to take the sculpture home.

  • • •

  We faced each other across the farm’s kitchen table as the last glow of a gold-and-purple sunset filtered through the sink window and the porch door. Twilight cushioned the kitchen’s poverty, burnished the dented aluminum cake cover on the pine shelves, softened the rust rings from coffee cans that Daddy had painted and used as flowerpots on the peeling ledge of the sink window. I clenched my hands around one of the Ledbetters’ distorted pottery mugs, filled with wine. Quentin nursed a shot of Scotch in a tiny, rose-colored glass Liza had made for Daddy. Between us on a table top, Oswald had painted a centerpiece of roses on the Formica for Daddy.

  And then Quentin finished explaining that he wanted to purchase the Iron Bear and take it back to New York. He offered to pay me the sculpture’s likely market value. “That would be one to two million dollars,” he said.

  I got up, pressing my bare heels hard onto the faded linoleum floor, finding my balance against all odds. “I need a few minutes to myself. Make yourself at home, you hear? When I come back, maybe I’ll know what to say.”

  He stood, his face grim. He’d obviously hoped for a simple reaction — shock, joy, and a quick agreement. The answer most people would have given him, and most women in a shabby farm kitchen, especially. But I looked as if he’d punched me. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine.” I forced a hard smile, and left the room.

  • • •

&nbs
p; She’s something different, he thought. He stood on the back porch, looking at the mountains in moonlight. He lit a cigar stub and smoked it briefly as he considered the wild beauty of the place, the stunning effect of the home his father’s work had found by the strangest of luck. And what kind of woman was this Ursula Powell? An architectural ornament he’d never collected before?

  He did not get involved in people’s lives any more than he could help, hers included. Frowning at the turn this simple trip had taken, he went back inside, turned on the sink faucet, and doused the cigar in the water. A gushing sound came from beneath the wooden cabinet, and when he opened the door he saw a stream of water spewing from the drainpipe into a galvanized water bucket.

  He debated that leaking drainpipe for a full minute, as if the mere act of caring about it would infect him with longings for the high southern country and barefoot redheads who wouldn’t say yes easily. He emptied the bucket outside, replaced it, and closed the cabinet door. I’m not here to fix her life, he told himself. She can do that herself, with the money I’ll pay her.

  • • •

  I made my way down a dark, narrow hall smelling of pine and cotton rugs to the house’s only bathroom, a cramped and practical place across from the open door to a storage room where old glass kerosene lamps and boxes filled with canned vegetables crowded the shelves. There I took a beeswax candle from a dusty box, lit it with a match stored in a fifty-year-old baking soda tin, and carried the candle into the dark, windowless bathroom like an acolyte entering a chapel. The bathroom light hadn’t been turned on for a month; the fixture had started sparking and I hadn’t had time to prowl through a home-fixit manual and learn how to repair it. At any rate, I craved the soothing darkness.

  I latched the door’s plain metal hook-and-eye, then sat on the side of the tub in the dark, gazing at the yellow dewdrop of candle flame at the opposite end of the tub. One to two million dollars.