“I’m so glad the energy of that time has improved,” Liza said.
He smiled ruefully. “Has it? My son, up in Boston, said he imagines me wearing overalls and picking cotton. I took some care to explain to him that we don’t grow cotton in the mountains, but he maintains that it’s how he sees my life here. My daughter is convinced she’ll come to visit and find me wandering in the woods with a Klansman’s noose around my neck, despite the fact that the Klan hasn’t been active here for forty years. I keep trying to convince them to bring their children and visit, but they won’t.”
“Have you told them Mr. John is pushing for you to become president of Mountain State College?”
“Oh, I’ve told them. They think I’m gilding the situation to reassure them.” He laughed. “Some days I feel a wicked urge to send my children a photo of myself barefoot, in overalls, with a straw hat on my head and a piece of hay between my teath, with a burning cross in the yard behind me and a bag of cotton over one shoulder.” He laughed harder. “My children would faint.”
“Why did you come back? Seriously.”
His expression grew solemn. “Because I owed it to Fred. If I don’t reestablish our family here, there will be no more Washingtons in Tiber County. This is our homeplace, our womb. It’s where our ancestors realized this family had true freedom, even though they were slaves. Land is freedom.” He paused, smiling dryly at his own sentimentality, then added in a melodramatic Tara brogue, “We’ll always have the land, Katie Scarlett O’Hara.”
I nodded.
As I drove Arthur back home that day, I began to feel that something was out of place. Something felt wrong. The others had gone to the Piggly Wiggly, so we were alone when I turned off the county road at Daddy’s brightly painted Bear Creek mailbox. Frowning, I guided the old truck along the rutted dirt road. Arthur fidgeted next to me. “Sister, stop,” he said. “The dirt looks funny.”
He was right. The road itself was bothering me. I stopped, got out, and scrutinized wide tire tracks that had chewed up the soil and gravel. Arthur craned his head from the passenger window. “We got big company,” he said.
Indeed. The old road carried the signatures of visitors like fingerprints. The fresh tracks indicated some large, heavy, double-wheeled vehicle had come through. I felt a wild rush of hope, then realized Quentin didn’t drive anything the size of a cement truck.
“Sweetie, I’m going to play a game,” I told Arthur. “You want to play?”
“Sure.”
I drove a little farther but stopped out of sight of the house, cut the engine, and got out. “I’m going to surprise our visitors,” I said. “You stay here and surprise anyone else who comes down the road. Don’t get out of the truck, though. Just wave at them.”
“Okay, but this is a silly game.”
“I know. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
When he looked the other way I slipped an old revolver from under the truck’s seat. I had no idea why I was so suspicious, although rural people are raised to reach for their guns before they step outside on a dark night, or when a stranger rolls into their yard. I told myself I’d listened to too much of Liza’s chatter about spirit guides giving her hunches. If I had spirit guides, they were probably laughing their ethereal asses off at the sight of me slipping through my own woods with a .45-caliber pistol in one hand.
What I saw when I crept to the edge of the clearing shocked me so much I didn’t move for a minute. A crew of four men were working feverishly to cut the Iron Bear apart. They’d set up oxygen and acetylene tanks near a truck the size of a moving van. Sparks flew from their cutting torches. They’d already severed the sculpture’s head. It lay on the ground.
They’re killing the Bear. The next thing I knew, I was striding from the forest, the revolver raised in one hand. “Get away from her, you sons of bitches,” I yelled, and fired at the sky. They jumped and jerked the visors upward on their welding helmets. I advanced on them with the revolver now pointed right at them. They threw their helmets and torches in every direction then ran, disappearing into the woods.
I fired two more shots into the air. Breathing hard, I stood with my legs braced apart as the shots echoed off the mountains. I stared at the beheaded sculpture. The men had only just begun to cut a second section apart. I saw score lines on the metal skeleton, but no further damage.
Still, the Bear’s head lay on the ground. I wanted to sob.
“No!” Arthur’s voice became a long wail behind me. I spun around. He’d followed me from the woods. Now he rushed past me and fell to his knees beside the sculpture’s head. “She’s dead,” he screamed. “The Tweens got her.” His mouth worked in convulsive misery. His eyes rolled back, and he collapsed.
• • •
The October wind curling off the ocean was frigid. Standing in what remained of the upstairs floor of a beachside mansion that had once belonged to a Vanderbilt, Quentin braced himself beneath the collapsing weight of a massive mahogany fireplace mantel. He stood on the remnant of a second-story portico thirty feet above a marble patio. His crew scrambled around him, yelling and cursing as they hurried to refit the tangled chains of the block and tackle they’d been using to hoist the huge, decorative mantel when a hook came loose. Popeye bellowed at him from the ground. “Let the damned thing fall! Let it drop! Captain! Move!”
Sweat poured down his face; sinews bulged in his throat; he hunched over double beneath the leaning wood. The buckle on the canvas web of his tool belt dug into his thigh through his work pants.
“We got it, boss, we got it!” his foreman called, and suddenly, with a whir and rattle of pulleys and chains, the weight lifted off his back. He sank to his knees, gasping. A minute later his crew began pounding him on his pained shoulders.
Coughing, he got up, staggered inside, and went down a shivering wooden construction staircase, holding onto the safety railings because his legs shook. Popeye met him at the bottom, in what had once been the mansion’s foyer. “I’ve had it with you!” he yelled. “I won’t watch this kind of shit anymore! What’s the matter with you, son? Are you trying to get yourself killed?”
Yes. Yes, I think I am. The words crept into Quentin’s mind like snakes. The old sergeant climbed into a truck and sped off. Quentin walked outside and sat down on the remnants of a low stone wall. He had scared himself, this time.
A high-pitched beep emitted from the dusty cell phone on his belt. Your conscience is calling, the snakes hissed.
His hands shook as he put the phone to his ear. “Quentin?” a soft, New Orleans voice said with quavering distress. “It’s Liza Deerwoman.”
He stood up. “What’s wrong?”
She told him. Ten minutes later, he was driving to the nearest airport.
CHAPTER 19
Arthur lay in a bed at the new hospital, tranquilized into a stupor. I had several stitches in my forefinger where his teeth had clamped convulsively. The knuckle was swollen to the size of a walnut. I’d rammed my finger into Arthur’s mouth to keep him from choking. My brother had suffered a seizure.
The whole county was in an uproar. It only took an hour or two for the sheriff to determine who owned the deserted truck at Bear Creek. He unearthed the names of the four men, who were from North Carolina. There the FBI caught one man immediately, and he wasted no time spilling every detail.
He and the others had been told that everyone at the farm went for ice cream and groceries every Saturday. They didn’t expect me and Arthur to return early. After all, their information had come from a source who knew us well.
The men had been hired by Mr. John.
I sat by Arthur’s bed, staring at the floor. Fannie lumbered into the room. “Go get yourself some coffee, child,” she crooned, and patted me on the head with a comforting hand that knew a piece of clay would break when fired too hard. “I’ll keep time with our po’ sweet boy.”
I nodded and got up. I wandered down the hall to a waiting area and stood at the window. Arthur’s docto
r wanted to call in a psychiatrist. “Your brother’s suffered so many traumas over the past ten months that he’s in real danger of a major, long-term illness,” she told me. “You may want to consider placing him in a facility for treatment.”
“My brother’s not going to leave my sight,” I answered. “If I have to turn my house into a mental ward and take care of him myself twenty-four hours a day, I will.”
The doctor looked at me patiently. “Now, that’s not sensible, and you know it.”
“In my family,” I said with slow emphasis, “being sensible is not considered a virtue.”
Lost in thought at the window, I didn’t hear Janine walk up. “Ursula, please don’t refuse to talk to me,” she said in a voice so shattered I barely recognized it. I pivoted slowly, keeping my expression shuttered.
Tissues protruded from the side pocket of her houndstooth blazer. Coffee stains speckled her jeans. Her skinned-back hair was held by a lopsided barrette, and her eyes were red-rimmed and hollow. She struggled for a moment. “I am . . . I am so ashamed. For Daddy. For our family. For me. Our oldest, dearest friends are turning their backs on him. The respect that generations of my family has earned is permanently tainted.”
“Are you asking me for sympathy?”
“No. No. Just . . . I can’t really explain what he did, but I have to try. I know this much: he wanted to get rid of the sculpture so it wouldn’t tempt Esme to run away again. He acted out of concern for her. Yes, it was a crazy and vicious thing to do. He knows that. Yes, there’s no excuse. But Ursula, he turned himself in at the jail. He’s sitting there in a cell, like a common criminal, tearing his heart out over what happened to Arthur. He told his lawyer not to ask for bail. He says he wants to be punished.”
I searched her tormented expression. “I don’t want him prosecuted. I don’t want any charges filed against him. I’ll tell them.”
She put a hand to her throat and stared at me. “You’d do that for him?”
“It’s time a Powell let a Tiber out of jail.”
She sank down on a sofa, with her head bowed. I remained standing. There was dignity in offering mercy, in taking the high road, but I was not so noble that I’d sit beside her. “Everyone’s saying you have a perfect right to demand justice.”
“I do expect justice. But not this way.” A warm sense of serenity and purpose flowed through me for that moment. I was doing what I knew to be right, what Daddy would have done.
“I’ll never forget this,” she said. “Thank you.”
“I have to go back to Arthur now.”
“Wait.” She raised her eyes to mine. “You may not believe this, but I’ve been planning to improve conditions for all the Tiber employees. Better pay, benefits, fairer treatment. That includes the contract farmers. Now that potential goodwill may be ruined.” She struggled with her voice for a moment. “This . . . horrible thing with the Bear and Arthur has stirred people up. They’re talking about going on strike at the plant.”
I stared at her. Business and image above all. Always a Tiber. “You want me to talk to them for you?”
“Oh, Ursula, would you?”
“Absolutely.” But not the way you think. “I’ll help them work up a list of demands for those new benefits and terms. Then they’ll have a solid starting point for negotiations.”
Her enthusiasm dimmed a little. “You’ll have them asking for the moon.”
“Good. You can meet them halfway. There’ll be lots of space to share.”
She sighed. “Whatever you want. All right.”
For the first time in our lives, we shook hands.
• • •
I sent the tenants home from the hospital. I wanted to be alone with my brother. Arthur looked up at me with bleary, vacant eyes, and did not speak. I combed his hair, sang lullabies to him, and promised him it would be easy to repair Mama Bear. His expression crumbled. Slowly, he shook his head. Then he turned his face away.
After he fell asleep I walked blindly into the hall, pulled his door shut, and leaned against it. What am I going to do? Failure swirled through my thoughts. I was so tired, and almost out of money, and terrified. I had never felt more hopeless in my life. My injured hand ached. I cradled it and closed my eyes.
A minute later I heard strong, heavy footsteps on the hall’s tile floor, but didn’t open my eyes to see who owned them. Some orderly or janitor, some harried physician on his way to his afternoon rounds. I didn’t care. I only wanted the intruder to pass by as quickly as possible, and leave me to my own bleak thoughts.
A large, coarse-skinned hand touched my face, then curved along the side of it, palming my cheek. I opened my eyes quickly. Quentin looked down at me with stark concern. I caught the front of his shirt with my good hand and gazed up at him as if he couldn’t be real. His clothes were covered in the dust and grime of a worksite, although he’d scrubbed his face and hands in an airport men’s room. Beard shadow darkened his lower face. The strain of recent weeks showed in his eyes, as gray as steel. His was nobody’s beauty. I had never seen a more wonderful sight in my life. He had come back.
Neither of us said a word. His fingers pressed possessively against my cheek. There were no words for my feelings, now that he was there, or at least none I’d admit. I didn’t throw myself at him. I managed to keep my pride. I simply raised my uninjured hand to his hand along my face, covered it, and squeezed with fervent welcome. He lifted my other hand and studied it, frowning. I let it rest gratefully atop his palm, like a wounded bird.
“If I’d stayed, this wouldn’t have happened to you. Arthur and the sculpture wouldn’t be damaged.” He raised angry, determined eyes to mine. I slumped a little. “Arthur thinks Mama Bear is dead.”
Quentin lifted my chin with his fingertips. Never turning his gaze away, he looked straight inside me, and me inside him. “Then we’ll bring her back to life.”
• • •
He stood before the broken sculpture, alone and unprepared for the rush of fury and grief that hit him. I’ll put it back in one piece again. It’s not ruined. I’ll take care of it, Papa, just like I took care of everything else. But the other one. The other one — invisible, waiting to be built — lurked in the place that fostered nightmares and unspeakable regret. I’ll take care of that, too, to get what I want, he thought. For Mother. For Ursula. For Arthur. For you, Papa, goddamn you. This is the last time.
One more testament, then the debt that had tormented him for so many years would be paid.
• • •
Everyone said he’d come back for my sake and his family honor. It was widely accepted that some measure of man-to-man confrontation with Mr. John was inevitable.
Juanita, who had barely spoken ten words to me since I’d known her, rushed into the hospital cafeteria where I was buying Arthur’s favorite yogurt. Oswald’s shy wife, who had been a worker at the Tiber plant before she married, hugged a colorful sweater over her denim jumper and spouted an anxious stream of Spanish. “Slow down,” I begged, translating slowly. She gulped. “My friends just see Quentin drive into the parking lot at the plant.”
I handed her the yogurt and hurried after him. Tiber Poultry was only a two-minute jog from the hospital. Heads turned on every corner as I ran past.
The processing plant loomed beyond the town railroad tracks like a brick beehive. Refrigerated tractor-trailers sat at wide loading docks on one side of the building. A line of refrigerated freight cars waited for loading on a side spur of the train track. The parking lot was filled with employees’ cars. I groaned as I darted by Quentin’s rented sedan in a parking area for visitors.
“You let him go on in?” I accused the lobby receptionist, a high school classmate of mine.
She raised both hands in defeat. “Mr. John said if he showed up, to let him by. Go see for yourself.”
I was astonished. I strode down the main hall of the plant offices toward a pair of darkly paneled double doors. The staff was clustered in open doorways, staring at M
r. John’s office. “We haven’t heard anything violent,” someone called to me. “But he hasn’t been here long.”
When I reached the doors, I halted. For a second I listened, heard nothing myself, considered knocking, then pushed my way inside. Mr. John sat in an armchair in one corner, before a large picture window that framed a postcard view of Tiberville. Quentin stood opposite him, gazing out the window, too.
Both of them turned their heads when I burst in. Mr. John looked haggard and old, his graying hair just a white shadow over his balding head. He had always been a pristine dresser, always in silks and linens proudly embossed with the Tiber logo. But now he was a portly old man in a golf shirt and rumpled trousers. His eyes, behind heavy bifocals he wore in private, were red-rimmed and swollen. He had obviously been crying only seconds before I entered the room. When he saw me he put his head in his hands. “Oh, honey,” he moaned. “I didn’t mean to hurt you and Arthur.”
“Too late for that,” Quentin supplied. His expression was simply cold, and a little sad. “We’ve come to an agreement,” he told me. “There’ll be a bronze plaque put on the campus at Mountain State, where the sculpture used to stand. I want it to tell how the sculpture was commissioned, and who was responsible for it. Betty Tiber Habersham. Tom Powell. Richard Riconni.” He paused. “And I’ll receive a letter of apology to present to my mother.”
Mr. John raised his head and looked at me. “Is there anything, anything at all, I can do to make this up to you?”
“I want the two hundred dollars you made Daddy pay you for the Bear. I want it donated to the March of Dimes.”
“Yes.”
“And I want your permission for Esme to visit Bear Creek whenever she wants.”
He nodded.
“That’s all.”
His face crumpled. “I would give all my money, everything, to turn back the clock.”
“So would I,” I whispered, on the verge of tears, myself. “I’d set it back more than twenty years. The Bear would stay on campus. And I’d save my mother’s life.” I looked at Quentin. “And you could save your father’s.” The look that came into his eyes was hard and poignant, taking little, a raw wound. Yet he nodded.
On Bear Mountain Page 26