Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories

by Terry Bisson

  * * *

  That evening after supper I asked Wallace Jr. if he might want to go with me to visit Mother. I wasn’t surprised when he said yes. Kids have more consideration than folks give them credit for. We found her sitting on the concrete front porch of the Home, watching the cars go by on I-65. The nurse said she had been agitated all day. I wasn’t surprised by that, either. Every fall as the leaves change, she gets restless, maybe the word is “hopeful,” again. I brought her into the dayroom and combed her long white hair. “Nothing but bears on TV anymore,” the nurse complained, flipping the channels. Wallace Jr. picked up the remote after the nurse left, and we watched a CBS or NBC Special Report about some hunters in Virginia who had gotten their houses torched. The TV reporter interviewed a hunter and his wife whose $117,500 Shenandoah Valley home had burned. She blamed the bears. He didn’t blame the bears, but he was suing for compensation from the state since he had a valid hunting license. The state hunting commissioner came on and said that possession of a hunting license didn’t prohibit (“enjoin,” I think, was the word he used) the hunted from striking back. I thought that was a pretty liberal view for a state commissioner. Of course, he had a vested interest in not paying off. I’m not a hunter myself.

  “Don’t bother coming on Sunday,” Mother told Wallace Jr. with a wink. “I’ve drove a million miles and I’ve got one hand on the gate.” I’m used to her saying stuff like that, especially in the fall, but I was afraid it would upset the boy. In fact, he looked worried after we left and I asked him what was wrong.

  “How could she have drove a million miles?” he asked. She had told him forty-eight miles a day for thirty-nine years, and he had worked it out on his calculator to be 336,960 miles.

  “Have driven,” I said. “And it’s forty-eight in the morning and forty-eight in the afternoon. Plus there were the football trips. Plus, old folks exaggerate a little.” Mother was the first woman school-bus driver in the state. She did it every day and raised a family, too. Dad just farmed.

  * * *

  I usually get off the interstate at Smiths Grove, but that night I drove north all the way to Horse Cave and doubled back so Wallace Jr. and I could see the bears’ fires. There were not as many as you would think from the TV—one every six or seven miles, hidden back in a clump of trees or under a rocky ledge. Probably they look for water as well as wood. Wallace Jr. wanted to stop, but it’s against the law to stop on the interstate and I was afraid the state police would run us off.

  There was a card from Wallace in the mailbox. He and Elizabeth were doing fine and having a wonderful time. Not a word about Wallace Jr., but the boy didn’t seem to mind. Like most kids his age, he doesn’t really enjoy going places with his parents.

  * * *

  On Saturday afternoon the Home called my office (Burley Belt Drought & Hail) and left word that Mother was gone. I was on the road. I work Saturdays. It’s the only day a lot of part-time farmers are home. My heart literally missed a beat when I called in and got the message, but only a beat. I had long been prepared. “It’s a blessing,” I said when I got the nurse on the phone.

  “You don’t understand,” the nurse said. “Not passed away, gone. Ran away, gone. Your mother has escaped.” Mother had gone through the door at the end of the corridor when no one was looking, wedging the door with her comb and taking a bedspread that belonged to the Home.

  “What about her tobacco?” I asked. It was gone. That was a sure sign she was planning to stay away. I was in Franklin, and it took me less than an hour to get to the Home on I-65. The nurse told me that Mother had been acting more and more confused lately. Of course they are going to say that. We looked around the grounds, which is only a half acre with no trees between the interstate and a soybean field. Then they had me leave a message at the Sheriff’s office. I would have to keep paying for her care until she was officially listed as Missing, which would be Monday.

  It was dark by the time I got back to the house, and Wallace Jr. was fixing supper. This just involves opening a few cans, already selected and grouped together with a rubber band. I told him his grandmother had gone, and he nodded, saying, “She told us she would be.” I called Florida and left a message. There was nothing more to be done. I sat down and tried to watch TV, but there was nothing on. Then, I looked out the back door, and saw the firelight twinkling through the trees across the northbound lane of I-65, and realized I just might know where to find her.

  * * *

  It was definitely getting colder, so I got my jacket. I told the boy to wait by the phone in case the sheriff called, but when I looked back, halfway across the field, there he was behind me. He didn’t have a jacket. I let him catch up. He was carrying his .22 and I made him leave it leaning against our fence. It was harder climbing the government fence in the dark, at my age, than it had been in the daylight. I am sixty-one. The highway was busy with cars heading south and trucks heading north.

  Crossing the shoulder, I got my pants cuffs wet on the long grass, already wet with dew. It is actually bluegrass.

  The first few feet into the trees it was pitch-black and the boy grabbed my hand. Then it got lighter. At first I thought it was the moon, but it was the high beams shining like moonlight into the treetops, allowing Wallace Jr. and me to pick our way through the brush. We soon found the path and its familiar bear smell.

  I was wary of approaching the bears at night. If we stayed on the path we might run into one in the dark, but if we went through the bushes we might be seen as intruders. I wondered if maybe we should have brought the gun.

  We stayed on the path. The light seemed to drip down from the canopy of the woods like rain. The going was easy, especially if we didn’t try to look at the path but let our feet find their own way.

  Then through the trees I saw their fire.

  * * *

  The fire was mostly of sycamore and beech branches, the kind that puts out very little heat or light and lots of smoke. The bears hadn’t learned the ins and outs of wood yet. They did okay at tending it, though. A large cinnamon-brown northern-looking bear was poking the fire with a stick, adding a branch now and then from a pile at his side. The others sat around in a loose circle on the logs. Most were smaller black or honey bears, one was a mother with cubs. Some were eating berries from a hubcap. Not eating, but just watching the fire, my mother sat among them with the bedspread from the Home around her shoulders.

  If the bears noticed us, they didn’t let on. Mother patted a spot right next to her on the log and I sat down. A bear moved over to let Wallace Jr. sit on her other side.

  The bear smell is rank but not unpleasant, once you get used to it. It’s not like a barn smell, but wilder. I leaned over to whisper something to Mother and she shook her head. It would be rude to whisper around these creatures that don’t possess the power of speech, she let me know without speaking. Wallace Jr. was silent too. Mother shared the bedspread with us and we sat for what seemed hours, looking into the fire.

  The big bear tended the fire, breaking up the dry branches by holding one end and stepping on them, like people do. He was good at keeping it going at the same level. Another bear poked the fire from time to time but the others left it alone. It looked like only a few of the bears knew how to use fire, and were carrying the others along. But isn’t that how it is with everything? Every once in a while, a smaller bear walked into the circle of firelight with an armload of wood and dropped it onto the pile. Median wood has a silvery cast, like driftwood.

  Wallace Jr. isn’t fidgety like a lot of kids. I found it pleasant to sit and stare into the fire. I took a little piece of Mother’s Red Man, though I don’t generally chew. It was no different from visiting her at the Home, only more interesting, because of the bears. There were about eight or ten of them. Inside the fire itself, things weren’t so dull, either: Little dramas were being played out as fiery chambers were created and then destroyed in a crashing of sparks. My imagination ran wild. I looked around the circle at the bears a
nd wondered what they saw. Some had their eyes closed. Though they were gathered together, their spirits still seemed solitary, as if each bear was sitting alone in front of its own fire.

  The hubcap came around and we all took some newberries. I don’t know about Mother, but I just pretended to eat mine. Wallace Jr. made a face and spit his out. When he went to sleep, I wrapped the bedspread around all three of us. It was getting colder and we were not provided, like the bears, with fur. I was ready to go home, but not Mother. She pointed up toward the canopy of trees, where a light was spreading, and then pointed to herself. Did she think it was angels approaching from on high? It was only the high beams of some southbound truck, but she seemed mighty pleased. Holding her hand, I felt it grow colder and colder in mine.

  * * *

  Wallace Jr. woke me up by tapping on my knee. It was past dawn, and his grandmother had died sitting on the log between us. The fire was banked up and the bears were gone and someone was crashing straight through the woods, ignoring the path. It was Wallace. Two state troopers were right behind him. He was wearing a white shirt, and I realized it was Sunday morning. Underneath his sadness on learning of Mother’s death, he looked peeved.

  The troopers were sniffing the air and nodding. The bear smell was still strong. Wallace and I wrapped Mother in the bedspread and started with her body back out to the highway. The troopers stayed behind and scattered the bears’ fire ashes and flung their firewood away into the bushes. It seemed a petty thing to do. They were like bears themselves, each one solitary in his own uniform.

  There was Wallace’s Olds 98 on the median, with its radial tires looking squashed on the grass. In front of it there was a police car with a trooper standing beside it, and behind it a funeral home hearse, also an Olds 98.

  “First report we’ve had of them bothering old folks,” the trooper said to Wallace. “That’s not hardly what happened at all,” I said, but nobody asked me to explain. They have their own procedures. Two men in suits got out of the hearse and opened the rear door. That to me was the point at which Mother departed this life. After we put her in, I put my arms around the boy. He was shivering even though it wasn’t that cold. Sometimes death will do that, especially at dawn, with the police around and the grass wet, even when it comes as a friend.

  We stood for a minute watching the cars and trucks pass. “It’s a blessing,” Wallace said. It’s surprising how much traffic there is at 6:22 A.M.

  * * *

  That afternoon, I went back to the median and cut a little firewood to replace what the troopers had flung away. I could see the fire through the trees that night.

  I went back two nights later, after the funeral. The fire was going and it was the same bunch of bears, as far as I could tell. I sat around with them a while but it seemed to make them nervous, so I went home. I had taken a handful of newberries from the hubcap, and on Sunday I went with the boy and arranged them on Mother’s grave. I tried again, but it’s no use, you can’t eat them.

  Unless you’re a bear.

  The Two Janets

  I’M NOT ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE who thinks you have to read a book to get something out of it. You can learn a lot about a book by picking it up, turning it over, rubbing the cover, riffling the pages open and shut. Especially if it’s been read enough times before, it’ll speak to you.

  This is why I like to hang around used bookstores on my lunch hour. I was at the outdoor bookstall on the west side of Union Square, the one that opens out of huge crates, when my mother called. It is tempting here to claim to remember that I was looking at an old paperback of, say, Rabbit Run, but actually it was Henry Gregor Felsen’s Hot Rod, the cover telling the whole story through the hairdos.

  The pay phone on the corner nearest Sixteenth Street was ringing and wouldn’t stop. Finally, I picked it up and said, “Hello? Mother?”

  “Janet? Is that you?” My mother has this uncanny, really, ability to call on pay phones and get me. She does it about once a month.

  Well, of course it was me: Otherwise, would I have answered, “Mother”? “Did you have trouble finding me?” I asked.

  “If you only knew. I called three phones, and the last two you wouldn’t believe.” It doesn’t always work.

  “So how’s everything?” I asked. It came out “everthang.” My accent, which I have managed to moderate, always reemerges when I talk with anybody from home.

  “Fine.” She told me about Alan, my ex-fiancé, and Janet, my best friend. They used to call us the Two Janets. Mother keeps up with my old high school friends, most of whom are, of course, still in Owensboro. Then she said, “Guess what. John Updike just moved to Owensboro.”

  “John Updike?”

  “The writer. Rabbit Run? It was about a week ago. He bought a house out on Maple Drive, across from the hospital there.”

  “This was in the paper?”

  “No, of course not. I’m sure he wants his privacy. I heard it from Elizabeth Dorsey, your old music teacher. Her oldest daughter, Mary Beth, is married to Sweeney Kost Junior who sells real estate with that new group out on Leitchfield Road. She called to tell me because she thought you might be interested.”

  It is well-known that I have an interest in literature. I came to New York to get a job in publishing. My roommate already has one at S&S (Simon and Schuster) and I called her before I went back to work. She doesn’t go to lunch until two. She hadn’t heard anything about John Updike moving to Owensboro, but she checked PW (Publishers Weekly) and found an item saying that John Updike had sold his house in Massachusetts and moved to a small Midwestern city.

  That bothered me. Owensboro sits right across the river from Indiana, but it’s still the South, not the Midwest. The northernmost statue to Confederate heroes sits on the courthouse lawn. I’m not touchy about that stuff but some people are. Then I thought that if you just looked at a map, as they might have done fact-checking at the PW office, or as Updike himself might have done, looking for a new place to live, you might think Owensboro was in the Midwest since it’s much closer to St. Louis than to Atlanta. Then I thought, maybe Updike was just saying “Midwest” to throw people off. Maybe he was, like Salinger, trying to get away from the world. Then I thought, maybe he didn’t move to Owensboro at all, and the whole thing was just a mistake, a coincidence, a wild flight of fancy. The more I thought about this theory, the better I liked it. “Small city in the Midwest” could mean Iowa City, where a well-known writer’s workshop is held; or any one of a hundred college towns like Crawfordsville, Indiana (Wabash); Gambier, Ohio (Kenyon); or Yellow Springs, Ohio (Antioch). Or even Indianapolis or Cincinnati. To a New Yorker, and all writers, even when they live in Massachusetts, are New Yorkers (in a way) Indianapolis and Cincinnati are small cities. Or if you wanted to get really close to home there is Evansville, Indiana, at 130,500 definitely a “small city” (Owensboro at 52,000 is only barely a city) and one that might even attract a writer like John Updike.

  With all this, I was eleven minutes late getting back to work. But what are they going to do, fire a temp?

  That was on Thursday, May 18. I had the usual weekend, and on Monday night, right after the rates changed, Alan, my ex-fiancé, made his weekly call. “Found a job yet?” he asked (knowing he would have heard from my mother if I had). Then he added, “Did you hear Saul Bellow moved to Owensboro?”

  “You mean John Updike,” I said.

  “No, that was last week. Saul Bellow moved here just yesterday.” Alan runs two of his father’s four liquor stores. He and I still share an interest in books and literature.

  “How could that be?” I said. I would have thought he was making it up but Alan, to his credit (I guess), never makes things up.

  I thought about calling Janet but I am always calling her, so the next morning I called Mother from work. I was temping for an insurance adjuster with a WATS line. “Mother, did Saul Bellow move to Owensboro?” I asked, getting right to the point.

  “Well, yes, dear, he did. He’s living
out in those apartments on Scherm Road. The ones where Wallace Carter Cox and Loreena Dyson lived right after he got his divorce.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Well, you didn’t seem very excited when John Updike moved here, dear, so I thought you didn’t much care. You have made a new life for yourself in New York, after all.”

  I let that go. “It sure is mighty nice of you to keep up with where everybody lives,” I joked.

  “When a famous person moves to a town like this,” she said, “everybody notices.”

  I wondered about that. I didn’t think people in Owensboro, outside of Alan, even knew who Saul Bellow was. I’ll bet not twenty people there have read his books. I have only read one, the most recent one. The other Janet reads only nonfiction.

  The next week Philip Roth moved to Owensboro. I found out from Janet, who called me, a new thing for her since it’s usually me who puts out the effort, not to mention the money, to stay in touch.

  “Guess who we saw in the mall today,” she said. “Philip Roth.”

  “Are you sure? How did you know?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine her recognizing Philip Roth.

  “Your mother pointed him out. She recognized his face from a story in People magazine. I’m not sure he would be considered handsome if he wasn’t a famous writer.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Was he just visiting or has he moved to Owensboro too? And what mall are you talking about?”

  “What mall!” Janet said. “There’s only one, out Livermore Road. It’s so far out of town that hardly anybody ever goes out there. I couldn’t believe it when we saw Philip Roth out there.”

  “What were you doing out at the mall with my mother?” I asked. “Is she bothering you again?”

  “She gets a little lonesome. I go by and see her, and maybe we go shopping or something. Is that a crime?”

  “Of course not,” I said. I’m glad my mother has friends. I just wish they weren’t my best friends, with the same name as me.