They rose en masse with a certain hard-kept dignity and filed toward the front door. I can’t afford to be softhearted, I thought. I’ll end up like Daddy.
Fannie Ledbetter stopped and made one last effort to convince me. “That brother of yours’ll go to the city because he loves you like nobody’s business,” she insisted, “but if you carry him away from this place you’re gonna kill him, mark my words.”
• • •
Arthur’s face grew sadder with every passing hour. He paced the floors, he cried, and finally, just before dark, he disappeared. I went upstairs to Mama and Daddy’s quiet, heartbreakingly empty bedroom, filled with cold, fading light, and I struggled not to give up and burrow inside the blankets of their old pine bedstead. I opened the lid of a huge quilt chest beneath one window.
“What are you?” I asked Arthur gently. He was curled tightly inside the big chest, a feat of amazing flexibility for his six feet two inches of lanky arms and legs.
“A baby chick inside an egg,” he said.
I sat down on the floor, reached inside the chest, and stroked his luxurious red-brown hair back from his face. It draped onto his shoulders. Daddy had let him grow it as he pleased, and Arthur didn’t like to cut it. “Are you going to hatch?” I asked.
“Yes.” His voice trembled. I knew at that moment that he had made up his mind to do what I’d asked — and that it was an act of devotion based solely on pure trust and adoration. He held up a shaking hand and I gripped it firmly. “Arthur, I promise you, you’ll be safe with me, and I’ll take care of you, and I’ll make sure you’re happy.”
He dragged my hand to the center of his ribs. “Hurts,” he said in a small voice. “Daddy’s here. Can’t talk. Like Mama Bear.” I rested my head on one arm along the rim of the trunk. “Hurts,” I agreed. Silver shadows were gathering, the whole world had gone gray and quiet. “Daddy’s here,” Arthur moaned again, pressing our locked hands harder against his ribs.
“We’ll take him with us,” I whispered.
• • •
I bought a sofa bed and moved my brother into the tiny living room of my garage apartment. Gregory regarded Arthur the way he looked at specimens under a microscope. “I’m going to talk to some people,” he told me as we sat on opposite ends of his pristine white couch one night. “See what kind of experimental medications they can suggest. We may be able to hook your brother up with a program that can help him. With help and support, he can live happily in a group home.”
“Let’s get something straight. My brother,” I said in a low, even voice, “isn’t ever going into an institution.”
Stiff silence filled the perfectly deodorized space between us. We had not slept together in a month. The next day he left for a public-health convention in Canada. I was glad.
“You look tired, boss,” my clerk said at the bookstore.
“I’m fine.” I went to the supply closet. Arthur napped sitting up, leaning against the cramped walls, his long arms laced around the handle of a mop. Pity filled me, and then, hatred.
The next morning, as if he knew, Arthur left.
I realized something was wrong when I went into the kitchen around seven and found his copy of The Incredible Journey standing on the table in the breakfast nook. Over the years, Daddy and I’d taken turns repeatedly reading the classic children’s story to him, and he loved it. Alongside the book, he’d neatly stacked the new sweater and the Braves cap I’d bought him. Half-awake, I picked up the book and frowned at it, then walked down the hall to Arthur’s room to see what he was up to.
The room was empty. I called the police. By the time the officer arrived at my door I was already working a network of friends and neighbors, marshaling a citizens’ patrol, and about to leave the apartment myself on the search. “How do you know your brother ran away?” the officer asked.
“He told me,” I said, and held up The Incredible Journey. A book about desperate, lost animals finding their way back home.
• • •
Arthur, who could lose all track of time and place even on the familiar turf of Bear Creek, tried to walk back to the mountains through the streets of Atlanta. The police found him two miles from my neighborhood, unconscious and badly bruised, with a broken rib. His backpack was gone, along with a change purse he carried, which had been stuffed with the five dollars I’d given him, even though he could never quite figure out how money worked.
After the emergency room doctors patched him up he was transferred to a private room at the hospital, and there he slept peacefully, thanks to tranquilizers and painkillers. I went into the bathroom, threw up, and screamed into a towel. What the attackers had done to him was like beating a lost puppy. And it was my fault.
Sometime after midnight, he woke up. One eye was swollen shut. The other filled with tears when I bent over him. I spoke his name. “I’m here, I’m here, it’s okay,” I whispered, stroking his hair. “I’m so sorry, sweetie. I won’t let anything happen to you again. I swear. I swear to you. I’m so sorry.”
His bruised, swollen mouth compressed into a trembling line. He had to work to form words. I leaned closer to hear them. “Mama Bear didn’t tell you to take me away from home,” he said. Then he turned his head away and, sobbing in soft, pained mewls, said nothing else.
By the next day I realized his silence toward me wasn’t temporary, and that we had a serious problem. Liza and the other tenants came to visit; she and Fannie Ledbetter sat by Arthur, spoon-feeding him vanilla yogurt Liza had brought. Liza knew his favorite foods, damn her. I watched from across the room, trying to catch his attention, thinking he’d give in, eventually. “Here, look at this, Arthur,” I said lightly, pulling a can of root beer from Liza’s blue macramé tote. “Your favorite.” I opened it, poured it into a cup of ice, inserted a straw, and brought the drink to him.
His battered face tightened with fury. His right hand shot out. He slapped the cup, catching me off guard. The cup and its contents landed on the floor.
I stood there in disbelief. My brother had never been violent before. The enraged expression on his face made him a stranger. He did hate me. I saw that. “Arthur Powell, you behave!” Fannie said, gaping at him, while Liza looked from him to me, frowning.
Arthur began to struggle weakly, flailing his bruised arms. “Go outside,” Liza ordered quietly.
I nodded. “I’m leaving the room, for his sake.”
I went down the hall and sat on the edge of a stiff chair in a waiting area, clutching my knees. My little brother, whom I’d diapered and fed and watched over and read to and defended when bullies picked on him, my brother, my only close family in the world, did not speak another word to me or anyone else from that day onward.
By the time Harriet Davies showed up at the hospital late one night, I looked the way I felt. Pale, hollow-eyed, my hair up in a ratty ponytail, wearing a pair of faded jeans stained with coffee and a black pullover with several unraveling threads dangling from the wrists. I’d forgotten about the City of Atlanta’s crucial zoning vote regarding our shops. I took one glance at Harriet’s soft, dimpled, teary face, and I said, “We lost the vote, didn’t we?”
“Yes.” She crumpled on one of the hospital’s vinyl sofas and sobbed. I sat down and put an arm around her. Peachtree Lane was doomed. I’d just lost my business. The leaden impact, coming on top of everything else, was too much for tears. I hugged her hard, squeezing because it comforted me, until she squeaked with pain and gently pried herself out of my frozen grip.
Gregory was due back from his conference the next morning. I paced the hall outside Arthur’s hospital room, trying to think of solutions, trying not to think of anything else. About midmorning, I glanced up and saw a vaguely familiar young woman walking my way. Then I realized I knew her — she was a technical writer for the CDC, which published a stream of reports and newsletters. I’d met her a couple of times at parties, with Gregory.
Strangely enough, I remembered her because she looked like me — tall,
a brownish redhead, semislender, with blue eyes. “Is Gregory all right?” I asked quietly.
“Yes. Oh, yes,” she looked startled, then halted a dozen feet away, her gray trenchcoat swinging around her rumpled blue pantsuit with stylish momentum, very dramatic. “I have to talk to you,” she said. “About Gregory.” Then she spun around and headed into an empty hospital room. I followed her and shut the door. My instincts for privacy were good.
She began to cry. And then, without warning, she spilled her lurid, heartfelt confession. She and Gregory had been lovers for almost a year now. They didn’t mean for it to happen, but it did, as usual in such stories. She loved him and he loved her, and he’d been trying to find a way to tell me so. “You’ve hurt him so much, forcing your brother on him, pressuring him to be a surrogate father to a grown man,” she moaned. “He says it’s the last straw.”
“Excuse me, I need some air.” I walked back into the hallway. The floor felt soft beneath my feet; I had to concentrate on the workings of my knees. I braced one hand against the wall and slowly made my way to the door of Arthur’s room, walking as if the floor had tilted.
I called Liza out of Arthur’s room. She took one look at me and reached out, frowning. “You need some rest,” she said. I shook my head. “I want you to tell Arthur something. In a day or two, when he’s released, I’m taking him back to Bear Creek. For good. Please tell him that. No more worries, no more experiments. I doubt he’ll forgive me for what’s happened, but at least he can relax about the future.”
“What about you?” she asked.
Lights danced before my eyes. I would have to sit down soon and take some breaths, have to pretend I wasn’t being pulled backward by the same hand of fate that had closed around Daddy when he was a boy, the curse that kept Powells at Bear Creek without good choices or any foreseeable way to break the cycle of just-getting-by.
“I’m going back home, too,” I said.
• • •
Everyone in Tiber County who heard the rumors or read between the lines knew I came home broke and jobless, my man had fallen in love with another woman, and because of me my own brother had retreated into shy and speechless torment. I rated a level of gossip equivalent to weddings, community awards, church events, college happenings, and a Rotarian lunch hosting the lieutenant governor.
My bookstore, like all the other shops at Peachtree Lane, sat empty. I’d packed and sold my inventory with a knife in my chest as every book disappeared from the shelves via a return box to its publisher or into the hands of yet another bargain-hunting stranger.
I deposited enough money in the Bank of Tiberville to pay the farm’s modest bills for only a few months. I had no more than the summer to set up housekeeping, concentrate on restoring Arthur’s faith and voice, and find a decent job. I was afraid to leave Arthur alone, even though he wouldn’t come in the house with me there. I had to stay nearby in case he suddenly needed me. He was already certain I’d deserted him, or didn’t care.
Arthur couldn’t or wouldn’t speak, but moaned as he wandered around the farm, darting into the woods whenever I approached him, then sneaking into the house to dump food from the refrigerator or throw books off my shelves in the living room — acts of meanness that were totally out of character.
“He’s acting out his grief and fear,” Liza suggested to me. “Just give him time.”
He slept in a tiny extra bedroom in Liza’s chicken-house apartment, or he stayed with Dr. Washington at the dilapidated Washington homestead, a ten-minute walk away, through the woods. I began to depend on Liza, though I didn’t want to. She looked after Arthur conscientiously, and she grieved for my father in a huge garden he and she had created behind the chicken houses. I walked up once and caught her crying, talking to him about seeds. Thomas, I’m planting everything in good earth. That’s all I can think to do. I retreated before she noticed me, angry and sad that she seemed sincere, that Daddy had never told me he had feelings for her, and that she called Daddy by his formal name, which no one else, including Mama, had ever done.
The Ledbetters had installed a small herd of goats in the pasture, and had turned an old cattle shed into a shelter for feeding and milking. A dozen majestic Rhode Island Red hens and their rooster lived in a fenced yard, supplying everyone with big, brown eggs. Liza’s mixed-breed gray cat, named Eternity, prowled everywhere, often showing up on the back porch wanting me to let her in, a clear sign that she — and Liza, too, I assumed — were accustomed to Daddy’s hospitality.
But the old water spigots poked up from the earth just as they always had, the massive forsythia at the edge of the front yard would sprout next year just as it had this year, turning butter-yellow with tiny blooms every spring. The blue hydrangeas would always be blue. I knew every smooth inch of the two fieldstone steps to the back porch, and the three to the front porch, worn from generations of Powell feet.
The chicken houses had lost their lean, working angles over the years, going soft like old dancers. They bulged with ramshackle porches and crudely added rooms, odd doors, uneven windows, and unmatched metal awnings. The Ledbetters’ small porch was rimmed with wooden shelves filled with their strangely shaped, softly colored pottery. Next door, Liza had transformed her porch into an open arbor, an incredible green bower she’d created with climbing roses, trumpet vine, and Confederate jasmine.
The second chicken house, which sat only a dozen yards from its sister, had been divided into work spaces — Liza’s glass-blowing studio, the Ledbetters’ dusty kilns and pottery wheels, Oswald’s gallery of weird canvases.
I thought constantly about the fire hazards, about the lack of insurance, about the thin line between my tenants, me, and disaster. The farmhouse was in no better condition than the chicken houses. What Daddy couldn’t afford to fix he’d learned to laugh at and ignore. The pipes hummed and snored, half the light fixtures no longer worked, the floors sagged, the roof leaked, and the house was riddled with holes that let in furry visitors.
On the back porch I set a large white ceramic pot. In the pot was a tall, leafy seedling I’d started the year before from a peach pit of the Peachtree Lane tree. The old grandmother tree might not survive the developers’ plans, but her offspring would establish a new peachtree dynasty in the mountains.
“You’re going to survive, and you’re going to grow,” I told it, and myself.
By god.
• • •
Quentin drove upstate on a hot summer morning. Word had come that the warehouse was being sold by the latest in a series of absentee owners, and soon would be remodeled to serve as a distribution center for a furniture manufacturer. Pragmatic crates of recliners and cheaply veneered dining tables would replace his father’s dreams and nightmares.
Once inside the empty building, Quentin went to the door of the old toilet, picked the padlock, and shut his eyes for a moment, remembering, and trying to forget. Then he swung the door open for the last time.
When he lifted his finger under the light switch he saw what a stranger would see — only a small, utilitarian space, with cracked tiles and yellowing fixtures. But when he got down on one knee and ran his fingers over the cold floor, he saw blood and his father’s empty stare. He walked out quickly.
As he passed the shabby cubicle that had served as his father’s living space, he stopped for a moment, breathing hard. He stared at its bare walls and the old stove and sink standing forlornly in a corner. When he was a boy he’d imagined his father there with the woman, servicing her in lurid detail. Now he only noticed how cold and depressing the place was, and he thought of his father always coming back to it after weekends at home, and how that must have felt.
Workmen for the new owner had dragged the old stove out from the wall a few inches, and had left crumpled bags of debris from a fast-food restaurant scattered on its blackened burners. The trash bothered Quentin. Papa had always been neat, disciplined, clean. Quentin knelt and gathered the garbage to discard. As he did he noticed what appeared
to be dozens of pieces of mail on the floor behind the stove, covered in dust and spider webs. He pulled the appliance farther away from the wall then reached behind and scooped up the materials.
Yellowed, stained, and badly rumpled, the long-lost mail was mostly just advertising flyers and other junk, but Quentin plucked out a water bill and looked at the postmark. His heart twisted. This mail had been delivered only a few days after his father’s suicide. Someone — probably Joe Araiza or one of Papa’s friends who had helped take care of the place for a while — must have tossed the pieces on the stove. They’d fallen behind it.
He stood angrily, wishing he hadn’t found anything to draw him back to that time. He was about to drop the entire handful of papers into a garbage can without sorting the rest, when one letter fell to the floor. Quentin glanced at it with perfunctory disgust as he picked it up. But when he read the dimly scrawled return address he went very still, and frowned.
Mr. Tom Powell, Bear Creek Farm, Tiberville, Georgia.
He opened the old envelope carefully then eased out two pieces of notebook paper filled with the same script, showing hard crease lines from twenty-two years of folded secrecy. Next he removed a faded color snapshot. He held the items with his fingertips, the way an archaeologist might carry priceless sheets of Egyptian papyrus.
Hello to you, Mr. Richard Riconni. You don’t know me, except what Mrs. Betty Tiber Habersham may have written to you. She is kin to me, and I helped her with the Bear. Now, sir, I am sorry to tell you that she has passed — rest her soul — and I have bought the Bear. It is sitting in my back pasture, as safe as it can be. I promise you, sir, it will stay here for good, and I will take good care of it. Me and my little daughter, Ursula. We know great art when we see it. We sent you a picture of your Bear in its new home.
Standing beside a middle-aged man and the Iron Bear in the photograph, a child smiled at Quentin, who was stunned, with a certain amount of solemn urgency. I’m waiting for you, that child’s smile said. This Bear is hard to hold still without help.