On Bear Mountain

  • • •

  I could put an end to this, I began to tell myself. Just tell Quentin to go, leave us alone, as I should have done at the start. But then what would I say to Arthur? He’d think Quentin had died. Everyone could die at any time, in my brother’s fragile world. The dilemma made me toss in my own bed at night. I woke from a dream about being homeless and finding Arthur beaten to death beside Mama and Daddy’s graves.

  Darting outside in the warm moonlight, I took deep breaths then squatted by the yard spigot, splashing my face and neck with ice-cold well water. Kneeling there, barefooted and dressed only in a thin cotton gown, I looked up and saw Quentin crossing the pasture. I stumbled to my feet.

  He walked to the sculpture and stood facing it, looking up into the thick, ursine face that his father had cut from huge cast-iron pots my father collected. His shoulders were hunched; even in the moonlight his silhouette conveyed both strength and defeat. He was so alone. I pressed my hand to my heart and slipped quietly to the edge of the light beyond the tree-shadowed backyard.

  I’d listen, if you could tell me. I’d tell you, if you could listen.

  He turned his head my way. There was no doubt in my mind he saw me in that sheer gown, my hand over my heart as if pledging allegiance. For one bone-tingling moment I thought he was going to walk to me, but instead he pivoted and walked slowly back to his own door.

  We never mentioned it.

  • • •

  “What is he saying to that thing?” Quentin asked. We watched from the porch the next evening as Arthur huddled on the Bear’s concrete pad, hugging his knees and rocking, his mouth moving in some obviously fervent conversation, lost in some lonely world.

  “He talks to the sculpture every day around sunset. It’s his habit. When he was a child it comforted him. But now he says he’s trying to comfort the Bear. I asked him this afternoon if he was any closer to a decision. He told me the Bear is still thinking.”

  Quentin leaned back in an old Adirondack chair, his eyes troubled. “Do you talk to it, too?”

  I hesitated. Everything I told him about myself felt too intimate. “Everyone who’s around the Bear for very long starts to talk to it. You can’t help yourself.”

  Quentin frowned. “I never talked to any of my father’s sculptures, never felt they were really alive.”

  “Do you understand what the Bear means to us?” I asked.

  “Childhood memories. I understand that.”

  “It’s not that simple.” I moved from my own chair to sit on the steps near his feet, looking up at him as if in prayer. If I could just make him understand. Maybe there could be a friendship between us, between our families, something Arthur would hang on to no matter what happened about the sculpture.

  “I don’t know what my father would say to you, but I know he’d want to do what was right,” I said in a fervent tone, my hands gesturing, almost brushing the material of his trousers, almost ready to touch him, to reach for his own hands, which lay open, palm up, on his knees. He leaned forward — frowning, listening intently, those large silver eyes never leaving my face. “Life was hard, here. Daddy didn’t have a lot of choices. He learned to appreciate what he had — in fact, he celebrated what he had. He was a righteous person. Truly, purely righteous. He believed in the integrity of sharing. He’d share with you, I’m sure.” I hesitated. “I was angry at you the other day at the jail because I behaved foolishly. And because I do want your money. I want to lord it over every damn Tiber in the county. My father would be ashamed of me.”

  I started to turn away, hiding my emotions and changing the subject, but Quentin touched my shoulder with just his fingertips. “No, he wouldn’t feel that way. You made him proud. There’s nothing wrong with wanting money to take care of your home and family.”

  Looking up at him helplessly, I said, “Are you psychic?”

  “Not even a little. I just can’t imagine any man not being proud of a daughter like you.”

  Warmth rushed through me. “My tenant, Liza, says she’s spoken to Daddy in dreams. That’s bullshit. I don’t really believe in that kind of thing, but still. I’ve tried to dream about him. The worst thing is, when I do dream about him, I can’t speak. Or I talk but I know he can’t hear me.”

  “And you wake up in a cold sweat with your throat raw.”

  I stared at him. “You are psychic.”

  “I’ve had that kind of dream.”

  I hesitated. Then, “Tell me about your father.”

  “I don’t like to talk about him. There’s nothing to say — and obviously I can’t say it even in dreams. He’s been gone a long time.”

  “Was he kind? Did you love him?”

  “None of that matters.”

  “But you still dream about him?”

  “I try not to.”

  “Then how do you live with what you can’t change and can’t explain?”

  He frowned. “I get up each day and forget he existed.”

  “It’s not that easy to shut yourself off. To stop caring.”

  His eyes narrowed. He studied me as if I were deliberately provoking him. “Practice makes perfect.”

  I tossed up both hands in disgust. “I read an article that said he committed suicide. All right? I know what happened to him. I can imagine what it did to you and your mother.”

  His eyes darkened. All right, she wants to know, she thinks she can imagine? “He shot himself in the chest. I found his body. I can still smell the blood. I can still see the hole over his heart and the little pieces of his skin and his shirt splattered all over him. I can remember how cold he was when I put my hand there. I can see the look in his eyes. How alone he was when he died. That’s how I see him in my dreams.”

  I looked away, stunned, ashamed of myself for prying. I fumbled with one hand and brushed his by accident. It only seemed natural to slide my hand across one of his open palms as a show of apology and sympathy. I had no idea how he’d react.

  But he curved his other hand over mine and turned my hand in his, then linked his fingers through mine. “Sorry to lay it all out that way.” His voice was gruff, his grip gentle and electric.

  I faced him again. “It didn’t occur to me that you were the one who discovered him. I wouldn’t have asked.”

  “I just don’t like to talk about him. I never think about him without remembering how he died. Nothing I can say will change it.”

  I shook my head. “Silence is the worst enemy of hope. I can’t remember who said that. Plato, maybe, or one of the saints. But it’s true.”

  He sat back slowly and released my hand. A shield returned. “I respect you. Don’t ruin it with the kind of advice I could get off a fortune cookie.” The tone of his voice sent a chill down my back.

  One of Mama’s favorite sayings rose in my mind. I hadn’t thought of it in years, but suddenly she was there beside me, firm and plain, warning the godly side of me. You don’t hold a snake. The snake holds you. Quentin had drawn me in, only to shut me out. I got up. “Making friends with me and Arthur is just a necessary maneuver to you, isn’t it?” I asked quietly. “You say what you have to, you do what you have to, it’s all calculated. You don’t want us to know you, and you don’t want to know us. You think we’re just quaint hicks. You have no real respect.”

  “That’s not true, but I’m here to do business, not share sad stories or analyze my father’s life. You need to keep that in mind.”

  “I will, from now on.” The tenants would be walking over, soon, for dinner. I had a huge pot of stew on the stove, and potato salad in the refrigerator. I had to set the table, be the lady of my father’s house and, now, my own. “Excuse me.” I walked inside. The hot evening sun couldn’t prevent an unnatural shiver.

  • • •

  Quentin lay on the small, cheap bed of the apartment that night, grimly replaying our conversation. He had left the apartment’s door open to fight the stale air and heat, with an outside screened door latched. Moths fluttered agains
t that screen. The window fan pushed warm, summer-scented air — the faint aroma like grapes — over his naked body. He linked his hands behind his head and gazed out a narrow window at a sky of brilliant stars undimmed by city lights. Hammer slept on the simple tile floor by the bed, twitching and breathing hard as he chased memories of a gray rabbit he’d spotted in the pasture.

  It’s so easy to forget who you are, here, he thought. Her hand on mine. Her blue eyes wide open and not as worldly as she thinks. She hasn’t traveled that far, hasn’t hated her own life that much. But we’re alike in so many ways. The same cloud over us. Growing up poor. Loving parents who didn’t always make sense. Losing the one who kept the family in one piece. Never forgetting.

  He groaned under his breath and shut his eyes.

  I didn’t want to hurt her, but she got too close.

  CHAPTER 14

  After that, every moment I spent in Quentin’s company was a push-pull of conflicting emotions. I saw flashes of humor, kindness, deep intelligence, but always that stony overlay, that impossible wall. I knew I hid behind a simpler version of that armor, but I felt very vulnerable around him.

  I escorted him over to the isolated Washington homestead and made introductions. We sat on the porch with the professor, sipping iced tea from crystal glasses and eating slices of a pound cake I’d made. Dr. Washington pointed to the porch hammock where my brother slept most nights. “Perhaps you can explain something Arthur’s been hugging in his slumber.”

  Arthur made the hammock his bed so often that I’d outfitted it with a thin cotton quilt and pillow. Dr. Washington pulled a dog-eared copy of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea from under the pillow. “He’s been holding this as if it were a security blanket. Ursula, is this something from your father’s bookshelves?”

  “It’s mine,” Quentin said. “I left it on the seat of my Explorer. It disappeared.”

  I winced. “I’m sorry. Arthur’s not a thief. He just wanted something of yours as a keepsake. Like a talisman.” I looked at Quentin coolly. “Whether you want it or not, you’re one of his Tweens, now. Holding up his world.”

  “Whatever he wants to believe is up to him. Leave it.” Quentin tucked the book back under the pillow.

  When I tried to thank him, he shook his head and instantly changed the subject. “Mind if I look at your barn?” he asked the professor. The Washington barn was a two-story architectural oddity built of thick-hewn logs. The top level was twice as large as the bottom, and perched on the smaller bottom like the top of a giant wooden mushroom. Its overhanging floor made a covered walkway on all sides of the bottom level, which had once provided stalls for the Washington milk cows.

  “It’s a cantilevered construction style,” Dr. Washington said. “Rare, around here. My brother Fred always took such pride in it.”

  “Dutch, isn’t it? I read about barns like this in eastern Tennessee.”

  “Yes.”

  “If you ever want to sell it, let me know.”

  Dr. Washington gazed at him curiously. “What would you do with an ancient log barn?”

  “I’d bring a crew down, dismantle it piece by piece, take everything to New York. Sell it to a buyer who’d reassemble it.”

  “I was of the impression that you dealt in fine period architectural pieces.”

  “I do. The craftsmanship on the ironwork alone makes your barn special.”

  “I admit to you I didn’t always care about that barn, but I’m wiser, now. My great-great-grandfather hand-forged every nail, every hinge, every hook. One of his children wrote that he believed he put the spirit of African strength into every piece he forged. His work was a testament to his heritage and his pride, even though he was a slave for much of his life.”

  Quentin listened with quiet respect. “I’d say he was an artist.”

  “Interesting. I suppose he was.”

  Quentin walked over to the barn, stepped into the shadows under its looming second floor, and ran his hands over massive iron hinges along a cattle stall door.

  “An interesting man, himself,” Dr. Washington said to me.

  I blew out a long, frustrated breath. “I read in an article that his father taught him all about metalwork. He likes iron, if nothing else.”

  “He clearly appreciates history, yet he’s bluntly unsentimental. So many contradictions.”

  I could only nod in agreement.

  • • •

  I can’t do this, I can’t just sit here, Quentin conceded as another day stretched out with no sign that Arthur’s intense musings would reach a conclusion soon. He and Ursula had used up most of their reasons to avoid each other or at least to stay busy in each other’s company. He had studied Liza’s glass-blowing techniques and the Ledbetters’ pottery skills. He’d adjusted an unbalanced pottery wheel for the old couple and rewired the electrical outlet on their largest kiln. He’d sketched a suggested new window for Oswald’s small painting studio, and had stood nearby, making serious commentary as Oswald finished an erotic forest portrait, titled Peckerwood, for lurid reasons everyone pretended to ignore.

  I’m already involved, he told himself. What could it hurt to stay busy?

  The farmhouse invited him inside as if it had a voice. He imagined that voice as feminine and very southern. The house, with its plain comforts and old woods, wrapped itself around him every time he stepped through the kitchen door. He inhaled the aromas from generations of hearth fires and home-canning, baked cornbread and fried apple pies, old cotton curtains, and scrubbed linoleum. He had watched Ursula at breakfast one morning, kneading biscuit dough in a wooden bowl that had been carved by her great-grandmother, and the blood rushed through him as if her hands were on his body. He’d had to step outside and shake his head in grim amusement over his own stark arousal. A barefoot woman in baggy, cut-off overalls massaging biscuit dough had that kind of effect. Work, hard physical work, was the only answer. His demons could be sweated out.

  • • •

  Quentin walked into my living room with a tool belt over one big shoulder and a look that burned the clothes off my body. “Time to fix your pipes and make your outlets work,” he said.

  I stared at him from behind my office desk. Powell Press was now headquartered there in less-than-professional splendor. Morning glories crept inside the window screens and a small chipmunk darted in and out of the soot-stained fireplace. “I beg your pardon?”

  He held up his hands as if to say, Look, they’re empty. “I need something to occupy my time while Arthur drags this negotiation out, and you need repairs done around here.”

  I knew he had grown up working at a garage, and that he had a degree in engineering. I knew he worked with his hands as well as his mind, tearing homes and mills apart with a surgeon’s precision. But he did not build, and he did not settle in one place, and the thought that I’d be surrounded by his handiwork after he left brought a pang of sorrow. He’d be everywhere I looked in my own home, and nowhere. “I appreciate your offer, but no. Thank you, but I can’t accept.”

  He mulled that statement as his gaze went to the walls crowded with bookshelves and office equipment, the old sofa and claw-foot end tables pushed aside for boxes of my authors’ unsold books, the general shabby, shoestring appeal of my work. He walked to a bookcase filled with my father’s favorite volumes. Selecting a thick text on modern art, he flipped through the pages, frowning. “I wish I’d met your father. I’d ask him what you were like before you decided not to depend on a man. Any man.”

  “I don’t just feel that way about men,” I corrected as lightly as I could. “I include women, children, pets, and inanimate objects. You’re one to talk. Old bachelor.”

  He shut the book and tucked it back into place, then slid a toothpick from his shirt pocket and eyed me while chewing the tip. “Old maid,” he deadpanned.

  “Would you like to hear a polite southern-girl excuse? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

  Quentin nodded at the hearth. The chipmunk had sudd
enly appeared. It saw us and zipped back into a hole in the wooden baseboard. “You like running a kennel for cute rats?”

  “Look, the truth is, I can’t work in here with you making noise in the house.” I tapped the desk. “Believe it or not, this is my business, and I make, oh, a whopping hundred dollars a month at it. I’d really like to be able to declare that steady income when I apply for food stamps.”

  “Tell me about your work.” He sat down in an old wooden chair near the fireplace. He looked so good there, so right. I blinked away the image. “Welcome to the Powell Press publishing empire.” I pointed to boxes stacked in one corner. “My warehouse.” A bookcase filled with books and files, computer mailing lists, and promotional materials. “The marketing department.” A worktable covered in boxes, labels, and rolls of packing tape. “Shipping department.” I pointed to the space where he sat. “You’re on my loading dock. Watch out for forklifts.”

  “I’d like to read the two books you’ve published.”

  “Oh?” Secretly pleased, I picked up a pencil. “Then you’ve come to the right place. You’re talking to the sales rep.”

  He got up. I gave him the books, and he left with them under one arm. I settled back at my desk and put my head in my hands.

  An hour later, Liza hurried in. “Did you know that Quentin is working on your barn?”

  He nodded at me from the loft, where he and Arthur were clearing broken planks and beams. One of the baby squirrels darted out of his shirt pocket and leaped to Arthur’s shoulder. “I’m infected with squirrels,” Quentin said dryly.

  “Sounds painful.”

  “I need something to do. This won’t bother you, will it?”

  “What does a man do now?” Arthur said loudly. He held one end of a short plank; Quentin held the other.

  “We’re going to angle my end out the hole in the wall and toss it.” I watched as they maneuvered the board and dropped it with a woody rattle atop a pile outside the wall. Arthur’s new hobby, besides pondering the sculpture’s fate, was asking Quentin for instruction on this creature, a man. When Quentin wasn’t Brother Bear he was the epitome of manhood, and Arthur mimicked him desperately. I had never seen anything like it before. My brother was finding a way to slip past the invisible bonds of autism. Thanks to Quentin, who didn’t want to care.