On Bear Mountain

  As soon as I could, I stamped the truck’s accelerator pedal and zoomed onto the public road. Free. Free of the snake.

  Or only wishing.

  CHAPTER 15

  It was midafternoon. The sky over the mountains had bloomed gray with promised rain. The air weighed on me, humid and heavy. Quentin had gone into town, taking Arthur and the grudgingly respectful Oswald with him, to purchase nails and other hardware for the barn.

  The barn was debris free, now, and he’d begun, with Oswald and Arthur’s help, to replace the rafters. I said nothing, made no protest, because the work kept us away from each other. Arthur seemed to be suspended in Quentin’s aura, fascinated by the manly duties he mimicked. Arthur was still totally unable to tell us what his beloved Mama Bear had decided about her future.

  The kitchen phone rang. I answered it with one damp hand, then continued toweling a large cast-iron skillet I’d used to cook sausage at breakfast. Cooking had never been one of my habits when I lived in Atlanta. Since coming home I’d turned into a southern Martha Stewart, devoted to making Arthur’s favorite meals.

  “It’s Harriet,” a voice said sadly.

  I set the skillet down quickly. “How are you?”

  “I’m managing the fine china department at the Perimeter Rich’s store. I miss my shop.” She went on to tell me how my other former neighbors were faring and where they’d found jobs. “I just had to let you know. Demolition starts next week at Peachtree Lane.” She began to cry. “I went to see the old shops. Ursula, they’re like old people on death row. You probably don’t want to go.”

  My heart sank. I leaned my forehead against the wall beside the phone and shut my eyes. “I have to,” I said.

  * * *

  I was about to climb into Daddy’s truck for the trip to Atlanta. I’d changed into a long, sleeveless dress Liza had made for me from a bolt of rose-print cotton fabric I’d found in the attic. Mama had stored it there in a box, wrapped in waxed paper. To our amazement, only the outer layer of material was rotted and bug-eaten.

  “She’d want you to make something from this,” Liza said. “I’ve always felt her spirit in this house, and always known it was very loving and positive.”

  “I can’t sew. I only do hems and buttons.”

  “I’ll make it.”

  I looked at her with mixed affection, but finally agreed. Now I was glad to have the dress. Today I felt the need to wear talismans, mementos. I wanted to dress up in honor of the old shops’ passing.

  I heard a car coming. A bright red Corvette rounded the last turn in my dirt road and pulled into the farmyard. I frowned and tossed my purse into the truck’s driver seat. I didn’t recognize the visitor.

  He was a fat, walleyed man with a jowly face. He pried himself out of the Corvette, gave me a big grin, then brushed invisible lint from his golf shirt and slacks. He wore a lot of gold jewelry — pinkie rings, necklaces with crucifixes, thick ID bracelets. “Morning. How do?” he drawled.

  “Can I help you, sir?” He nodded, sighed, then retrieved a black leather briefcase and set it on the Corvette’s hood. He adjusted a pinkie ring then stuck out a hammy hand. “Joe Bell Walker. I’m here to see Tommy Powell.”

  “I’m his daughter, Ursula.” We shook.

  “Do tell? I’ve sure heard about you. He’s mighty proud of his chillen.”

  “Mr. Walker, I hate to tell you this, but my daddy died in January.”

  “No!” To my surprise, he leaned against the car, bowed his head, pulled a white handkerchief from his slacks, and wiped his eyes. I stood there in miserable silence, focusing my gaze on the yard oaks, wondering what kind of friend he was. He owned too much finery to be one of Daddy’s artist cronies, and had too much flash for a local.

  “Lord, lord,” he moaned. He asked me what had happened, and I explained in gentle detail. “Lord, lord, lord,” he repeated, then put his handkerchief away. He waved one gold-trimmed hand at the Bear. “You take care of Tommy’s chillen for him, you hear?” he called.

  “Mr. Walker, are you an artist?”

  “No, hon, but I do appreciate art, and I done a lot of shopping amongst your daddy’s co-opters. My wife and daughters love them perfume bottles Liza makes.” He reached for his briefcase and sighed. “But I’m here on business, today. I’m a collector for the Donahue Financial Institute.”

  I took a step back, my mouth open in silent horror. The so-called Donahue Financial Institute was infamous throughout the mountains. Old Man Donahue and his sons were rumored to have run gaming halls for the Dixie mob until the 1970s. In the last two decades their clan had established a reputation as notorious loan sharks. This tearful fan of my father’s was a kneebreaker. “Did my father take out a loan?”

  “Yes, miss, he sure did. About two years ago he borrowed ten thousand dollars, not counting interest. Said he was cleaning this place up after that unfortunate business with the drug bust. Said he had some tenants who couldn’t quite foot the rent — these folks he’s got here now — they’re good and decent and he was determined they’d stay, but they couldn’t come up with full pay and he didn’t want ’em to know he needed the money. So he got himself a loan.”

  “How much does he still owe, with interest?”

  “Five thousand, hon. I been lettin’ it slide since winter. He hasn’t been able to make no payments — he told me things were down in the art business. His folks couldn’t give him a dadblame cent of rent. But they sure pitched in when he needed ’em. Miss Liza handed over some jewelry and the Ledbetters sent a whole set of nice crockery to Mr. Donahue’s wife, and Oswald threw in his spare motorcycle, but it just ain’t enough, hon. I mean, there’s rules, and your daddy knew that when he signed for the money.”

  I fought a rising tide of nausea and fear. “What did my father use for collateral?”

  “Three acres of land. Surveyed off the front of your farm, here.”

  Daddy had been desperate, if he’d risked Powell land. In the 150 years of our turbulent history, we had never, ever, lost even an inch of the original homestead.

  “I’ve got some papers here, hon. If you go ahead and sign then I’ll get the deed worked out.”

  I forced myself to think. My head spun. “I can have your five thousand in cash by tomorrow.”

  “Well!” He gazed at me in pleased surprise. “You sure?”

  “Absolutely. I’ll bring it to you in the morning, before noon.”

  “Whew.” He slammed the briefcase, handed me a business card, and wiped his forehead. “That’s a load off my mind.” He pulled out a stylus and a handheld computer, and made a note. Even good-old-boy kneebreakers had gone high-tech.

  “I sure am sorry to bring you this news,” he finished. Joe Bell Walker looked stricken. “And I hope you get the money to me. Cash, now, you hear?”

  “I hear.”

  He put a hand over his heart, and told me goodbye. As he drove away my knees gave out as if he’d cracked them. I leaned against the truck. Daddy had needed money; he’d tried his best to improve the old homeplace and protect his favorite tenants. He’d wanted me to be proud of him. This was right after I’d scalded him with my shame and anger.

  Three hours later I sat at a desk among the gleaming shelves and display cases of Atlanta’s most reputable silver dealer. She was a discreet older woman dressed in a tailored outfit of blue wool, with a fine strand of pearls at her throat. I’d heard that she went into the silver business after her husband died, because she’d had to sell her own family silver to make ends meet. We’d become friendly over the years, as I scrimped and saved to put together my proud heirloom collection, the first silver set any Powell female had owned, the set I would give to my eldest daughter some day, and she to hers. Now that collection sat in cardboard boxes around my feet.

  “Dear, I hate to see you do this,” the dealer said in a dulcet Old South voice.

  “You know how it is, sometimes.”

  She nodded. When she handed me a check she rested a blue-vein
ed hand on mine. “I’ll hold your silver for a month, and you can have it back for what I paid you.”

  I thanked her but walked out knowing that the silver was gone forever. Rain had begun to pour down. The day was ending, growing darker. I should go home, give myself a break, get drunk.

  I drove to Peachtree Lane.

  • • •

  I’d have given her the money, if I’d known. If she’d asked. But she’d never ask. Quentin drove into Atlanta, looking for Ursula. Liza had confided to him about Joe Bell Walker; she’d caught Ursula in the farmhouse living room, packing her silver, and she’d had to explain.

  Goddamn blood-sucking loan shark, just like the bastards I grew up with, he thought. He maneuvered his vehicle into a narrow lane of traffic on the crowded interstate. But all she had to do was tell me. I’d have given her whatever she needed. We could have called it a small advance on the Bear.

  He frowned, thinking about her attitude, then cursed under his breath.

  She doesn’t want to owe you. Not for money, not for herself. She has you figured out. Cash and carry. Keep it impersonal. So she did. You want your life to operate this way? You got it.

  Quentin guided the Explorer up an exit ramp and onto a city street. Slow gray rain slid down the windshield. He started the wipers and rolled his window up tight. The scents and colors of a rainy day had always made him feel the world was empty and he had to move through it alone. He drove faster.

  Maybe I don’t want it this way, anymore.

  • • •

  Rainy southern evenings in the summertime were a dangerous sauna, melting even the strictest inhibitions with wet heat. The sensual steam made people kill or seduce, scream under full moons, or channel their wildness into tent revivals where sweat, sex, and salvation smelled the same. Heat fogged the truck windows. The windshield wipers said Fool, shush, Fool, shush, Fool.

  The day had melted into wet shadows when I parked in one of the spaces that nosed up to the broad sidewalk at Peachtree Lane. Around me, the residential streets were quiet and empty, the weeknight house lights glowing in the lonely mist. Not many blocks over, in the house I had helped him renovate, Gregory and his new me were probably scrubbing a sink or spritzing disinfectant on his squeaky clean floor.

  The lot beside the shops had already become a jagged landscape of plowed-up concrete. The pecan and peach trees were gone; a hole existed where the peach had stood, and the pecans were just low stumps in the sidewalk. Unsheltered by greenery, the shabby line of old brick shops looked vulnerable and naked. Their tall Palladian windows had been removed and the openings boarded over. Worst of all, ten towering feet of hard chain-link security fence enclosed the whole block. I clutched the unexpected fence and pressed my face against it, staring at my shop like a parent separated from an injured child. I wanted to squeeze myself through the wire the way soft butter passes through a sieve.

  I returned to the truck. I drove around back where the Dumpsters used to sit, eased the truck into low gear, inched the front wheels over the curb, and nuzzled the fence with Daddy’s pink-painted bumper. The fence swayed. Clearly, its steel posts had not been set deeply, so there was no real concern for trespassers. A sign from God.

  I pressed down slowly on the truck’s frayed accelerator pedal. A section of fence buckled with satisfying surrender, giving the truck’s grille a coy slap before it flattened under my wheels. I got out, took a small ice cooler from the truck’s cab, then climbed the steps to the stoop outside my shop’s back door. Only then did I see that a large clasp and padlock had been added by the demolition contractor.

  I pounded the door with a fist, then went to the back windows and tried to pull the boards off — even considered, for one wild second, ramming the shop’s back wall with the truck. The slow, warm rain trickled down my face, the darkness grew around me.

  I heard a thick engine prowling the narrow street that bordered the parking lot. The sidewalk oaks and a row of tall lilac shrubs hid me and the truck from casual view, but then came the unmistakable sounds of the vehicle circling the block and turning back, moving slower as it approached the back lot. A high-powered police cruiser, probably. The law, as old mountain folks said. Someone had spotted the downed fence, and me, and had called the law.

  I wiped my face and climbed back onto the stoop to meet my fate as a vandal and trespasser, clenching both defiant hands around the ornamental iron railing I had lovingly shellacked each year with black, rustproof paint. A love for iron was in my blood, though I never thought of it that way. I just held on to the least giving structure I could find. If the law had come to carry me away, I’d have to be pried off.

  Quentin drove up. I gazed at him with honest relief.

  “Raising hell like a good Rebel?” he called in his deep voice, the voice of Brooklyn boxers and old movie gangsters, enough to make a nearby magnolia tree drop the last genteel white petal of its summer blooms like a startled handkerchief.

  I nodded. “And kicking a little symbolic corporate behind.”

  He made his way across the street jungle of flattened fence and uprooted steel posts. A yellow street lamp clicked on, and the seeping evening mist settled on his dark hair like tiny jewels. His very presence was large and reassuring. All I could think was, I’m glad he’s here.

  “You’re always hanging around buildings that are about to fall down,” he said.

  “So are you.” He climbed onto the narrow stoop, then halted beside me. “Liza told me where you were headed. And about the silver.”

  “She thinks I need a shoulder to cry on. She’s wrong.”

  “I didn’t come here to offer any body parts.” He lifted a hand, and when I didn’t indicate I’d disagree he touched just the back of a knuckle to one of my cheeks, tracing the bone, where he caught a drop of rain that might have been a tear. Then he turned and studied the padlocked door instead of me, while I gazed blatantly at him. “You want to go inside?”

  “Yes. I just want to see my old shop one more time.”

  “Give me a second.” He went back to his truck, then returned with a powerful flashlight and a pair of slender gadgets he cupped in one hand. I held the light while he slid them into the keyhole of the padlock, and I heard it click. He pulled the lock off, flipped the latch back, I pushed the door, and it swung open. The engrained scent of old wood, paper, leather, knowledge, the essence of books rushed out on dark air. I inhaled deeply. “Thank you.”

  “Thank a guy named Lockhead. He taught me to do this when I was twelve years old. Want me to wait out here?”

  “No. Come in. This store has wonderful ghosts.”

  He gave the cooler at my feet a curious glance, then picked it up. Carrying it, he followed me into the cozy labyrinth of small rooms still fitted with bookcases. Even bare, they had a certain warmth and personality. The creaking wooden floor echoed with our footsteps. I caressed the shelves and the faded rose wallpaper. He turned the light from the wall to my gently rose-flowered dress. “Bookstore camouflage,” he said. “Pretty smart for hunting books in the wild.”

  I choked on a laugh. He set the flashlight atop the old oak counter that remembered sixty years of sales, readings, authors, readers, and joy. “F. Scott Fitzgerald leaned on this counter when he visited the original owner in 1945,” I said. “I have her picture with him. And last year, F. Scott Shey leaned here when he visited me. He won the Nobel Prize for physics. I have a picture of me with him. There’s such a spectrum. Such continuity.”

  Quentin nodded. “Okay, so that covers the F. Scotts. Tell me about everybody in between. Get it out of your system.”

  “That could take a while.”

  “I’m in no hurry.” He leaned against the counter, webbed in shadows, sharing my sorrows quietly. The rain soothed me, and I was glad it was just us, him and me, sheltered in this old haven on its last few days of existence.

  “I had a little ceremony planned,” I told him. I knelt by the cooler on the floor, then looked up at him with an idea. “In the
back room I left an old wooden bench. Its cushions are torn and it wasn’t worth saving. Will you pull it in here? It’s heavy — and about six feet long.”

  “Your wish is my command.”

  If only, I thought, as he left the room.

  We sat on the bench, sharing a bottle of champagne and a delicate, long-stemmed glass Liza had made. Flickering light bathed us from two tall, wide candles I’d placed on the bookstore counter. Quentin took his turn sipping the chilled champagne from the glass as I opened a book of poetry I’d brought. A few long swallows of the liquid had already driven away my artificial dignity. My stomach was warm, my muscles relaxed. I was ready to speak to the bookstore.

  “I really couldn’t decide what to offer in honor of your spirit,” I said aloud, gazing around the room. “So I looked for something in the classics, to sum it up for me. I took this from Ben Jonson.” I bent my head over the book. “A lily of a day is fairer far in May. Although it fall and die that night, it was the plant and flower of Light. In small proportions we just beauties see; And in short measures life may perfect be.”

  I lifted my head, took the champagne glass Quentin held out, and raised it to the deeply shadowed room. The shop was so quiet, not even the hum of a light fixture breaking its silence, just the sound of rain on the roof. There could have been no world outside the boarded-over windows. Oddly enough, that felt fine. Even Quentin looked content. I nodded to the old store. “You made a lot of people’s lives perfect inside these walls. Including mine. Thank you.”

  My voice wavered on the last words. I sipped from the glass quickly, then turned and set up on the counter behind us, next to the bottle. “No more for me.”

  “May I see your book of poetry?”