I handed it to him. “It’s a collection,” I said. “A little bit of everything.”
“How about something from Macbeth?” He browsed through a section of Shakespeare with skilled reference, then read in a low, melodic baritone, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
I groaned lightly. “Oh, how perfectly you. How morbid.”
He arched a dark brow. “All poetry is morbid.”
“It is not.” I slid closer to him and flicked the pages in the heavy, hardcover volume as he held it. “There. Ogden Nash. Very sweet.” I read, “The turtle lives ’twixt plated decks, which practically conceal its sex. I think it clever of the turtle, in such a fix to be so fertile.”
“Hmmm. All right, a compromise. Something Masefield wrote.” With a glint of humor in his eyes, he thumbed through the book. “Let me have wisdom, beauty, wisdom and passion, bread to the soul, rain where the summers parch. Give me but these, and though the darkness close, even the night will blossom as the rose.”
“Roses,” I teased. “You only thought of that because of the rose wallpaper.”
“No, because of you and your dress.” He nodded at the faded roses softly aligning themselves down my body. “You’re beautiful.”
We grew quiet, trading a look that made me feel unwound, settled, open. He looked down at the book again. “Let’s go back to Shakespeare.” He emanated a visceral heat I couldn’t resist. I bent my head next to his, then shut my eyes for a second, enjoying the scent of his clothes, his hair, his skin. His shoulder brushed mine and I didn’t move away.
He cleared his throat. “He jest at scars, that never felt a wound. But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.” His voice caressing me, he continued through the entire famous soliloquy. No man had ever read to me before. At least, not since Daddy had read to me, as a child. I watched him, enthralled, feeling renewed and alive for the first time in months, no, years. Years had gone by since it had been that easy to simply feel.
Quentin was vividly aware of my breath on his cheek, the scent of me, the need in my eyes, the easy intimacy that had melted us together over spoken words and silent desires. He had grown hard beneath the book, reckless, starving. When he finished he raised his eyes to mine, intense and searching, dark in the candlelight. “Don’t look at me that way. Get up and walk out of here right now.”
I shook my head. “I can’t walk out on the way you make me feel. I just want more.” And then, on my low sigh or his — I don’t know — I kissed him. I was trembling when we eased apart. I looked into his face and saw my own emotions mirrored there — the danger, the impulse, the lust. And perhaps the love. Whether it was my wish or his reality, I had no idea.
“I’m giving you one more chance to leave,” he said.
I kissed him again, and this time he took charge. He touched my face, slid his hands into my hair, drew my tongue into his mouth and tasted me with his own. Suddenly we were both frantic and rough, tangled together, consuming each other.
We shoved the bench cushions onto the shop’s scarred wooden floor and used them as pillows. Delirious, rough, quick, silent, we worked in unison. Stripping our clothes away, moist skin open to touch in the hot, sexual air, his hand on my breasts, then his mouth. I stroked him as he stretched out atop me. And finally, as I looked into his face, he kissed me very gently, a lull in the storm, and I urged him inside my body.
We merged and flowed as easily as the rain on rich earth.
• • •
The stars were out when we arrived back at Bear Creek. I’d had a long drive home, alone in my own truck, to clear my mind and fill it with a misery so deep I could barely focus on the road. You’ll spend the rest of your life wanting him again.
He was thinking the same agonized thoughts about me, but I didn’t know it. We crossed the dark, misty yard without touching. I lit a kerosene lamp on the rail of the porch and sank gingerly onto the creaking porch swing. Quentin sat down on the porch steps, a dozen feet from me. Hammer bounded out of the darkness, his tail wagging. He looked subdued when neither Quentin nor I offered much petting.
“We need to talk,” Quentin said.
“I know.”
“I’m eight years older than you.”
“Only eight years? You’ll have to think of a better argument than that.”
“Old habits die hard.”
I kicked off my sandals and pushed the porch floor with my toes, rocking slowly, the rhythm so sensual that after a second I stopped. “I have old habits, too. I’ve always gone my own way. I’ve tried so hard to stay clear of serious relationships.”
“What was your doctor like? The researcher. Liza told me a little about him.”
“Gregory? Very clean. Very dependable.”
“But he cheated on you.”
“I think I knew he would, some day. I knew I’d never marry him.”
“You must have loved him in some way. He did something for you that made you stay.”
“If you mean sex, you’re wrong. Not that it wasn’t pleasant, but it’s always been a resistible urge, to me.” I paused. “Until lately. I’ve never thrown myself at a man before.”
“I thought I seduced you,” he said with weary humor. “When I told you to stop? I was lying.”
Those gallant words warmed me to the bone. “You have an ability to pinpoint connections and relationships. Structure, I mean. Spaces and joints and systems. You’ve got a feel for it. It’s a creative instinct. You saw what I wanted and you gave it to me.”
“That’s not being creative. That’s being a man.”
“I think you’re an artist, at heart.”
“No.”
I squeezed the next words out with painful effort. “You have a woman in New York? You must. More than one, I expect.”
He told me about Carla Esposito, bluntly, honestly, and without saying they had no future. “We’ve been friends since we were kids,” he concluded. “She comes and goes.”
Friends who have been sleeping together most of their lives, I mused in dreary silence. “This isn’t just a friend. This is a woman you love.” I spoke without accusation, just stating what was obvious, to me.
“No.”
“What do you call love, then?”
“Someone I can’t live without.”
There was a long pause between us, with no indication that his someone might someday be me. I stared hard into the darkness beyond the low pool of lantern light. “That’s how I define love, too. Probably why I’ve always run from it, and I may never stop running. My parents loved each other that much.”
“So did mine.”
“Too painful.”
“Yes.”
I took a deep breath. “My life is here. This place. I’m a Powell. This land owns me. And Arthur. Arthur can never live anywhere else.”
“You need someone who loves this farm as much as you do.” Quentin pulled the stub of a cigar from his shirt pocket, then jabbed it in the dirt of my potted peach tree seedling. He seemed to be telling me he’d been raised with pavement beneath his feet and didn’t appreciate the sanctity of dirt. I watched the light on his dark hair, his tired profile, his hardening eyes. I watched him in silver silence, hurting inside.
He was no better off, though I didn’t guess it.
Hammer raised his head and barked softly. Quentin and I looked at the forest path beyond the forsythias in the side yard. At first the only sound I heard was the low singsong of frogs from the creek bottoms, but then came the distinct rustle of feet on twigs.
I stood and went to the edge of the porch. “Arthur?”
He slipped out of the darkness into a patch of moonlight. He held something in his hands. “Brother Bear?” he called.
“I’m here, Arthur,” Quentin said.
“Sister Bear?”
“Right
here,” I said.
“I know what Mama Bear needs. I’ve finally figured it out.”
I caught my breath. “What is it, sweetie?”
He emerged farther into the moonlight, silver shimmying on his brown hair, his face as pale as cream. He stepped forward again then stopped, swaying as if he’d come to a revival. The bulky object in his arms weighed him down. “She’s got nobody like her. Her own kind. That’s what you think too, isn’t it, Brother Bear? You gave Ursula a kiss the other day to chase away the Tween because she’s lonely, too. Like the Bear.”
Quentin stood. “I kissed your sister just because I like her.”
“Mama Bear needs a kissing friend. She’s so lonely — if she doesn’t feel better she’ll . . . she’ll die!” Arthur caught a tearful sound in his throat as he held out the mysterious object to us. “It’s so bad to be alone. She’ll die if she’s not happy! Just like Daddy died! But you can help her!”
“Easy, easy, Arthur,” I crooned, moving down the steps. He backed away and I halted.
“Tell me what you want me to do, pal,” Quentin urged gently.
“She needs a friend! If that doesn’t make her feel better, then she can go live with you.”
“You mean that? You’ll let me have her?”
“Yes. If she’s not happy even after she gets a friend. We have to see, first. All right?”
“All right, Arthur. Whatever it takes. We’ll find out.” Quentin and I traded puzzled frowns.
“I brought you the first piece of her friend!” Arthur said. “I found it in the barn where we’ve been working. Daddy put it up high, but it fell back to earth. Because he wants us to use it!” Arthur knelt and laid the item at Quentin’s feet, then bounded up and began backing away. “A bone!” he exclaimed. “I’ll look for more parts tomorrow!” He turned and trotted into the night.
Both Quentin and I stood there for a moment, trying to sort through the perplexities of my brother’s request. “Let’s see what he brought,” Quentin said. I went inside and turned on the porch lights. When I came back Quentin had dropped to his heels beside two long rectangles of ornamental ironwork with pronged feet, bound together with baling wire for easy storage. “These look like the base for an old sewing machine table,” he said.
“They are. The sewing machine is long gone. It was my grandmother’s, and then my mother used it. Daddy hung the pieces of the base up in the barn loft. He meant to make a tabletop for them. He never got around to it.”
“What does Arthur think I’m going to do with them?” He propped the heavy pieces against his bent knees and scrubbed rust from their tops. “What does he want?”
Suddenly I understood. I sat down on the rain-soaked ground, just sat down, and lifted the two heavy iron pieces onto my lap. I looked up at Quentin bitterly — defeated, angry, lost. What my brother wanted was impossible, just as wanting Quentin was impossible. We’d all end up losing our hearts, our voices, our hope. “He wants you to build another Iron Bear,” I said.
CHAPTER 16
After a sleepless night, the hot morning sun burned Quentin’s eyes. It beamed through a fat pine tree, illuminating Tiberville’s small, whitewashed Catholic chapel. Clay pots, bursting with gaudy petunias, lined the chapel’s front walk. A short, graying priest, dressed in a collar, a black shirt, and jeans, was sweeping that walkway. His chubby beagle stopped snuffling in the chapel’s neatly mowed lawn long enough to bay at Quentin as if he were a fox.
“Morning, Quentin,” the priest drawled. “I’ve heard a lot about you. I know who you are.”
This kind of reaction no longer surprised Quentin. “Father, I’d like you to hear my confession. But I have to warn you, I haven’t been to church in years. I’m rusty.”
“Oh? Well, no time like the present to oil your conscience. Come on inside. I’m Roy. Father Roy.” They shook hands.
Quentin reassessed his decision as they walked up the path of old-fashioned flowers. He couldn’t imagine elegant and cosmopolitan Father Aleksandr growing petunias, wearing jeans, or owning a beagle. Or being named Roy. It just seemed too comfortable. Yet a priest was a priest, and this morning, when he felt twisted inside, he sought comfort in the traditions of his boyhood. “Where are you from, Father?”
“Mississippi. I grew up two miles from Elvis’s birthplace. Around here, that’s the same as rubbing shoulders with a saint.”
“Maybe Saint Elvis is my best bet.”
Father Roy laughed.
• • •
I went to the bank, then drove the sleepy, forest-shaded back roads to the next town. I waited in the lobby of a small brick office building, staring blindly at Jerry Springer on a corner television, along with two other bedraggled clients of the Donahue Financial Institute. “You ought to beat the e-ternal tar out of her puny little ass,” one said to the combatants on the screen.
Life was dominated by petty nonsense, disappointments, and humiliations, broken only by rare moments of transcendent victory and joy. Last night, in Quentin’s arms, had been one of those special moments. Reality had returned, now.
Had the world been akilter all these years without a second Iron Bear to measure our lives against silent fates? Arthur thought so, and now nothing would do except to build one — and it couldn’t be done. I’d spent a large chunk of the moonlit summer night in a rocker on Dr. Washington’s weathered, honeysuckle draped front porch, watching my brother sleep, smiling and dreamless, in the hammock.
When he woke once I whispered, “Arthur, are you sure you need a second Bear?” and he murmured, “You can’t make babies without two,” before dozing off again, snuggled in a cool muslin sheet and the profound serenity of his decision. Like a tribal shaman he planned fertility and harvest, symbolic riches to sustain us and our land.
When Joe Bell Walker arrived with a box of glazed donuts in one gold-pinkied hand, I followed him into his office and laid a bulging envelope on his desk. “Five thousand, in cash. Twenties. Sorry. The bank teller was sadistic.”
“I’m kinda sad myself over the way you’ve treated me.” He shook his head and arched his eyebrows. “You pulling my leg? I been paid already.”
“When? How?”
“Got a call from a feller early this morning. Friend of yours. Quentin Riconni? Met me at the donut shop, handed me the money. We had a little talk.” He scowled.
I stared at him. My mind was bleary, I’d barely slept, my body was tender, I felt numb. Quentin was paying me off. Telling me our bonds could be converted into simple cash. “Good enough,” I said, and picked up my packet. I had to get out of there, to be alone with the misery crawling through me.
Joe Bell cleared his throat. “I just want to say something, here. You send a man like that to see ol’ Joe Bell Walker, then you’re sending a message. You’re a tough lady. I sure underestimated you. But I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday, myself. So just lemme be clear on this. No hard feelings, okay? I don’t want any trouble from his kind.”
“His kind?”
“You know what I mean. Italian. New York. Us boys down here, we got our territory. Those fellers up there, they got theirs. Never the twain shall meet. Let’s keep it that way. If you’re under that kind of protection, we’re sure gonna respect it from now on. Okey dokey?”
He thought Quentin was in the Mafia. I wanted to laugh, or cry. I ought to tell Joe Bell the truth, but I just nodded my acceptance and walked out, carrying my money. I’d earned that five thousand dollars on the floor of an empty bookstore.
• • •
Quentin and I walked out in the pasture and stood before the Bear. “When are you leaving?” I asked. I was stone cold about it.
His shuttered expression weighed me down for a moment. I dared him to tell me he wasn’t planning to get as far away from me as quickly as possible. Men tended to give gifts when they felt guilty. “Today.”
There. Done. Not so hard. You cut it sharp, clean. Keep breathing.
I nodded my approval. “Please don?
??t call, don’t write, and don’t come back with a new offer. Arthur will recover sooner that way. I’ll think up some fairy tale to explain why you can’t do what he asked.”
“Stop it.” Quentin took me by the shoulders. “You know why I can’t build a second sculpture — I’m not a goddamned artist. I never told you I was.”
“I understand. I realized from the look on your face last night that you have no intention of doing what he asked.”
“Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. I’m not my father.”
He’d spent most of his life trying to prove that, and this was the ultimate test. “I understand,” I repeated.
“Stop agreeing with me.”
“I just want to put an end to this fantasy before it’s completely out of control.”
“I still intend to buy the Iron Bear. I’ll find someone — a trained metal sculptor — who can copy it for Arthur. I’ll have that imitation built. And I’ll bring it back here. He’ll like it. He’ll trade with me. You’ll see. I’ll do whatever it takes to get the original sculpture. You have my word I’ll make this deal work.” He released me and stepped back.
I shook my head. “My brother doesn’t want a copy of the original. And he doesn’t want some stranger to build it. He wants a second, unique Bear. In his mind, you’re the only one who can build it. And it has to be made just like the first — from things we gather in this community. Our memories. Our talismans. Our junk. Our castoffs. The pieces of us we want to throw away. Whatever you want to call them. But only you can make what he asked for. I know you can’t do it — or won’t. That’s why you have to get out of our lives right now, before he gets hurt worse.”
He looked down at me with such brutal frustration that he seemed to be in pain. I clenched my hands behind me to resist touching him, clinging to him. “We’ll try it my way first,” he said between clenched teath.
My heart sank, and then I was angry. I walked a few feet away before I faced him again. “Demolition and salvage, that’s your style. No permanent home, no permanent relationships. You’ve never built anything in your life, have you? You just tear things down.”