Emory’s Gift (11 page)

Well, okay, that last one didn’t slide so easily into place: I wasn’t able to conjure up a conversation in my head where my father said,
Of course you can keep a full-grown grizzly, Charlie
.

I’d have to think of something.

Rather than climb back up to the rocky ridge and on to my house, the bear and I walked past the Old Cabin, heading toward the river. The cabin was up on a bluff, and below it was a steep bank of heavy sand that ran all the way down to the rushing waters. One of my favorite things to do was leap from the bluff, the soft soil absorbing the impact.

“Ready?” I said. I launched myself into the air with a hoot, showing off for the bear, who stood up on two legs to watch me slide and tumble down the embankment.

Then the bear followed suit. I laughed in disbelief as the bear sprang into space, landing on all fours and then rolling down the hill in an explosion of flying sand. He came to rest at the bottom of the hill, lying on his back as if he, too, were laughing.

The bear took a deep drink at the river. There was, I reflected, time enough for me to grab my rod and see if I could coax a few fish from the water. The bear kept wading deeper into the stream until he was up to his neck, his big head serene in the clear, rapid river. Or maybe we’d just stay here and swim.

I grinned at the thought of Kay coming upon us just then.
I’m just watching my friend swim, in case he needs junior lifesaving,
I’d tell her. She’d be amazed. She’d sit with me and hold my hand while the bear frolicked. It would be our secret, something Kay and I would never tell another soul.

The easiest way back home was to follow the river upstream until the creek joined it, then walk along the creek’s banks to the trail up to our house.

The bear came out of the water and we strolled side by side as if there were nothing more natural than the two of us together. He got interested in overturning some rocks to take a look at what was underneath: grubs and worms, it turned out, which I thought was pretty disgusting, but the bear slurped them up as if they were made of chocolate.

The riverbank here was a wide stretch of light, sandy soil, striated from when the waters rose high but otherwise as pristine as a chalkboard on the first day of school. The soil was not as firm as sandstone but was packed solidly enough that when I took a stick and swiped at it I could draw a permanent mark. I made a big letter
C.

“My name is Charlie,” I told the bear. I stuck my tongue out a little as I drew my name in the dirt. When I stepped back, it was pretty easy to read:
Charlie.

“That’s how you spell it,” I told him. “See? Charlie.”

The bear looked at the marks I’d made as if trying to read them. He lumbered up to the bank, taking a closer look. Then he moved off down the bank a ways, where I hadn’t yet written anything.

I cocked my head, regarding my artwork. Should I write
loves Kay
after my name? Or turn it around:
Kay loves Charlie.
Maybe Sergeant Lunkhead would come across it, think he’d lost her, and abandon Selkirk River forever. Or maybe he’d get in a big fight with Kay, acting all jealous, and then I’d show up to save her. I’d have the bear with me, which would sort of stack the odds in my favor, even if Lunkhead had military training.

I looked down at my feet and saw a small painted turtle crawling glumly among the rocks. I almost shouted,
turtle!
at the bear but then bit my lip. The bear would probably just eat the thing, and I didn’t want to have that on my conscience.

I glanced up, but the bear wasn’t paying attention to me. He was digging at the soft soil of the bank with a single paw, a small trickle of dirt pyramiding at his feet. I frowned. What was he doing?

With a huff, the bear backed away from the bank, and now I could clearly see that he’d made his own marks in the smooth soil.

He’d written his own word, plain as day, easy to read.

EMORY.

“Oh boy,” I said.

chapter

TWELVE

THE first psychiatrist I was sent to, the one I never liked, spent very little time getting to know me before he asked, “At what time did you become convinced the bear was trying to communicate with you?”

That one didn’t take much thought. “When he wrote his name in the sand,” I said simply.

The psychiatrist gave me a long, frozen, unamused look before speaking. “And then you took the bear to your house.”

“To the pole barn, yes. Not inside the house or anything.”

“And what were you thinking at that moment?”

That
question again. Why did everyone expect me to be doing so much thinking all the time? How much thinking did
they
do at thirteen?

To this day, I can’t really explain what I felt as I looked at the word “Emory” carved in the riverbank, nor why my only reaction was to say, “Hi, Emory.” You don’t shake hands with an animal with four-inch claws, so we sort of looked at each other for a minute, and then I said, “I’ve got some more food in the freezer.”

Probably I just thought it was cool that someone had trained him to write his name. I’d heard of a horse who could do simple arithmetic, so why not this? I say “probably” because I can’t look back at my first thoughts without filtering them through all of the events that transpired later. Asking me to isolate one single memory at the start of it all is just asking too much.

“What would
you
think?” I challenged the psychiatrist the second or third time he asked me about that day. He didn’t respond, of course, because he didn’t believe any of it happened.

That day in the woods it seemed as if the birds and all other creatures went quiet at the sight of a thirteen-year-old boy walking alongside a grizzly bear. The breeze died down, even, as if stilled in awe. I couldn’t keep the grin off my face at the sheer mass of him moving next to me. Emory the bear.

I raised the big roll-up door to the pole barn and Emory watched it go up as if trying to figure out how it worked. “See, we have this big sink in here for water,” I said, showing the place off like a Realtor. In the back was a big couch, too big for the living room, still wrapped in plastic from the move. I attacked the plastic, pulling it off as eagerly as a child going after a Christmas present. “And if you ever got sleepy you could take a nap right here. And there’s food in the freezer.”

Emory watched all of this with his inscrutable expression. I wondered if this meant he didn’t understand I was hoping he’d live in our barn.

Because the air was so still I easily heard an unfamiliar car turn off onto Hidden Creek Road and start the climb toward our house.

“Hey! Uh, I have to close the front door, okay?” Anyone driving past our house would be able to see right in the barn, where it would be pretty hard to miss a six-hundred-pound animal. I ran to the garagelike door and pulled it shut with a crash.

The sunlight seeped in from the various gaps along the top edges of the walls like stars all lined up in single file, and there was a big square splash of light from the window in the top half of the exit door on the side of the pole barn, but even still, Emory’s dark shape seemed to disappear in the shadows for a minute. I listened for the car, thinking I’d feel a little better when it passed and I could open the door again.

But the car didn’t pass. It pulled in our driveway, making a squeak as it stopped. I heard the driver’s door open and light footsteps hurrying to our front door.

Yvonne? Probably. I wondered if she would come to the pole barn when no one answered the front door.
That
would be bad. I walked over to the side door and put my hand on the knob. “It’s my dad’s … it’s a friend of my dad’s,” I said to Emory. “I’d better go out there and see what she wants.”

“Char
lie
!” a woman called. It did not sound like Yvonne.

I opened the door, stepped outside, and firmly shut it behind me.

I’ve often wondered what would have happened, how things would have been different, if I hadn’t shut that door.

A woman I had never seen before was standing on our front deck. She was maybe my dad’s age, with black hair pulled back from her face and wrapped in a knot behind her head. She was peering through the window into our house, knocking on the door. She looked a little frantic.

“Charlie, are you in there?” she shouted again.

I wondered what kind of trouble I’d gotten into now. I approached the woman and she caught sight of me out of the corner of her eye. She jumped a little, putting a hand to her chest.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. She took a breath. “Are you Charlie?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m Margaret Shelburton. Rod Shelburton’s wife? Your dad’s partner in bison?”

“Oh. Right.”

“Charlie, there’s…” She pursed her lips together, as if she didn’t want to say what she’d come to say. She came off the front porch and down to the driveway, leaning over a little to look in my eyes. “Your father was in an accident.”

“What?”

“Something happened at the ranch and he fell off the fence. He had to go to the hospital. I came to get you.”

All I could do was stare in dumb wonder. It simply wasn’t possible that my father was hurt; he
couldn’t
be hurt. He was the only thing I had to hold on to in life.

“Why don’t we go inside and get some things. You can stay with us for a few days. Okay?”

I shook my head. “No, I’m okay here.”

“Charlie.” Her eyes were soft and caring—mother’s eyes, the kind that can look right into a child and see what he needs. “It will be okay. Your father’s going to be fine.”

That’s what they said about my mom at first. She was going to be “fine.” “Is he in a coma?” I asked tremulously.

“Oh no, nothing like that. He might have to stay in the hospital for a few days, though, and if you come home with us we can take you to see him. Okay? Let’s go pack.”

I certainly couldn’t tell her I had a quarter ton of live grizzly in our pole barn, so I wound up passively following her into my house and leading her to my bedroom. I was numb with denial. None of this could be happening. At her request I pulled out a suitcase and opened drawers, not objecting when she picked out clothing for me, not complaining when she touched my underwear. She told me to grab my toothbrush and as I did so I looked in the mirror and my face was blank.

I hesitated getting in the car, looking back over my shoulder at the doors to the pole barn, firmly shut. But what could I say or do? I would have to figure out a way to get back up to the house later.

When she caught me examining her in the car she gave me a reassuring smile. I was, oddly enough, thinking what a perfect match she made for Mr. Shelburton. She wore more makeup than the ladies around Selkirk River, but she dressed like a rancher’s wife, with a thick plaid shirt and cowboy boots. She didn’t have a Chicago gangster accent like her husband, yet there was something decidedly citified about her manner, a real sense that she was a transplant from a different world. It showed up in her manicured nails and the way the rings on her fingers flashed as she steered the car a bit too fast down the paved road into town.

The hospital hit me with a wave of dread so powerful it was almost nauseating. I hadn’t considered what it would be like to turn up the driveway and into the visitors’ parking lot, didn’t give it any thought at all until I was there. This was where Mom died, curled up and shrunken down to the size of a small child.

I don’t think I made a sound, but somehow Mrs. Shelburton knew what I was feeling. When we got out of the car she pulled me to her and hugged me. The tenderness in her embrace made my throat ache; I had to concentrate really hard on not letting any tears flow.

“I’m so sorry. I know how hard this will be for you. But this time is different. Your father is going to be okay, Charlie.”

We went inside. Same carpet, same smells, same background noises. A muddle of TV sounds was occasionally punctuated by what seemed to my ears to be someone calling for help or mercy. Sharp antiseptic chemicals mixed their odors with sour, unhealthy air.

I loathed everything about the place. Everyone always acting so busy, industriously walking back and forth, none of it helping. Each patient room was a study in self-absorption, all attention focused on their insulated personal tragedies, none of them aware that Laura Hall lay dying of C.M.L. I deliberately picked a chair as far away from where I usually sat as I possibly could, though they were all beige chairs, uniformly stiff and uncomfortable. Mrs. Shelburton sat next to me and held my hand.

Mr. Shelburton hurried in a few minutes later, and his wife and I both stood up. He was taking the cowboy thing pretty seriously, with dusty jeans, cowboy boots, a denim jacket, and even some kind of handkerchief tied around his neck, like the Boy Scouts.

“Beth and Craig are with Mrs. Landers.” Mr. Shelburton looked pale and all the folksiness had gone out of his voice. I gathered that Beth and Craig were their children. He patted his pocket absently for cigarettes, then gave his wife an
oh yeah, I quit smoking
look.

“What happened?” I asked him.

“Your dad was up on a fence and a buffalo decided to ram it for no reason. I’m getting so I hate those things,” Mr. Shelburton told me. “He tumbled off and hit his head pretty bad.” Mrs. Shelburton gave him a stern look. “Oh, but he’s okay!” he said hurriedly.

As it turned out, my dad had dislocated his shoulder and had a skull fracture. Neither would prove life threatening, but he’d been knocked unconscious and the doctors wanted him to hang around so they could make sure he was okay.

He looked so weak in that hospital bed, a snakelike tube clinging to his nose so that he’d get extra oxygen, that I almost fell down. The strength just left my knees and I got really wobbly, but Mr. Shelburton grabbed my arm and propped me up.

My dad said his head hurt and that he felt really woozy. Then we stood around, not sure what to say next.

With my mother, there was always something to talk about. We never had these dead moments of silence. Mom always made an effort to engage me in conversation and to try to make me feel better, even though she was the one with C.M.L. Left up to our own devices, my dad and I would probably have just stood there and gazed at her, like I was doing right then with him.