Emory’s Gift (13 page)

He trudged back as if sentenced to ten years hard labor. Mr. Shelburton stood. “Guess I’ll swing by the ranch for a bit,” he said. “Charlie, I’ll check on your dad.”

“Please let us know how he’s doing and when I can bring Charlie in for a visit,” Mrs. Shelburton requested.

“Hi,” Beth said.

She walked into the kitchen amid the admiring silence she deserved. She wore jeans and a T-shirt and her hair was brushed back, but even I could tell that despite the casual look, she had put considerable effort into her appearance before coming to the table that morning. I caught Mr. Shelburton and his wife exchanging a look: Mrs. Shelburton was smiling and Mr. Shelburton wasn’t. Beth gave me a shy glance, and I tried not to appear to be an idiot.

“Hi good morning to you hello,” I said, running my greetings together like Craig telling a story about werewolves and jet packs.

Beth had some of her mother’s French toast and then she and I did the breakfast dishes. I’d never before much appreciated doing dishes, but now it felt like the high point of my social life, more fun than any party I’d ever been to. There was a magnetic field around her that made my insides flutter like iron filings whenever she passed close by.

“Today let’s go into town, Charlie. We’ll walk along the river and get some lunch. My treat,” Beth said.

“Okay.”

“We could go to the music store,” she suggested.

“Okay.” My mind was elsewhere—should I try to take Beth with me to my house? I needed to get up there but didn’t want to spend a moment away from her.

“Are you always this easy to get along with, Charlie?” she asked me in a teasing fashion. “What if I said we should climb the hill and throw rocks at patrol cars? Would you say ‘okay’ to that?”

“You’re probably not going to see very many patrol cars go by,” I replied, an answer worthy of my father.

She laughed at that. “Craig threw a rock at a sheriff’s car last year; that’s why I ask. He said he didn’t know why he did it. I’m worried it might run in the family and that I’ll get the compulsion, too. If you’re not going to stop me, who will?”

It was such a strange question it made my brain sort of seize up. I was so
drawn
to this girl, not just to her beauty but to the way she talked, the way she churned me all up inside with her rapid change of topics. We grabbed some of her mom’s homemade chocolate-chip cookies. (My father’s cookies oozed out of a tube, like toothpaste, and tasted like burnt toast.) While Beth chatted I followed her out the door and down the road toward town, feeling as dumb as a calf on a rope.

The Shelburtons lived much closer to town than we did out on Hidden Creek Road. A gravel path along the river was a less direct but prettier way to find our way to the shopping district, and as we walked I had the sense that if I had the nerve I could hold her hand and we’d be like the older couples, the kids in high school, who took the path along the river with their fingers interlaced or their arms linked.

“Isn’t this river beautiful? Don’t you love it?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes.”
She drew in a deep breath, appreciating the clean smells. I was appreciating the cookies, which I’d started to munch on the second we were out the door. The chips were milk chocolate and still warm; each bite made me close my eyes in absolute ecstasy.

Before long Beth was talking about the dance that was coming up at Benny H., a dance I had never before thought of attending because I’d never been to a dance and now it seemed like it was too late—if I went, everyone would know how to behave but me and I’d do something stupid. The point of her conversation had something to do with how easy boys had it because we could just show up, but girls had to wear a new outfit. “It’s a
burden,
” she informed me. “Nobody wants to wear exactly what someone else is wearing, but nobody wants to dress different than everybody else. What is it?”

I’d come to a halt, and she was now searching my face with her eyes.

“I have to ask you something.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed. I saw a small flush invade her cheeks and knew instantly that she assumed I was about to ask her to go to the dance with me. This flustered me into an anxious silence. I was utterly without clue as to how to address her expectations. I couldn’t imagine ever having the confidence to ask a girl to a dance. And never
this
girl—Beth already had me so rattled I could barely converse.

If she saw the battle raging inside me, she didn’t say anything; she just stood there, her green eyes resting lightly on mine. I pushed past it, reaching almost desperately for my original topic. “I need you to…” I groped for the words. “I need you to cover for me.”

It was the first time I’d seen Beth Shelburton unsure of herself. “What do you mean?”

“I have to do something today. Back at my house. But I can’t; I don’t want anyone to know that I was up there. Okay? So can you go to town and do like you said, and if anyone asks you say I was with you?”

“Why?”

Well, that one was certainly unanswerable. “I just have to do something. Please, Beth.”

She peered at me. “You,” she finally said, “have some sort of mysterious secret.”

I nodded.

“Are you going to tell me what it is?”

I hesitated, then shook my head no.

“Well, okay. I’ll do it.”

“Okay.”

We smiled at each other. I looked around. “When I’m done I’ll come back here, okay? I’ll meet you right here at this bend in the river at around five o’clock.”

“I’ll see you right here, Charlie. Now go do what you need to do.”

The parting was so unnatural and weird that I found myself holding out my hand like an insurance salesman. Beth laughed with delight and shook it. “Right here,” she repeated.

As soon as I was away from her I ran, my feet light on the pavement. When I turned off onto the steep climb that was Hidden Creek Road the fatigue set in and each step landed with a thudding impact. Though I had sprinted from the bottom of this road to the top of its many switchbacks almost every day after school, I had never done it after first running what felt like a marathon, and my lungs were starved for air by the time I made it to my driveway.

On the other side of the big garage door of the pole barn was a grizzly bear who’d been trapped inside since Friday, two nights ago, trapped without water or food. The animal would probably be crazed, but I didn’t hesitate to roll up the big door. I didn’t even raise it all the way, just enough for me to enter.

What I saw inside the pole barn took what little breath I had left away from me. I put my hands on my knees, sick and dizzy, while the door behind me rattled back down and slammed shut, plunging everything back into shadow.

The light from the side door window and the spangles of sun leaking in where the walls met the roof made one thing obvious: there was no bear. What there was, however, was bloodred liquid splattered liberally on the floor.

I squinted at it, shocked and uncomprehending. In the gloom, my eyes still trying to adjust, it now looked black, but the brief flash of full daylight when the door was open had given me sickening confirmation of its real color. Cautiously I stepped forward. Emory’s paw prints were all over, big as both my hands put together. Rivulets of the dark liquid ran among the prints.

The side window was broken out, and when I went to investigate I found two large smudges on the window frame, and these were easily identifiable in the stronger light as being the same bright red. I pulled the side door open.

“Emory?” I shouted, cocking my head to hear any response.

I spotted red tracks in the dirt, heading away from the house. I followed them at a run, but they petered out on me. Frantic, I ran down the path to the creek, stumbling a couple of times, heedless of the pain that flashed through me when I barked my knees against a fallen tree trunk. I burst out of the brush and leaped over the loamy embankment and fell more than ran into the rocky creek bed. My shoes splashed in the pockets of muddy water that were lying there in the rocks, waiting for the rains to liberate them.

“Emory!” I shouted, anguished. Tears were flowing down my face, gritty tears that burned on their way out.
“Emory!”

The wind gave me a lonely, empty reply.

I sank to my knees, then, afraid and ashamed and guilty. It was not an unfamiliar mix of emotions. But the difference was that with my mother I knew what I had done—here my crimes were not clear enough for self-indictment. I’d left Emory alone, but what in God’s name had happened back at the pole barn?

What could he have done to cause all that blood? Did he slice open an artery on the broken window? How could he have bled so much in the pole barn and then not tracked it more than a few feet down the trail to the creek?

After a time I managed to gather myself and numbly head back toward home. I had to hope that the bear’s wounds weren’t too bad, that he wouldn’t get infected, that maybe he’d come out of the woods and I could put iodine on them. But the sheer volume of red blood I’d spotted belied this hope: something had happened to wound Emory, something deep and awful.

What if someone had come and killed him?

Back up in the driveway I opened the big pole barn door all the way and let the light flood in, sucking in air as I did so. The wreckage was even worse than I’d first thought: the tomato cages were scattered, more than one of them bent and twisted. Tools were strewn about; paint cans were lying here and there on their sides.

Paint cans.

I took a closer look at the blood on the floor. It was indeed red, bright red, impossibly bright red. The dribbles and spatters gleamed as if wet, but they were dry to the touch.

Against one wall was a stack of paint cans that had followed us all the way from Kansas. The paint had been attacked by the bear, for reasons I could not fathom. A one-gallon can of fire-engine red paint had been opened—a grizzly bear has claws that certainly rival any man-made can opener. The paint from this can was undoubtedly what I was seeing all over the place.

I examined the side window. The glass was entirely on the outside, leaving little doubt that it had been smashed from within. The smudges on the window frame were paint, not blood, and careful examination revealed that the bear had meticulously busted out the glass, not leaving so much as a single sliver in the frame to cut him as he squeezed through to freedom. A tight fit, but obviously he made it.

I sighed in relief. As far as I knew, Emory was unharmed.

Crossing my arms, I looked around the garage at the mess he’d made. How would I explain any of this to my father?

Well, I
couldn’t
explain it. I would have to clean it up. The paint wouldn’t come off the floor, of course, but we had a couple of gallons of gray garage floor paint in our collection—the former owner had apparently found it easier to lay down a new coat of paint every so often than to try to scrub out the inevitable stains from his game-dressing business. As long as I didn’t waste any time, I would have no problem meeting Beth back down at the river at the appointed hour.

The first thing I did was straighten the twisted tomato cages as best I could and lock them in a back cabinet—they were too precious to leave out, I thought, feeling a flash of resentment that my father hadn’t put them someplace more protected.

I was gathering up a paint roller, a paint pan, and a stir stick when I glanced up at the wall of the pole barn opposite of the broken window. I’d been so fixated on the mess on the floor I hadn’t looked over there until that moment.

The far-side wall was normally a pretty dull thing to behold. It was just an expanse of flat white, though sometimes in the oblique sunlight of late afternoon you could make out the ghostlike outlines of some shelves that had once stood against it.

The wall was no longer blank.

Big drippy letters were painted in red on the wall, drawn with a striking meticulousness. This is what they said.

I, Emory Bain, pvt. 3
rd
regt., inf. of GR Mich, May 1862 pursued rebels at Chickahominy, wounded, took fever, now returned. I have a message.

I sat down on the paint-splattered floor and read the words over and over again, my mouth open.

chapter

FIFTEEN

THE cryptic note was written in an odd script, the capital letters twisting up in ornate flourishes, the words painstakingly inscribed in a stilted, schoolboyish cursive. Some dribbles of red paint were all that marred what was otherwise handwriting better than mine.

When Emory wrote his name in the riverbank, his letters were all capitalized, drawn from slashing swipes of his paw. These words were as neatly painted as any brush could make them. But how could a bear hold a paintbrush? They had no thumbs.

The words made little sense to me.
I, Emory Bain,
could be interpreted easily enough if you were willing to accept the idea that the bear had somehow managed to write the words. He’d already told me his first name, so why not his last? The next several abbreviations, though, I didn’t understand, and when I did, I didn’t understand how they fit together.
Pursued rebels at Chickahominy.
Whatever Chickahominy was, I was pretty sure I was pronouncing it wrong. The final part was more clear:
wounded, took fever, now returned. I have a message.

Thing was, I didn’t care. The way I saw it, I had a big problem. The pole barn was a mess. My dad would be home within a day or two. I needed to put things back the way they had been.

A question a lot of people have asked me is why I did what I did next; what in the world could I have been thinking? (Yes, that question
again.
) All I can say is that I didn’t want my father to be mad at me. I couldn’t picture him being happy that there were bear tracks painted all over his floor and words scrawled on the wall. And I certainly wasn’t about to tell him that I’d been consorting with one of the most dangerous species alive.

So it was not the content of the message on the wall but the fact that it was painted there in the first place that got all of my attention.
No,
I’ve responded patiently to so many people,
I did not stop to connect “1862” with “rebels” and I did not try to figure out what “inf.” and “regt.” meant.
I was a kid. I just didn’t want to get in trouble. And anyway, my biggest concern had been for Emory, and he was evidently fine.