Bear (10 page)

She looked at herself in the female colonel’s pierglass. Her hair and her eyes were wild. Her skin was brown and her body was different and her face was not the same face she had seen before. She was frightened of herself. She warmed water and washed her hair and her face in the basin. She brushed her teeth and retched at the toothpaste. She found lipstick and a comb and stuff to puton her eyes.She found a clean checkered shirt. She got into the motorboat and went to the marina. Babs was at the counter. “Where’s Homer?” she asked. “Up at the lumbermill, first road off past the falls. To the right,” said Babs, without a second look. She drove into the town and bought whisky. Homer was at the abandoned lumbermill, filling his pickup with firewood to sell to his campers. “Hi.” “Long time no see.” “Been on a work-jag.” “Thought you might get bushed.” “I brought you a drink.” He grinned. “Cups?” “I’ve got one in the glove-compartment.” “Me, too.” They sat on a log side by side and began to drink it straight. They kept up with each other. He had no stories to tell her. When half the bottle was gone he plucked her sleeve and took her into a decayed bunkhouse. Unbuckled his belt. As she did hers. They stood half-undressed before each other. He grinned. “Can’t do too long without it, can we?” There were no preliminaries.He had a good long prick and he used it. It felt very strange and naked, and he had a way of hesitating and starting again that was unlike anything she had known before. He excited her. And it was good to have that enormous emptiness filled, but she felt nothing with him, nothing. When he was finished he said thank you. Then they dressed. “You keep the rest of the bottle,” she said. “No, you. It’s easier for me to git.” “Well, okay. You can stop by for a drink some time.““Sure will. Thanks.” She went home and cried.Then she went upstairs and tried to work again. Surely there was something in that enormous library, surely an annotated Roughing It in theBush or a journal.Something more than a recipe for raspberry shrub. Otso, thou my well-beloved honey-eater ofthe woodlands, let not anger swell thy bosom; I have not theforce to slay thee willingly thy life thou givest as a sacrifice to Northland… We shal lnever treat thee evil, thou shalt dwell in peace and plenty thou shalt feed on milk and honey… — The Kalevala “Oh God,” she cried, “I was nevera woman who wore circles of animals eating each other around her neck to church. I don’t want his guts for my windowpanes or his shoulder blades to cut my grass. I only want to love him.”

But he smelled man on her that night and would not come to her. “People get funny up here,” said Homer, “when they’re too much alone.There was a Colonel who was magistrate after the first Cary. He shot the man who shot his pet beaver. Orville Willis and the Swede he had working for him spent all winter in a wickie-up over by Gardner’s Reach, cutting logs for a house and eating turnips and fish. In the spring, one of the Leroys found them curled up like the Babes in the Woods, stone dead. Mrs. Francis, an English lady, and her daughter, got left alone on her no-good son Ralph’s farm. They got meat-hungry and they went into the barn and caught swallows in those big nets that ladies used to wear on their hats. They plucked them and roasted them on their hatpins and said they were pretty good. There’s wild hazel nuts grows around here too, they’re good eating. Have another?” She sat cross-legged away from him. He crept closer. “You stink of bear,” he said. “I guess I do. There’s no way of living with him except living close to him.” She stared at Homer’s hairless ears and thought of his hairless body. Shuddered. “People get funny when they’re too much alone.” “I have a lot ofwork to do.” “What’re they going to do with the place, anyhow?” “Use it for conferences, maybe.” “Not enough room. Sleep four at the most.”

“I don’t know,” she said impatiently, “I don’t know.I have to make a report on it, I don’t know what to say.” “Turn in to a fishing camp for government big wigs more likely.” “You and Joe still want to take care of it?” “Sure, it’s a job.” When the bottle was finished she walked out to the boat with him.He handed her a stack of mail. The air was chilly. “Fall’s coming on,” he said. “You’ll be going soon.” “Soon, Homer.” “Joe says he’s coming soon for the bear.Old Mrs. Leroy, she’s none too well. They’ve got the extreme unction out on the coffee table all the time, now. She wants to see the bear before she goes. Joe says he reckoned the other night she must be about a hundred and four.” “Healthy climate, Homer.” “Used to be nice in the old days when all the funerals was by boat.” “I guess it was, Homer.” He went away.

After Labour Day, the motorboats miraculously disappeared. The water was beginning to be cold again, but at high noon she and the bear were able to play like otters in the water. She wound herself in her bathrobe on the bank afterwards. She had an urge to put up preserves. Certainly there were bottles in the basement, old greenish Gem jars now worth a fortune in foolish antique stores, with corroded metal tops and stretched rubber rings. But her garden was a flop, and she spent the afternoons instead lazing in the sun with the bear, thinking ofthe things she would have to do if she were to stay with him all winter, thinking herself into a rugged, pastoral past that itwas too late to grasp,remembering the screeching taste of fresh buttermilk, the warm silkiness of succotash and how one of her aunts made soap out of bacon grease and lye and how she burned the hiredman’s European frilled shirts with a flat-iron once, even though it sang when she spat on it. She was idle and grubby. Her nails were broken. She and the bear sat in pompous idleness on the lawn. In the evening, they lazed by the upstairs fire. Bear and woman by the fire. Both in their pelts. His thick pelt tonguing he ragain, her hands in his fur. The smell of him drink to her now. Night and silence. Faraway, the last lakers booming along the river. Once, a spark from a birch log landed in his fur. It smelled of burning feathers until she licked it out.

He was slower now. Losing his assiduity. He ate great quantities. She knew he was growing a plug of fat in his anus against hibernation. She was nearly— oh, really, completely— through with her work. She was cold without his fur around her. She wriggled closed to him, closer. Until he encompassed her. He moved a leg and nearly broke her arm. She had forgotten his great weight. “It’s over, now,” she told him. “It’s over. You have to go to your place and I to mine.” She sat up and put her sweater on. He sat up across from her, rubbing his nose with a paw and looking confused.Then he looked down at himself. She looked as well. Slowly, majestically his great cock was rising. It was not like a man’s, tulip-shaped. It was red, pointed, and impressive. She looked at him. He did not move.She took her sweater off and went down on all fours in front of him, in the animal posture. He reached out one greatpaw and ripped the skin on her back. At first she felt no pain. She simply leapt away from him.Turned to face him.He had lost his erection and was sitting in the same posture. She could see nothing, nothing, in his face to tell her what to do. Then she felt the blood running down her back, and knew she had to run away. “Get out!“she shouted, pulling her sweateron to — well, warm her,cover it up, sop up the blood.“Get out.” She drew a stick out ofthe fire and waved it at him.“Get out. Shoo.Time for bed. Go. ” Slowly and deliberately,he got upon all fours and waddled down the stairs. She put the screen in front of the fire. Puther jeans on. Blewout the Tilley lamp. Picked up her cigarettes and followed him down the stairs.He knocked something over in the kitchen. He’ll smell my blood, he’ll want me now, she thought. “Go,” she screamed. He went out through the back door, scuttling.She walked as erectly aspossible to the door, bolted it, and fell shaking into bed. When she awoke, it was still light. She was burning. She knew what had happened. She had stayed out too long in the sun, it must be the second of July, and her mother had put that stuff that was like rubber-cement on her back and she was stuck to the sheets, and chilled with sunstroke. She was going to get a fever now and vomit a lot and be taken care of and then be told she never did anything except in extremes. The only thing to do was rip herself off the muslin sheets quick, get it over with. She struggled, She would not come loose. There was something different. She tried to raise one arm. Pain screamed. It rang in her ears. She remembered. Oh God, I am a fool, a fool, a f… It was day. The light was streaming in, She was lying stuck to the bed in full daylight. Unable to raise her left arm. Something had happened. That. Christ have mercy upon us. The room she lay in was dirty. Her hands were dirty.How long have I been like this? she wondered, and where is he? Is he hungry? Is it fall already? Has he gone to sleep? She moved her legs. Good. She had clothes on, she found. She could move her head, her right arm, and, slowly, now, her left.Oh Jesus and John Wesley, it hurts. My hands are cold, my head is hot. I must get up. She found she could roll off the bed. She found she could stand. She walked into the kitchen and found that she could walk. Drink. Take aspirin. He ripped me, she thought. That’s what I was after, wasn’t it, decadent little city tart? She leaned against the kitchen counter for a while, deciding what to do. Then she went out the front door and lay in the river in her clothes, until she felt her sweater coming loose from her broken skin. She tried to remember what happened. She remembered him rising to her,then his one gesture. Her screams. Her flight. Had she been foolish? Oh, no. If there was enough wild animal left in him todo that, the blood… The water was freezing. She got up and ran into the house. Shucked off her bottoms and, with the greatest difficulty, her top. Looked at herself naked in the great oval pierglass once more. She was different.She seemed to have the body of a much younger woman. The sedentary fat had gone, leaving the shape of ribs showing. Slowly, she turned and looked over her shoulder in the pierglass at her back: one long, red, congealing weal marked her from shoulder to buttock. I shall keep that, she thought. And it is not the mark of Cain. She went in to the kitchen and soaked a tee shirt in disinfectant.Slung it over her shoulders for a while. Then dressed, and very slowly set about making her breakfast. When she went outside, the bear was waiting expectantly for her. She handed him his plate. They sat quietly side by side. She shivered for a while. There was a nip in the air. He edged a little closer to her. Upstairs, he lay and watched the play of the fire while she sat at her desk,opening the mail Homer had brought her the other day.A summer’s Times Literary Supplements overflowing with advertisements for archivists, a number of angry letters from the Director (was he feeling sexually deprived?),a letter from her sister describing things that are of interest to mothers only but still cry out to be described. She sat beside the bear for a while, reading. Last night she had been afraid that the smell of blood on her would cause him to wound her further, but today he was something else: lover, God or friend. Dog too, for when she put her hand out he licked and nuzzled it.Something was gone between them, though: the high, whistling communion that had bound them during the summer. When she looked out the window, the birch trees were yellowing, the leaves were already thin. Methodically, she began to pack her books and papers. When she had done that she would begin to clean the house.

That night, lying clothed and tenderly beside him by the fire, she was a babe, a child, an innocent. The loons’ cries outside were sharp,and for her.The reeds rubbed against each other and sang her a song. Lapped in his fur, she was wrapped in a basket and caressed by little waves. The breath of kind beasts was upon her. She felt pain, but it was a dear, sweet pain that belonged not to mental suffering, but to the earth. She smelled moss and clean northern flowers. Her skin was silk and the air around her was velvet. The pebbles in the night water gleamed with a beauty that was their own value, not a jeweller’s.She lay with

him until the morning birds began to sing. What had passed to her from him she did not know. Certainly it was not the seed of heroes, or magic, or any astounding virtue, for she continued to be herself. But for one strange, sharp moment she could feel in her pores and the taste of her own mouth that she knew what the world was for.She felt not that she was at last human, but that she was at last clean. Clean and simple and proud. She went down to the water’s edge and watched the miracle of the dawn. She felt the sinister pike sliding through the reeds where they belonged. She watched the last gathering summer birds, and felt the eyes of the goshawks upon her, without fear. The water was cold on her feet, but the air was good and gracious.She turned around, and the white house behind her stood frail and simple too: no longer a symbol, but an entity. She went in and continued to pack her tidy files. Later in the day, a man in a red and black mackinaw, a huge man with a shock of black hair, came to the back door. He was Joe King, nephew of Lucy Leroy.He knew she was going, he said, and he and Lucy would like to take care of the bear for the winter. Well, she thought, well. It has come. But the time felt ripe. She enquired about Lucy’s health, which was holding up. “She’ll be glad to see him. She sure is stuck on that bear. She says she don’t have nobody to talk to. She hopes you made friends with him.““I used to go swimming with him.” “He looks in good shape.” “I’m going to miss him, but I can hardly take him to Toronto.” “If we leave him here, some goddamn hunter will get him.““You won’t kill him when Lucy goes, will you?” “Only if he’s sick. We don’t eat bear paws any more. Anyways, Lucy will make us promise. You don’t have to fear.” She went up to him and gently put his chain on. “Lucy said you’d get on good with him,” Joe said. “Oh, I got on good with him. He’s a fine fellow.” “When are you going back to Toronto?” “In a couple ofdays. I have to leave the house in good shape.And there are a few last papers to deal with.” “I don’t suppose you found any buried treasure. They didn’t know much, people like the carys. They were tourists.” “Compared to you and Lucy.” She walked with them down to the dock.Then she went back and got the remains of the chow for them. When she returned, the bear was already ensconced in the motorboat, quite contented. She rubbed his ruff affectionately, and scratched his small gristly ears. “Good-bye,” she said. Joe started the motor. The bear twitched at the noise and his tongue flung out sideways and licked her hand.Then Joe pushed off with a casual good-bye and she was left standing, watching the bear recede down the channel, a fat dignified old woman with his nose to the wind in the bow ofthe boat. He did not look back. She did not expect him to. She swept out the house, packed her belongings, and took her gear to her car in stages. She left the Cary laundry in town, including the blooded sheets, in Homer’s name. She went to the bank and drew out enough money to settle Homer’s enormous account. She went back and sat in the empty, enormous house. She had not found its secrets. It was a fine building, but it had no secrets. It spoke only of a family who did not want to be common clay, who feared more than anything being lost to history.With their fine tables and velvet pelmets and pierglasses, the English wives had proclaimed their aristocracy among these Indian summer islands. Much good it did them, she thought, perishing in the wilderness. Colonel Jocelyn was the only one who knew anything: how to tan a lynx. Up in the office, she took the Rowlandson print down from the wall: it belonged to a time of her life that was long gone. She dusted the books and locked the cabinets. Against the regulations she wrapped both the first edition of Wacousta and the Bewick in Times Literary Supplements to take away. Some winter, snowmobilers would break in. They would take the telescope for its brass screws, and smash the celestial and terrestial globes. Well, let the world be smashed: that was the way things were bound to go. The bear was safe. She would make these two books safe.Over her collection of Cary’s notes she hesitated. They seemed to belong more to her than to the Institute. But in the end, she put them in an envelope and left them in the desk drawer marked w C Cary’s notes on bears.” She did not need them any more. There was an immense peace in performing these duties, which she did thoroughly and well.She makes her little house to shine, she thought. She stood in the tree crow’s nest and took a last farewell of Cary’s impressive view. She went to the beaver pond where she had never seen a beaver.The goshawks were gone. She surveyed the ruin of her garden. She stood in the doorway of the bear’s old byre and inhaled his randy pong. Really, she thought, really. It was late afternoon when she had cleaned out the kitchen, leaving a few canned goods for passers-by and a clean counter, and carried the last of her things to the boat. The river was choppy, for an autumn wind had sprung up.She went up the river slowly.She felt tender, serene. She remembered evenings of sitting by the fire with the bear’s head in her lap. She remembered the night the stars fell on her body and burned and burned. She remembered guilt, and a dream she had had where her mother made her write letters of apology to the Indians for having had to do with a bear, and she remembered the claw that had healed guilt. She felt strong and pure. Leaving the keys at Homer’s, she had a farewell drink with him over the counter, away from Babs’ eyes.He promised to put the shutters on the windows and look after the place all winter and bill the Institute.“Lucy’ll die happy now she has that bear back,” he said.“He’s a good bear.” “I guess he is. I wouldn’t know myself.“She remembered the odd ridge ofHomer’s upper plate the day she made love to him. “Well,good-bye.“Shaking his hand.“Thanks for everything .I didn’t make much of a go of the garden.” “You did all right. You’ll be up again?” “I don’t think so. I’m thinking of changing jobs. Time to move along.” “Come fora holiday. I’ll give you a special rate on a tent-site.” “Thanks, Homer.” She drove south all night, taking the long, overland route. She wore a thick pullover and drove with the windows open until the smell ofthe land stopped being the smell ofwater and trees and became cities and gas fumes. It was a brilliant night, all star-shine, and overhead the Great Bear and his thirty-seven thousand virgins kept her company.