Emory's Gift Page 30

  “It’s happening,” he said.

  “What is, George? What’s happening?” Nichole asked, her hand to her mouth.

  “He’s gone back to being a bear,” I said.

  McHenry’s eyes went wide. He glanced up at the door but didn’t approach it. “Oh,” was all he said.

  “We’ve got a wild grizzly bear trapped in our barn, and he’s not happy,” my father agreed, recovering from his shock.

  We all went silent for a second. I don’t know what the rest of them were thinking, but all I could do was process hurt feelings. I was Charlie; why would Emory act like that toward me?

  McHenry and my dad decided that none of us were foolish enough to try to open the pole barn and then get out of the way of a charging, paranoid, claustrophobic grizzly. McHenry ordered his security men to get in their vehicles, and my dad shepherded Nichole and myself into the house. We all went to the window over the sink and watched as McHenry backed his truck up to the big door at the front of the pole barn. He got out and grabbed a towing chain from the bed of his truck, wrapping it around both the doorknob and the trailer hitch. He glanced at us once before running back and getting behind the wheel of his truck. I noticed that not only did he roll up his window; he also locked the door, as if the bear might be able to figure out how to open it to drag him out of there.

  All four of McHenry’s wheels bit the driveway as he accelerated. The chain snapped taut and then with a crash the door came flying off, flapping flat and dragging behind the truck in a shower of sparks. He drove up to the top of the driveway and then sat there, waiting.

  I think we all held our breath. And then Emory appeared.

  He held his nose up to the wind, getting his bearings. He looked at the house and just for a second it seemed as if his eyes met mine, but there was no recognition, no sign he even knew who I was. And then he turned and loped off down the path to the creek.

  I couldn’t stand it. Without even thinking, I broke away and burst out the back door in pursuit.

  “Emory!” I called, my voice full of anguish.

  “Charlie!” my father shouted. “No!”

  The bear was moving fast, quickly pulling away from me, making a beeline for the creek. I kept running. “Charlie!” my dad yelled.

  “Emory!” I screamed again.

  The pain inside me felt exactly the same as when they told me my mother was gone for good. I’d never had a chance to tell her good-bye, tell her how much I would miss her. That’s what hurt, even now, even today: I missed her so very much and I never got a chance to tell her. I could barely see through my tears, but I kept running.

  The bear must have stopped to drink in the creek, because all of a sudden I jumped over the bank and there he was, twenty yards away. He took a look at me and bolted, heading up the hill. It was comical, really: I was a thirteen-year-old boy, small for my age, and he was an immense grizzly bear, all power and teeth and claws, fleeing me as if frightened for his life.

  I pursued, tired but still going, drawing on my cross-country lungs. We reached the part of the hill that was visible from the house, and even from that distance I heard my father’s thin wail: “Charlie! No!”

  Later he told me what happened, how after I left he went to the gun cabinet and got out his .30-06, his hands shaking as he unlocked the trigger guard, nearly dropping the shells as he loaded it, slapping the bolt. Nichole stared at him with wide eyes as he took up position on the deck, sighting through the scope, using the railing to steady his aim, hoping that the bear would keep retreating, praying that if he didn’t, he wouldn’t make a stand until he was up from the creek, in the sparse trees, where my dad could get a clean shot.

  He had the scope on Emory when the bear finally grew weary of the chase and turned, pounding his forepaws on the ground, snarling at me in fury.

  I kept running. The bear showed his fangs, snapping them at me, drooling, chuffing, banging his paws again. He felt cornered and threatened and he was getting ready to attack.

  Up at the house, my father gave a helpless gasp, resting the crosshairs just below the shoulders, going for a heart/lung shot.

  The bear glared at me, locking eyes with me, a final warning before he charged.

  My father’s senses cleared and he became aware of everything around him. He could feel that behind him Nichole stood tense and weeping, McHenry mute next to her.

  My father thought briefly of what McHenry had said, that maybe the bear had to die. That this sacrifice was somehow a necessary part of the whole process.

  And it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered to my father right then but that his son was recklessly pursuing a wild grizzly bear. He could see me now in the scope, looking so small compared to Emory, as I heedlessly ran up the trail.

  He had no choice. The bear was going to kill me.

  He squeezed the trigger.

  There was a dry, impotent click.

  Cursing, he quickly moved the bolt, chambering a fresh round.

  Back on the hill, I was close enough to Emory to see the wild fury in his eyes. I reached my arms out.

  My dad pulled the trigger again and again, all with the same result.

  When I was less than ten feet away from the bear he abruptly stood up on two legs. The tension went out of his body, and a warmth flooded his eyes. The transformation was immediate and complete: Emory was back.

  I crashed into him at full speed, and he wrapped his front legs around me.

  “Emory. I’m going to miss you, Emory,” I said, my voice muffled by his thick, coarse fur.

  Up at the house, my dad let the rifle sag in disbelief.

  We’d figure it out eventually. What seemed like a lifetime ago but was actually only back in August I’d hastily reassembled the rifle when I heard his Jeep pull onto Hidden Creek Road, the small parts scattering on the hardwood floor. Inadvertently I’d stepped on the spring that made the gun fire, warping it just enough that the firing pin no longer hit true, disabling the weapon.

  I cried, saying farewell to Emory, a harsh sobbing that hurt my throat, as if all that emotion was scraping me raw on the way out. And then it was time; I knew the sheriff would be pulling in our driveway any second. I gave my bear one last hug.

  “Good-bye, Emory. Good-bye.”

  He dropped to all fours. He held my gaze with those wonderful brown eyes for a minute, and then he turned to leave. I watched him climb slowly and deliberately up the slope, higher and higher, and then when he got to the top of the rocky ridge he rose up on his rear legs and lifted his nose to smell me one last time. I raised a hand and he looked at me for a long, long moment, holding my gaze, and then he turned and disappeared.

  EPILOGUE

  THOUGH a lot of people tried, no one could track Emory more than a few miles up into the mountains. He seemed to vanish like a wisp of smoke, which lent mystery to those who needed the whole affair to have mystery and frustration to those who needed to have explanation. It didn’t help that winter showed up in an angry, punishing fury just as the really serious search parties were getting organized. And then, by the time the snow melted, no one could seem to remember what all the fuss had been about. It was just a tame bear, right?

  A few weeks after the bear left, my dad bought me a puppy, a half-Lab, half-who-knows-what bundle of energy. Dad understood that losing Emory broke my heart in several different ways and that despite the literal writing on the wall, emotionally it still felt as if my prized pet had run off.

  A lot of people expressed their unsolicited opinion that the entire affair implied that my dad was not a good father and that something had to be done for my “welfare.” I was sent to a smarmy psychiatrist with fat, wet lips—I guess you could say I didn’t like him very much. He insisted we talk about the “delusions” I had and the “stunt” that I’d pulled. I eventually agreed that maybe it was possible I’d written the words in the pole barn myself, just to get him to back off.

  When it came to my welfare, that puppy helped a lot more than the shri
nk, I’ll tell you that much.

  Years later, my American Sikh therapist, Sat Siri, was too polite and professional to pass judgment on the quality of the treatment I’d received from her colleague with the fat, wet lips when I was in eighth grade, but during one session she said something that gave me a little insight into what she thought about the psychiatrist pushing so hard for me to admit I’d made everything up. I was talking about Emory with her when I abruptly halted the monologue.

  “What just happened? Why did you stop?” she asked me.

  I sighed. “I forget, sometimes.”

  “Forget?”

  “You don’t believe me. About Emory.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well…” I was always a little irritated at her style of conversation. If she’d been pointing a gun at me and I’d said, You’re pointing a gun at me, she would probably have said, Why do you say that?

  “It’s because for the past year you’ve been asking me to ‘take a look at’ everything,” I explained. “The timing of Emory’s appearance, a bear who rescued me from the loneliness of my life with my depressed father. The fact that he used the tomato cages, which you said I should ‘take a look at’ because they were the last things I could remember my mother touching, when it had been just my mom and me, out in the garden. That I wanted to believe that my mother wasn’t really dead, that there was an afterlife, hence reincarnation. And that I desperately needed love and forgiveness, so ‘God Loves All.’ Your opinion couldn’t be more clear.”

  “Did you ever hear me say I didn’t believe you?”

  “No.”

  She leaned forward in her chair. “Is it possible that because you think no one truly believes you, you read into my questions what you expected to hear?”

  “What else would I think?”

  “Charlie, it was never my intent to imply, directly or indirectly, that I doubted you. I would never be so arrogant to question an article of faith, to tell someone to believe or not to believe in the Resurrection, or reincarnation, or Communion. That’s not my role here. The psychiatrist you saw when you were a child thought he was doing his job, but please understand, regardless of what else I believe in, I believe in you.”

  A month after that, Sat Siri fired me. My word, not hers. She just suggested I was finished with her—my insomnia had passed and, though I was still enjoying my sessions, I didn’t need any more therapy. She told me I should call her if I ever needed to talk to her, and from time to time I do.

  My father and Nichole J. Singleton were married the summer after Emory, making official an arrangement that pretty much settled into place the day the bear went back to being a bear. I continued to call her Nichole, and she became my second mother. She bought Selkirk River’s newspaper and took over as its editor and, for the first few years, was its only staff. If she missed life in the big city of Spokane, she never said so.

  I never heard from Tony Alecci again, though Wally Goetz came to Dad and Nichole’s wedding. When I became a bear biologist I tried to track down Phillip T. Thorpe, Bear Expert Extraordinaire, and never located a single person who had ever heard of him. For someone who so clearly wanted to be famous, he remains the most anonymous person in the entire story.

  Not long after Emory left, McHenry paid for some kind of expert to come out and shine oblique lights on the wall and carefully, stroke by stroke, re-create the original script that Emory wrote on the wall, the one I painted out. When the expert was finished we all stood and stared at it in wonder, but after a while it lost its novelty and I’ll sometimes go months without reading those words. Then I’ll catch myself ignoring them and feel a little guilty about it, like someone who thinks he should be going to church more often but never manages to do so.

  People still come up to see the pole barn, especially in the summer. For some of them it’s the place a miracle happened; for others, just confirmation that we don’t know everything. I think many folks find the whole thing exciting, like Bigfoot, maybe, or a haunted house. They accept, or at least contemplate, the notion that Emory wrote those words because it’s fun to do so, gives them a little shiver, a frisson. They don’t look too hard at the profound conclusions one might draw from it all. Instead, they come to the pole barn for the entertainment value. I don’t mind it at all; we each have our own walk.

  A lot of the visitors leave little stuffed bears that they buy in town, placing them at the base of the wall as offerings. Every few months I ship a box of the critters off to a children’s hospital. Folks like to stand and gaze at Emory’s words, which are protected from vandalism by sheets of Plexiglas. There’s a bucket we discreetly set out and people sometimes drop in a few coins or dollars. I send the money to a bear charity.

  For every one of them, though, there are ten people who think I faked up the whole deal and a hundred people who have never even heard of Emory the bear. I’ve learned to accept their hostility and their indifference, to shrug off the people who are angry and to be patient with the ones with the dumb questions, like whether the bear could have been a robot.

  A question I can’t answer: Why does a photograph of me standing in my room, taken by my mother in 1972, clearly show two books on my bookshelf, one right next to the other? The first, General McClellan and the Peninsular Campaign, was written for young readers and, I’m sorry to say, has a chapter on how the Yankee forces routed the rebels at Williamsburg and then “pursued them across the Chickahominy,” using those very words. Listed in the back of the book are the regiments that fought under McClellan, and yes, it’s right there on the list, Emory’s regiment, the Michigan Third Infantry. The other book, Native American Stories for Boys, has a chapter on the Ani’- Tsâ’gûhï—an ancient clan of Cherokee who were reincarnated as bears.

  I admit, it looks pretty fishy that the two books are right there together, though I have to question the sanity of the magazine writer who first pointed it out. Didn’t he have anything better to do than to scrutinize my bookshelf with a magnifying glass? At any rate, the picture pretty much satisfied conspiracy theorists that they could close the case on this one.

  Yet, I don’t even remember reading either one of these books, though I vaguely recall looking at some Civil War pictures that could, I suppose, have been in the McClellan one. I can neither spell nor pronounce Ani’-Tsâ’gûhï. People who want me to confess I either consciously or unconsciously cobbled together the entire story of Emory out of these two books because of juxtaposition are just flat out of luck. It’s my life to remember the way I remember and to live the way I want to live, though in the latter case I sometimes make an error or two.

  I’d like to say that Beth and I remained together through college and then got married, but alas, the trauma of having me go off to high school while she stayed back in Benny H. was simply too much for us to endure. It was more my fault than hers—I was stupid again. I was jealous of the boys at Benny H. because they had Beth to themselves every school day and then I’d be angry with her, even though she hadn’t done anything. I provoked fights because the negative thoughts with which I tormented myself needed an outlet. She put up with that nonsense for a few months and then showed me the door.

  I changed a lot as a sophomore, finally getting my growth spurt, becoming a track star, gaining confidence. Senior year my time in the mile was only half a second behind that of the guy who took home the state trophy. Beth, on the other hand, remained petite, almost little girl–like, pretty as ever. I’d see her around town, often with one boy or another, and feel miserable inside.

  Beth became a lawyer and moved to Minneapolis. The day I heard she got married I put on my hiking boots and tromped down the trail and stood where I’d kissed her and closed my eyes, remembering.

  I stayed in Selkirk River. Jules McHenry made his ranch his permanent home and set up a foundation to study and protect grizzly bears and I went to work for him straight out of graduate school. Maybe it showed a lack of imagination, but whenever I was in an urban area all I co
uld think about was when I could get out. Selkirk River was plenty big enough for Charlie Hall.

  I dated a girl from Coeur d’Alene for a few years but didn’t propose to her because it felt like everyone expected me to and I had an aversion to going with the default. After we broke up I prepared myself for someone else to show up, but no one did.

  Kay Logan married her soldier and left with him and never came back. I was at her wedding and as the car pulled away with her in the backseat, waving and smiling, I felt pretty sure she was looking right at me for a long second, giving me one last gift.

  Life flows past pretty quickly when you’re not moving very fast yourself. One July evening I realized I was thirty years and three months old, and went into town to find something to do to justify that fact. I was wandering the streets, trying to settle on a course of action, and I turned the corner and saw Beth, watching me with amusement in her eyes.

  “And there’s Charlie Hall,” she greeted me.

  “And there’s Beth…” I paused. “I don’t know your last name now,” I admitted.

  “It’s back to being Shelburton. That happens sometimes,” she replied. She slid up next to me so that we were walking in the same direction. “Where are we going?”

  I told her about my meager ambitions for the evening. “I’m thinking either a drink or an ice cream,” I replied.

  “No reason we can’t do both. Drink first, though,” she said, self-assured as always.

  We sat in a restaurant and made each other laugh until suddenly the lights went up and the manager was standing at our table telling us he was closed. The ice-cream shop was shut by then, too.

  “Probably seems pretty tame, now that you’ve been in Minneapolis,” I apologized.

  “Actually, it seems kind of nice,” she told me. She still had those clear green eyes. The childlike features I remembered so well from junior high—smooth skin, small nose, delicate hands—had combined to make Beth Shelburton a real beauty.