simply thought of her as Ten Speed, because she raced up and down the road all day on what he referred to as “the ten speed.” She had wide-set eyes and was always listening to a bulky black tape player clipped to her belt, its headphones holding her mess of brown curls in place.
Pine forest topped the mountains, large trees distinct like spurs against the sky in the hour before sunset. Many of the fields around our house were planted with Christmas trees, hundreds of neat rows of the pine, fir, and spruce that my father sold each December.
By the time we arrived home, he’d convinced my brother and me to keep our adventure between the three of us. His joyful mood had ended as soon as we pulled into the driveway, and he said he had to check the trees—something to do with an order for spruce. We were to go inside, but the thrill of train racing hadn’t worn off, and I couldn’t bear the thought of staying in the house with my mother and sister. When I begged to tag along, he hesitated. “Okay. Come on,” he said.
As the two of us walked the rows, I asked him to tell me a story. He stared ahead, taking slow, deep breaths between his parted lips, as he stepped evenly, lightly over the wet, tufted earth. I had a specific story in mind. When I was younger, my mother had told me I’d someday grow facial hair, and I’d pictured myself, my face hidden in a stinky beard as I showed up to class and sat in the back, terrifying the other kids. I cried, and my father laughed at me. I was so embarrassed and angry that he told me about a fat bearded woman he’d lived with before my mother. She sat on him so he couldn’t leave, but he wiggled from beneath her butt and ran away because he didn’t want children with beards.
He stayed silent now, narrowing his eyes the way his dogs did before they ran after something. He kept six German shepherds in a pen, and whenever he let them out, they sniffed the air and gazed into the distance, the wind ruffling their fur, and then they raced away so suddenly that I felt they were the happiest animals on earth.
But he just walked, and I followed him to the Christmas tree fields on the other side of the road. We stepped over sagging barbed wire and crossed a stream on a plank nailed with asphalt shingles for grip. I lingered to watch for trout in the pools beneath overhanging trees. He kept on and I ran to catch up.
When I took his hand, his fingers closed slightly.
“Which story?” he asked.
“About the bearded woman.”
He nodded and said, “If she’d been your mother, you’d have a beard.”
He’d been like this more and more—at first normal, making jokes, doing something fun and crazy, laughing wildly; then, a little later, silent, staring off.
We came to where the fields gave way to tall tangled grass and huge weeds and forest. The mountain rose steeply above us, and we turned and walked along its base, the rows of Christmas trees at our side. With each few steps, another long, thin corridor appeared, descending out of sight.
Where the trees ended, a shallow, overgrown ditch separated the neighbor’s blueberry farm from our land. There was a bad smell, like an alley trash can in the city, behind one of my father’s seafood stores.
“He got some bears,” he said, and told me that our neighbor had set up bear traps. He waded into the yellow grass, crushing a path that I followed.
I stretched my neck. He’d often warned me to stay away from black bears and their cubs, and he’d made me promise that if any came along when I went fishing alone, I’d get on my bike and hurry home. I’d seen them once, four dark spots near some distant trees, and I’d pedaled as fast as I could over the rutted dirt road, my fishing rod pinned to my handlebars. I felt a little nervous now, the stink of rotten meat stronger, but he was there, between me and the bears.
“Look.” He motioned me forward.
The dense grass came up past my elbows, and I walked ahead, my heart beating faster. Two large shapes lay on the earth. One haggard carcass was just before me, its jaws open and its eye sockets hollow.
“You’re not afraid?” he asked as I measured my breath, studying the second bear, sprawled on its side, a naked leg bone raised stiffly, claws struck into the rank air.
“No,” I said. The bears were dead, and this wasn’t a big deal after all. I moved closer to the fanged, gaping jaws, the rotting fur like torn carpeting over the ribs. The stench made it hard to breathe.
He turned and said, “Let’s go.”
“I want to look at them.”
He chuckled. “Come on. You’ve seen enough.”
I crouched. Two long curved teeth protruded from the top and bottom jaws. A few weeks earlier, in class, I’d read a story in my fourth-grade primer about the loup-garou, the werewolf. Because my classes were in French, we often read folktales from Quebec, but this one was my favorite, and I’d imagined myself growing fangs as I stared at the full moon.
My father started walking, and I jogged after him, through the battered grass. As I followed him back across the rows, I told him the story, feeling a little breathless at the thought that what I’d just seen might not really be bears.
“There’s this hunter who likes to hunt more than he likes to be in the village. He hunts all day long and he sleeps in his cabin, and he almost never goes home or talks to anyone. Then, one night, when the moon is full, his uncles and cousins visit his cabin. But it’s empty. They find clothes covered with animal hair, and there are huge wolf tracks in the snow.”
“I heard that a lot when I was a boy,” he told me, his eyes serious, maybe a little worried, as I tried to match his pace.
If he were a loup-garou, his beard would spread over his face and neck and arms. I pictured him standing at the edge of the forest beneath the mountain, dressed in torn fur, the bear skull on his head as he stared out at the valley through the ragged jaws.
I expected him to say more about the loup-garou, but he just glanced over the spruces as we silently made our way back, pausing at a few old tool and fertilizer sheds that smelled of wet earth.
“See,” he said and touched one of their wooden corner posts. “Each year they’re smaller. They rot into the ground. The valley’s moisture eats up the wood.”
He turned in a circle, and then he kept on while I hurried after. I couldn’t remember him ever acting like this. We came to the ditch separating us from the road, walked along it and crossed over a large culvert.
As we followed the asphalt, I heard the low whine of a bicycle chain against its gears, and Ten Speed shot past with a sound like someone snapping a wet towel. Briefly, shouting voices blared from her headphones. I’d asked Ian about this, and he’d said that she listened to radio shows. We’d once found her sleeping in the hay of the barn, curled up, the voices clamoring from her frizzy hair. Then her eyelids popped open on large, terrified pupils, and she ran past us, staying crouched low, and went down the ladder and out the door.
My father glanced behind us. A white car had appeared in the distance. He kept walking, reaching out and telling me to take his hand.
The car pulled next to us, and the darkening sky warped in the window that descended on two clean-shaven men. The driver, with eyes as blue as my mother’s, said, “Excuse me. Can you tell us where André Béchard lives?”
My father squeezed my hand. He then tilted his head, scrunching
