fly up, dust chokes him. Grit in his mouth. When he rubs his fingers against the ball of his thumb he feels hard grit. And turns back onto the concrete.
Miles of snow fence. A peregrine falcon balances on a forgotten hay bale. The flatness changes, the earth’s color changes, darker, darker. Prayers and long silences out of the dusty radio. In the autumn rain the houses become trailers among the trees. Oaks come at him, flash, burst into thickets, into woods. H&C Café, EATS, Amoco, GAS 3 MI. AHEAD. Fog. A little night fog. The sod in Indiana a deep brown-black. The cattle sink into its blackness. Southering geese spring up from the sloughs and ponds, scissor over him in the hundreds. The water is streaked with the lines of their angular necks, fractioned by dipping heads and beaks.
In the diner hunched over the cup of coffee he wonders how far he is going.
THE BEAR, LIKE MANY BEARS, had led a brief and vivid life. Born in the late winter of 1918 in a stump den, he was the oldest of two cubs. In personality he was quarrelsome and insensitive to the subtle implications of new things. He ate the remains of a poisoned eagle and nearly died. In his second autumn, from the height of a cliff, he saw his mother and sister backed against an angle in the rock by lean bear hounds. They went down in squalling that drew nothing but dry rifle fire. He was hunted himself the same year but escaped death and injury until 1922 when a coffin maker’s charge of broken screws swept up from the shop floor smashed his upper left canine teeth, leaving him unbalanced in mind and with chronic abscesses.
The next summer McCurdy’s Lodge, a massive structure of dovetailed spruce logs and carved cedar posts, opened on the eastern side of his range. The bear’s sense of smell was sharpened by hunger. He came to the Lodge’s garbage dump and its exotic peach peelings, buttered crusts and beef fat that melted in his hot throat. He began to lurk impatiently in the late afternoon trees for the cook’s helper with his wheelbarrow of orange peel and moldy potatoes, celery stumps and chicken bones, trickles of sardine oil.
The helper was a lumber-camp cook learning the refinements of carriage trade cuisine. He saw the bear in the dusk and ran shouting up to the Lodge for a ride. Hotelier McCurdy was in the kitchen talking Toumedos forestier with the cook and went to look at the bear for himself. He saw something in the hulking shoulders, the doggy snout, and told the Lodge carpenters to build benches on the slope above the dump. They set the area off with a peeled sapling railing to mark the limits of approach. The bolder guests walked twittering through the birches to see the bear. They touched each other’s shoulders and arms, their hands sprang protectively to their throats. The laughter was choked. The bear never looked up.
Through the summer the guests watched the bear flay the soft, fly-spangled garbage with his claws. The men wore walking suits or flannel bags and argyle pullovers, the women came in wrinkled linen tubes with sailor collars. They lifted their Kodaks, freezing the sheen of his fur, his polished claws. Oscar Untergans, a timber-lot surveyor who sold hundreds of nature shots to postcard printers photographed the bear at the summer dump. Untergans came again and again, walking along the path behind the cook, picking up any fetid rinds or dull eggshells thrown from the jouncing wheelbarrow. Sometimes the bear was waiting. The cook pitched the garbage with a pointed spade. He hit the bear with rotted tomatoes, grapefruit halves like yellow skullcaps.
Two or three summers after Untergans snapped the bear’s image they ran electric line to the Lodge. One evening the bear did not appear at the dump, nor was he seen in the following weeks and years. The Lodge burned on New Year’s Eve of 1934. On a rainy May night in 1938 Oscar Untergans fell in his estranged wife’s bathroom and died from a subdural haematoma. The postcard endured.
6 The Violet Shoe in the Ditch
MERNELLE SLOGGED DOWN the steep road, the snow packing into her boots. The dog plunged into her tracks, up and out, like a roller coaster. ‘You’re knockin’ yourself out for nothin’,’ she said. ‘Nobody’s sendin’ you no letters or postcards. No penpals for dumb dogs. I can guess what you’d write. Stuff like “Dear Fido, Send me a cat. Wufwuf, Dog.”’
Later Mink would get out the snow roller that the town had sold him cheap when they went over to the snowplow and hitch it to the tractor. The roller was a slatted rolling pin of a thing that crushed the snow down into a smooth pack. After the roller went up and down the truck still couldn’t make it, even with chains. In November, before the big snows came, Mink parked the truck at the bottom of the road. He hauled the forty-quart cream cans down every morning with the tractor.
‘Leave the truck up here, we run the risk of bein’ trapped for the winter. This way we got at least a chance if the place catches on fire or somebody gets hurt bad. Get down to the road, we got a ride.’ That was Jewell talking through Mink’s mouth. Jewell was the one afraid of accidents and fire, had seen her father’s barns burn down with the horses and cows inside. Had seen her oldest brother die after they pulled him out of the well, the rotten cover hidden by years of overgrown grass. She told the story in a certain way. Cleared her throat. Began with a silence. Her fingers interlaced, wrists balanced on her breasts and as she told her hands rocked a little.
‘He was smashed up terrible. Every bone in him was broken. That well was forty foot down, and he pulled stone on top of hisself as he was falling, just hit a stone and it’d come right out. They had to move eighteen rocks off him, some of them weighed more than fifty pound, before they could get him out. Those stones come up one by one, real careful so they wouldn’t jar no more loose. You could hear Marvin down there, “unnnh, unnnh,” just didn’t stop. Steever Batwine was the one went down in there to get him out. It was awful dangerous. The rest of the well could of caved in any minute. Steever liked Marvin. Marvin had did some work for him that summer, helped with the hayin’, and Steever said he was a good hand. Well, he was a good hand, only twelve but already real strong. The rocks they were pulling up could of come loose from the sling and beaned Steever.’ Dub always laughed when she said ‘beaned.’
‘Marvin’s the one you’re named after,’ she said to Dub, ’Marvin Sevins, so don’t laugh.
‘Then they put down a like little table with the legs pulled off it, put the table in the sling and lowered it down. The table only got halfway down when it stuck and they had to bring it back up and saw the end off before it could fit. Steever was down there expecting more rocks to come any minute. He picked up Marvin and laid him on the table. He screamed terrible when Steever gathered him up to put him on the table, then went back to moaning. Steever said the only thing holding him together was his skin, he was like a armful of kindling inside. When Marvin come out of the well on the little table all black and blue and covered with blood and dirt and his legs twisted like cornstalks my mother fainted. Just swooned right down and laid there in the dirt. The hens come pecking over by her and this one hen I always hated afterwards, just stepped in her hair and looked in her face like it was thinking about pecking her eye. I was only five or so, but I knew that hen was a bad one and I got a little stick and took after it. So they brought Marvin into my mother and father’s room and the hired man, he was just a young fellow from the Mason’s place was the one that started to wash off the blood. He was real gentle about it, but he could hear this crackling like paper when he wiped off Marvin’s forehead, and he seen it wasn’t no use, so he put down the bloody washrag in the basin very soft and he went out. Took Marvin all night to die, but he never opened his eyes. He was unconscious. My mother never went
