Emory’s Gift (39 page)

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 could 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.

“Tomorrow, then. Ice cream tomorrow,” I suggested.

She gave me a lingering, speculative look. “Okay, Charlie,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

I picked her up at the Grassy Valley Ranch, where the Shelburtons had built a house and now lived full-time. Mr. Shelburton had bought my dad out of the American bison business and was still selling buffalo meat, which had finally started to catch on with consumers a little bit. Beth and I decided that instead of eating ice cream we felt like walking the horse path that eventually led up to the trickle of water we still called Dead Man’s Falls.

She told me the man she married was a nice enough guy but that he was a secret drug addict and had nearly bankrupted her and then he got another woman pregnant. So she had divorced him and was taking the summer off after winning a big case for her firm. She needed to “reset,” she said.

I told her I was studying grizzly bears and how critical they were to the ecosystem. How every year we had to euthanize several who became unafraid of mankind. It was the part of my job that bothered me more than anything. Beth said she could understand that.

We sat on a log along the path and I told her she was my first love and that I would always cherish the memory of her. She smiled her wonderful smile and said she felt the same way. With no awkwardness at all I leaned forward and kissed her, and it was the same sensation as in eighth grade, the same soft lips, the same loud thumping of my heart.

I knew in that moment there was love to be found and redemption to be had in the arms of this girl from long ago.

Her trip to Selkirk River turned into an extended stay and then she decided to open a law office right there, across the street from the Baskin-Robbins where I finally managed to take her on our fifth or sixth date. McHenry shifted all the foundation’s paperwork to her so she had a client on her first day, and her business grew slowly but steadily enough that she managed.

I decided I wasn’t going to let her get away this time. We were married almost one year to the day after I ran into her on the streets of Selkirk River. We have three children: two boys and a girl. Beth was my first love, and now she’s my forever love.

I call her the Beth of Both Worlds.

My dad died not long ago. It was a sudden shock, because he’d only been diagnosed with stomach cancer a few days before. That’s how he would have wanted it, though: after seeing what the chemo did to Mom, after fighting that long, losing battle, he didn’t have it in him to put any of us through it again. The doctors told him he only had a few weeks and they were way long in their estimates.

He knew I loved him, though, because I told him often, and he knew that when he died I would miss him because I told him that, too. I did not suffer the same awful lack of completeness, closure I think they call it, that I felt when Mom passed away.

Nichole let me bury him next to Mom and actually bought the plot on the other side of him. “When we all get to heaven we’ll sort it out,” she told me with a laugh. My dad had many more years with Nichole than he’d had with Laura Hall, which gave me a start when I first thought of it. Nichole moved to Pittsburgh because of an ill sister, but she calls and visits frequently.

It occurred to me that after my dad died there was no one left alive who remembered my mother. Oh, I do know that there were plenty of people in town who could muster up an image of Laura Hall in their minds if they were challenged to do so, but not people who really
knew
her. I’m the only one who knows what it was like to sit at the dinner table, just the three of us, before she got sick and her illness became the focus of our lives. I’m the only one who remembers her touch and her smell, her kind eyes, the way she loved me and loved my father. I can hear her voice in my head, a gift I can’t share with anyone, not even Beth. She just has to take it on faith.

I still think about my mom every single day. She was the most wonderful mother a boy could have, and I will always, always miss her.

Did it really happen?
That’s what people ask me about Emory the bear, usually with cautious skepticism in their eyes, wanting to be drawn in, hoping to be convinced by me, but always with the reserved enthusiasm with which people will throw themselves into a magic act, knowing that in the end it’s all just sleight of hand.

Sure, they all know there was a bear. They all know that for a few weeks in the autumn of 1974 the bear lived in my pole barn. They can drive up and look at the words painted on the wall, and I wrote a book about the events they can buy right there on the spot. But I can’t prove that Emory was anything other than a tame bear, any more than I can prove that my mother was a wonderful, loving person. You either believe me or you don’t; you have faith or you don’t.

Here’s the question people should be asking: not
Did it really happen?
but
Why?

Sometimes I will gaze up at Ursa Major in the night sky and reflect on what Nichole J. Singleton told me: no one who is loved is ever truly alone.

“God Loves All.” Doesn’t that mean that whatever is out there, we’re not facing it on our own?

Could that be why Emory was sent with his message?

Most written accounts of the mild hysteria of that time suggest very convincingly that I wrote the words myself. That I, a little boy who had lost his mother, was so starved for attention, and so wanting to believe in life after death, fabricated a backstory for a lost circus bear who had turned to me for shelter. That I came up with the whole story, drawing inspiration from a couple of books I’d read as a kid, and that I cleverly positioned myself so that the words “God Loves All” were secretly written by me, while the sheer bulk of the grizzly bear hid my actions from the rest of the world.

Hey, could be. If we all accept the theory that I’m crazy, then clearly it’s possible I’ve deluded myself into believing Emory wrote those words. That’s possible, right? And what could be more insane than suggesting God exists and loves all of creation?

When I start asking these questions of people, Beth always gives me a warning look and I shut up. We’ve long ago decided there’s no point getting involved in this type of conversation. I just sometimes can’t help myself.

And as for Emory …

Sometimes I think I see him when I’m out among the bears. They are wondrous creatures, and to see them moving with ponderous grace along the rivers, doing their work, is something that takes my breath away. I’ll catch the eye of a grizzly and for just a moment I’ll believe I see Emory’s warmth, that glint of intelligence.

In a way, I’m always searching for Emory. And I believe that someday, I don’t know when, I will find him.

acknowledgments, explanations, and excuses

If you’re a student of geography, or perhaps just well informed about Northern Idaho, you’re possibly a bit perplexed over the location of the town of Selkirk River. It should be easy enough to find: just head up the highway on the west side of the mountains, going north out of Sandpoint, well east of Priest Lake, and there, stitched into a valley at the foot of the Selkirks, you’ll find a charming town with a movie theater, a junior high school, and its own newspaper.

Actually, no you won’t. Find it, I mean. I built it in my imagination, using spare parts from around the area. For example, there’s a road heading out of the town of Wallace that tracks a river in just the way that the unnamed stream flows into the fictional town of Selkirk River. The high school in Kellogg offered me the view and the terrain that I imagined for Charlie’s cross-country course. When Charlie went to the movies, it was the Panida Theater in Sandpoint that I pictured him attending—though I placed him in the theater prior to its magnificent restoration. In the end it was just easier to piece together the town in my mind until it exactly fit the story than to struggle to change Charlie’s experiences so they could take place in an existing location.