Emory’s Gift (7 page)

“Come on there!” Mr. Shelburton yelled in frustration at the beast they were working.

The buffalo herd stood around like parked cars. Flies buzzed at their faces. They were immense creatures, the males taller at the hump than I would be on tiptoes. Apparently, if they didn’t feel like moving, they didn’t move.

Finally one gigantic bull grudgingly bumped his way down the chute. Mr. Shelburton triumphantly leaped off his horse and onto the platform. He had what looked like a sharp stick in his hand—a long-handled hypodermic, most likely. He and my father grinned at each other.

Mr. Shelton stabbed down smartly and then, as they say, all hell broke loose.

chapter

SIX

THE second that long-handled syringe jabbed him, the bull let out a bellow and leaped straight in the air, kicking his rear legs. His mighty hooves slammed the wooden walls of the enclosure with a tremendous boom, rocking the platform and nearly spilling Mr. Shelburton to the ground.

The panic went through the rest of the herd like electricity. They surged forward and the stout wooden fence of the corral broke apart with a ripping, splintering sound. Mr. Shelburton leaped back onto his horse as the platform toppled and the buffalo stormed past him. Many of them smashed into the red truck and it was hard to tell if it was by accident or if they were just plain mad. They hit that vehicle with blow after blow from their butting heads. The headlights broke and the windshield spiderwebbed as the truck rocked back on its shocks.

And then all we could see was the herd’s backsides as they took off at a dead run, their hooves winking black in the dust cloud.

The freight train–like rumble faded as the buffalo, still going flat out, crested a small hill and dipped below its horizon. The only sound was the truck’s tires, two of which were giving up the ghost in a slow hiss. The side of the vehicle was ruined, dented up and down its length. One half of the corral gaped open, wood fragments from the fence lying trampled into the mud. Mr. Shelburton and my father just stared at the destruction, their mouths open, unable to speak.

I stood and cupped my hands over my mouth to shout, “That’s one!”

I made a careful mark on the paper and looked at the men expectantly.

My dad gave me an unreadable stare and then, for the first time in more than a year, he threw back his head and laughed. Pretty soon he and Mr. Shelburton were standing on the ground in the ruins of the corral, their hands on their knees, laughing so hard they could scarcely breathe.

For the first time ever I began to hope Dad and I were going to allow ourselves to enjoy life after all, no matter how unfair it was that we were here and Mom was not.

I had a lot to ponder that night, with the Grassy Valley Ranch and the brief visit by a grizzly bear who seemed to have disappeared as abruptly as he had come, but mostly, as I lay in bed that night, I thought about Kay. My love for her felt like a buffalo stampede thundering through my blood, capable of smashing through any fence I tried to put around it. It made me feel powerful one minute and weak the next. My bones ached with it.

By the time I eased myself out of bed the next morning my dad was back on the ranch. He left me a note telling me that he and Mr. Shelburton had “a lot of work to do.”

My dad has always had something of a gift for stating the obvious.

It was Sunday, a whole week away from the next junior-lifesaving lesson. A car pulled in the driveway around noon. I guiltily snapped off the television—my dad hated when I watched television on a sunny day—and went to see who it was.

Yvonne.
She emerged from a Chevy Vega, bending over to pull an aluminum-covered pan from the passenger side floorboards. She nudged her door shut with a hip. She was wearing a knee-length skirt and a white blouse with a big floppy collar. She set the pan on the hood of her car and messed with her blouse in the reflection of her car window.
What do you think, Yvonne, that I can’t see you unbuttoning your shirt from in here?

I toyed with the idea of not answering her knock but figured that maneuver would have consequences for me. You could see into the dining area from the driveway—I imagined she’d probably spotted me spying on her. I opened the door and she blinked at me, smiling.

“Hello, Charlie.”

“Hi, Miss Mandeville.”

She suddenly remembered the circumstances of our last meeting. “Are you feeling any better?” Her expression was now one of concern.

“Yeah.”

We stood looking at each other. I not only was not inviting her in, my arm was on the doorjamb to let her know she’d have to physically overpower me to get in the house.

“Is your dad home?” Her moist blue eyes flitted around the empty house.

“No, he’s working today.”

“On a Sunday?”

“He’s working.”

She nodded in defeat. “Okay.” Her smile brightened. “Say, I brought this for you. It’s warm, but not hot. Can you take it?” She held out the pan.

My vast experience with casseroles told me the specimen I was being given belonged to the tuna noodle variety.

I knew exactly what I was going to do with it.

I think I pretty much had given up ever seeing the grizzly again, so I was surprised when I got to the creek and saw him standing in the shallows. His head was darting quickly from side to side as he stared intently into the water, which at that place in the creek was barely half a foot deep. I crouched down by the banks, the casserole, which I had dumped into a paper bag, at my feet. The wind was flowing into my face, keeping my scent from the bear.

All at once the grizzly pounced, making huge splashes as he pursued a fish in my direction, lunging back and forth and bounding with jabbing forepaws again and again. I was startled by the astounding agility of the bear, the way he could stop that huge bulk in an instant and spring to one side, stabbing those claws into the water. The contrast with yesterday’s buffalo couldn’t have been more stark: both immensely powerful creatures, but with bison it was all about charging in a straight line. This animal before me could just as easily move laterally, turning tightly, graceful as he was strong.

He thrust his snout below the surface, blowing bubbles, then raised his head and sneezed. This struck me as so comical I couldn’t help but laugh a little, but when I did the bear lifted his head and looked straight at me, and then I stopped laughing.

“I brought you some food,” I told him, my voice taking on an involuntary quaver.

When bears walk right at you their amazing muscles bunch under their fur in a way that completely belies their dexterity. If I’d not seen this huge creature leaping about just moments ago I might assume him to be clumsy and slow. I took an easy, careful breath, holding my ground. This close, he looked as big as Yvonne’s Chevy Vega.

I nudged the grocery bag with my feet. “I hope you like it,” I stuttered as the bear stuck his head in the bag, exactly the way he’d held his nose underwater just moments before. He inhaled and the sides of the bag collapsed.

What I now know about bears is that there was no worry he wouldn’t like it. Bears are amazing omnivores. They eat seeds, berries, roots, carrion, and honey. But they also graze like cattle and will attack a moth swarm or an anthill with determination and gusto.

The bear ate the casserole and also the paper bag it came in.

“So, okay then,” I said.

The bear and I looked at each other. I expected the same expression I’d seen in the eyes of the buffalo: black and implacable, seeing me but not assigning me any particular importance in their wild world. But there was something about this bear’s expression that seemed … friendly.

I was friends with a grizzly bear.

Many years later I was in my office when a man phoned from Montana wanting to speak to a “bear guy.” I explained what a bear biologist was, and he seemed satisfied, though not impressed, with my credentials. He was calling with a question. “What,” he asked, “do you feed a grizzly bear?”

I tightened my grip on the phone. “You don’t,” I replied honestly.

He was a former aerospace executive who had purchased a Montana ranch to play on and who had discovered a grizzly living on the edge of his property. The man’s wife thought the bear looked hungry.

I’ll bet.

“Mister, if you feed that bear even once, he’ll start thinking of you as a food source and will follow you home,” I warned. “A grizzly can kill a man with a single swipe of his paw—you’ve seen his teeth, his claws? The only safe thing to do is to stay as far away from that bear as you can.”

But there was no one there to give eighth-grade Charlie Hall that sort of advice.

That day I made four trips up to the pole barn, returning each time laden with frozen dinners the bear crunched up as soon as I pried them out of their pans. Each time I came back the bear was wading around in the water, jumping fruitlessly on fish I couldn’t even see.

“You probably ought to give up on trying to catch a fish. It doesn’t look like it’s working out for you,” I told him.

The bear gave me a look that I swear contained a little bit of irritation. I decided to let him go about his business without the commentary.

After I handed over a cheese-and-noodle dish that rained macaroni like little dried-up worms when the bear bit into it, I told him that maybe that should do it for the day.

“I don’t know that my dad won’t notice if I keep giving you stuff at this rate,” I explained apologetically.

I figured there must have been something in my tone that the bear understood, because we stood there regarding each other for a minute and then he lumbered off. When I yelled, “Bye!” at him he did not look back.

I was in a good mood when I walked in the house, totally unprepared for the expression on my father’s face. He was standing in the kitchen by the sink.

“Hi, Dad,” I said cheerfully, unaware. “Did you finish rebuilding the corral?”

“Charlie,” my father said gravely. He held up the pan that had contained the lunch that Yvonne had made for the bear. A little of the slimy casserole still clung to the sides—I’d been planning to wash it when I got around to it.

“What’s this?”

Uh-oh.

chapter

SEVEN

“YVONNE called a minute ago to tell me I should put this in the oven for half an hour and then it’d be ready.” My dad set the pan in the sink and then crossed his arms, facing me. “You want to tell me what you did with our dinner?”

“I put it in a bag and threw it away,” I said, which, though not the exact truth, was practically truth’s identical twin. Or similar-looking cousin, anyway.

“Why did you do that?”

“Dad, it was
tuna noodle.
” What more defense did a man need?

My dad regarded me gravely. I fidgeted under his gaze. He drew in a deep breath and let it out as a whistle through his nose.

“Sit down, Son,” he said to me. We settled in at the kitchen table and he stared at me, searching for words. The fact that he was wrestling with what to say caused me to feel a rising dread. This was going to be about more than just kidnapping a casserole. Suddenly I flashed on what life would be like if Yvonne were sleeping down the hall from me in Mom and Dad’s room, if Yvonne cooked dinner at Mom’s stove, if Yvonne stopped in to try to give me a kiss every night.

If that happens,
I decided to myself,
I will run away.
I would run away with Kay, who had a driver’s license. We would drive to some place in Canada, where it would probably be legal for us to get married—it was Canada where they let people do whatever they wanted because it was too cold to bother stopping them.

“Charlie, when a man…” He reconsidered and started over, correcting himself. “Charlie, there are things a man needs.…”

I stared at him in alarm. We weren’t seriously going to talk about
this,
were we?

“Everyone thinks of me as being this lonely man who needs to have a woman around. They respect your mother, but they feel that time enough has passed and that I should have someone like Yvonne in my life, someone I can…” He sighed again. “So I’m really sort of helpless, here. I don’t really
like
Yvonne. She’s fine; don’t get me wrong. But I don’t like her in the girlfriend sense of the word.” He shook his head in wonder. “I’ve had four people ask me over to their house this month and they all include Yvonne, like the town took a vote.”

My dad agitatedly got to his feet. “There’s nothing wrong with the woman. I don’t want to hurt her feelings.” He stared moodily out the window. “But it’s as if the lack of any other alternatives makes her the default. Do you know what I mean by that?”

“So if you don’t have a girlfriend, then you wind up with the person who is just there,” I said to my father.

I briefly wondered if Kay had a boyfriend. If not, couldn’t I be the default? She didn’t act like she was going steady with anyone.

“Exactly.” My father nodded.

I was the oldest student in Junior Lifesaving, now that Dan Alderton had dropped out. I was “just there.” Who else could possibly be the default?

I looked at my dad, who was running a hand through his reddish brown hair. This was the deepest and most intimate conversation we’d had in a long time. What I should do, I realized, was tell him about Kay. It would be an equal trade of information, two men swapping
“women, you can’t live with them, you can’t live without them”
stories.

I opened my mouth, wondering where to start. Talking to my dad had just gotten to be so
hard.

“But Charlie. Throwing away her dinner, that was just rude. She was trying to do us a kindness. I was lucky I saw the pan in the sink and figured out what she was talking about, but when she first asked me I was without a clue.”

I hung my head, unhappy with the shift in mood.

“I raised you better than that.”

“You and
Mom
raised me,” I retorted with a sharpness that startled both of us. I didn’t know why I snapped at him. It wasn’t something I did very often, that was for sure. When the surprise and anger seeped out of his eyes they turned cold and grave and unloving. I knew that look.