Emory’s Gift (25 page)

“You shot my bear, McHenry,” I hissed, my voice actually quivering with wrath. I stepped forward so that he could see me. McHenry’s eyes were filled with a wild light, his face a milky pale, his chin trembling. We locked stares and his look was beseeching, hopeful. I knew my expression was as pitiless as my heart. “You shot my bear, and now I’m going to shoot you, McHenry. I’m going to shoot you dead.”

I was thrilled to say it. I wanted to rampage; I wanted to kill him and beat his body. I’ve never felt such a berserk anger, such an out-of-control bloodlust. I pointed the gun at his face and lowered the barrel until it was just inches from his nose.

Emory stopped me. He lifted his paw and pushed the gun away. “No,” I cried, attempting to aim, and this time the bear released McHenry and knocked the rifle out of my hands.

Hot tears gushed from me as the fever passed. I felt giddy and sick now, and without thinking I plunged my face into Emory’s coarse fur, hugging him and, after a moment, feeling him hug me back.

I recovered with a flash of fear when it occurred to me that McHenry was now free to grab his own rifle, which was lying just a few feet away. I broke from Emory’s embrace and looked to the hunter, but I needn’t have worried. He was still lying there in the same paralyzed position, his eyes wide with shock, beyond terror, beyond comprehension. I bent over and picked up his gun, my hands shaking from the aftereffects of what I’d almost done.

“I’ll keep this for you, but I’m not stealing it. I’m no thief,” I spat. “Don’t let your dogs out until we’re long gone. Understand what I’m saying?”

He nodded, his face still a sickly white.

“Come on, Emory,” I said. As we turned away and headed back toward home, I tried to act as if I weren’t fighting a rising panic.

Emory had been shot. I had no idea what we were going to do now.

chapter

TWENTY-SIX

WHEN Emory and I reached the top of the rocky ridge, I glanced back at McHenry, and he was still lying there, looking like he might never recover from having a grizzly bear’s teeth just inches from his throat.

Good.

If Emory was limping at all, I couldn’t tell, but he was still bleeding from his shoulder. He followed me docilely, and again the unfairness of it all embittered me. Why couldn’t people just leave things alone? We hadn’t been hurting anybody.

My dad was waiting for me on the back deck. His face looked tired.

“Emory’s been shot!” I shouted at him. I went straight to the pole barn, as if physically avoiding my dad’s wrath would be possible. Emory strode over to the couch and eased himself down on it. My dad came up from behind me.

“Give me my rifle, Son,” he said quietly.

I snapped the bolt back and released the shell, then handed him the weapon butt first, barrel down. He nodded at the other one.

“Where did you get that?”

I told him what had happened with McHenry and the dogs at the Old Cabin. My father listened without expression at first, but he grew contemplative when I explained that Emory had pushed the rifle away when I pointed it at the man lying on the ground. I didn’t tell my father about the nearly demonic rage that had infused my blood with a lust for murder, but I think he concluded something like that must have happened.

“What you did was just about the most stupid thing possible. You could have been killed. You could have shot a man. You broke into my gun cabinet when you expressly knew I had locked you out of it, locked you out for what turns out to be a very good reason. You must never disobey me again like that, understand? We said we were in this together, but Charlie, you violated that pact, Son.”

All of this was true and all of this could have been said with a hot anger, a cold fury, or even physical blows, and it would have been justified. But there was something almost gentle in the way my father pronounced his words that made me feel that there was a different meaning to it all.

Later, as I was thinking it over, it occurred to me that there was an unstated possibility at work in this whole injustice. If the words on the barn wall had, in fact, been written by Emory and if he was, in fact, a Civil War soldier somehow returned in the form of a living grizzly bear, then what McHenry had been up to was nothing less onerous than hunting a man down with a pack of dogs and then shooting him out of a tree, murdering him in cold blood. Not a bear, a man.

And though he was not by any means helpless, Emory couldn’t hold a rifle, couldn’t fight back. I had done wrong, but it had been in the name of defending something we might not understand but which had the potential of being innocent human life. So Dad needed to work it all out in his mind, and he wasn’t there yet. It was wrong to disobey, but was it really wrong to disobey when it meant saving a man’s life?

As I said, all of this came to me later. Right then I was fixated on the fact that Emory was bleeding. We couldn’t really see the wound through the fur, though he allowed my father and me to lean in and peer at it. It would not heal without help.

My dad departed in the Jeep to go get the vet. He left me there to keep Emory company, though I suspect that he also didn’t want me along to see what sort of tale he told the veterinarian to convince him to return with his large-animal surgical bag. Later, when I asked my dad about it, he flushed and said that he may have given the impression that the emergency concerned a horse, though he never said so directly.

“You’ll be okay, Emory,” I said, hoping it was true. Emory gazed back at me with oddly serene eyes. Maybe I was imagining it, but I suddenly had the impression that he knew more about what was going on than any of us.

Several hours passed while we waited for the vet. Outside, the clanking and rattling of the school bus on its way to Benny H. sounded like a long-distance call from another time zone, a faint reminder that far, far from here I had another life. During all that time, Emory just sat there, not crying or panting or anything despite his wound. I was the one who felt like crying, frankly—when I thought back to what happened at the Old Cabin, where I’d been ready to shoot McHenry, I felt like I was going to throw up. What if I had actually done it?

The vet was Tim Humphrey’s father. His name was Jim, and I believe that in the family there was also a sister named Kim and for all I knew a dog named Pim. Dr. Jim Humphrey had Tim’s blond hair and blue eyes and muscular frame, and gave me a toothy grin as he was getting out of the Jeep.

The smile went away when he saw what was in our pole barn.

“My God!” he exclaimed. At first he stood stock-still, staring at Emory lying there on the couch, and then he retreated, stumbling over his own feet. He yanked open the passenger door of the Jeep and jumped in, slamming the door behind him as if the canvas roof of the vehicle couldn’t be shredded by a grizzly bear.

“You said … you said…,” Dr. Humphrey stammered through the open car window.

“I know. I’m sorry,” my father said sadly. “I had to get you out here, Jim.”

My father gave the vet the short, easy version: this was a tame bear who had followed me home. We’d set the bear free, but a hunter had winged him with a bullet and we needed the shoulder patched up so the bear could recover.

It sounded reasonable to me, but Dr. Humphrey was hanging on to the door handle as if he were on a wild carnival ride. He shook his head in terror when my dad got to the part about the town’s veterinarian treating a grizzly bear for a gunshot wound.

“Isn’t there something we can give him to knock him out?” my dad asked when Dr. Humphrey remained intransigent.

The prospect calmed the vet a little. He agreed that yes, he could tranquilize the animal, or rather,
we
could do so while he sat in the Jeep and clung to the door latch. He fussed in his bag and before long produced a large hypodermic, into which he drew some clear liquid from a glass bottle.

He handed the shot to my father. We left the animal doctor in the Jeep and went back to the pole barn together, but my father put out an arm to stop me. Emory was acting strangely. He was off the couch, and his eyes were big and round. He was drooling heavily.

I was both baffled and alarmed, but my father read him better than I did: “He’s scared.” My dad looked back over his shoulder at the vet, realization clicking. “Ah, okay. Wait here, Charlie.”

Unhesitatingly my father stepped closer to a mad-looking, anxious, frightened grizzly bear. It was at that moment that I realized with wonder that my father really did believe me; he truly thought Emory was more than just a bear.

“It’s different now, Emory,” my father said. “We won’t have to amputate. And we have medicine a hundred times more powerful than whiskey that will take the pain away.”

During the Civil War, bullets were mushy, fragmenting metal balls and getting hit with one pretty much guaranteed amputation as the only way to prevent infection and death. If Emory had been a soldier in that war, he had no doubt heard the screams as his compatriots were held down and had their legs and arms literally sawed off, the lucky ones getting a few sips of alcohol before the surgeon operated.

“See how thin this needle is? I’m going to poke you with it, in your other shoulder. All right? This is the medicine that will make you sleepy.”

Dr. Humphrey had heard all this and now watched in amazement as Emory calmed down and went back to the couch and sat there while my father injected him. Almost immediately Emory’s eyes clouded and his head drooped, and he collapsed into a deep slumber.

The Jeep door creaked open cautiously. Dr. Humphrey entered the barn. “How did you … I’m not sure what just happened,” he whispered.

My dad reached a decision. “Charlie, show Dr. Humphrey the Polaroid.”

I handed over the picture to the veterinarian, who accepted it and stared at it numbly. My dad nodded at the newly repainted wall. “The bear wrote those words. We painted them out, but they were right there.”

Dr. Humphrey handed the photograph back to my dad with an absolutely disbelieving expression on his face.

As it turned out, it wasn’t as serious a wound as I’d thought. The bullet came closer to missing Emory than hitting him, furrowing a path that was, as Dr. Humphrey described it, “through and through.” He sewed up the wound with quick efficiency, giving us some antibiotic tablets.

We’d shut the door to the pole barn, which is why we only heard but didn’t see a vehicle crunch into our driveway. My dad indicated with his eyes that I should go see who it was.

McHenry stood in what was now noonday sun. He still looked worse for wear, haggard and drained, his face twitching with residual emotions from his encounter up at the Old Cabin. His ponytail trembled at the back of his head. He came around the front of his big gleaming pickup truck.

“Are you here for your rifle?” I asked him in even tones.

He regarded me with a puzzled expression.

“Your rifle?” I repeated pointedly.

“Oh. No, I just … I wanted to see.”

What I knew he meant was that he wanted to
understand,
but I wasn’t going to go easy on him and explain that none of us had gotten that far yet. What I said instead was, “Wait here and I’ll fetch it.”

When I came back out of the house with his rifle in one hand and the shells from it in another, he was standing just inside the pole barn, staring at the sleeping bear. His mouth was open in awe.

“Here’s your gun, Mr. McHenry.” I handed him the bullets, too, which he put in his pocket.

“Will he recover, Jim?” McHenry asked the vet.

Dr. Humphrey, like everybody in town, did business with McHenry. They shook hands now. “There’s no reason he shouldn’t make a full recovery. I can’t tell without an X-ray, but I’m all but certain there are no bullet fragments in the wound. It’s through and through. So you’re, uh, part of all this, McHenry?” Dr. Humphrey asked.

“Part of it,” McHenry repeated, as if unsure what that meant.

Dr. Humphrey didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to offend someone like McHenry. So he just shrugged. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he finally allowed, a neutral statement that could mean that he believed the bear understood English or that he believed my father and I were lunatics.

“You know, Jim,” my father said, clearing his throat, “I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone what you saw up here today.”

“Of course,” Dr. Humphrey replied, with just enough hesitation so that I knew he thought the request ludicrous. There was a bear with a bullet wound sleeping on a couch up on Hidden Creek Road; how could he
not
talk about it?

They stood awkwardly for a moment, as if not sure what to say next.

“I’ll walk you to your car, Jules,” my father finally announced firmly but politely. McHenry nodded, took a final long look at Emory, and then followed my father up the driveway to his truck.

“How would a bear do that, do you suppose, Charlie? Write those words?” Dr. Humphrey asked. It was a question I was tired of. I didn’t know how a bear could paint such clear script onto a wall. No one knew.

And there was a larger significance in the question, though I didn’t recognize it at the time. By focusing on the mechanics of how a bear managed to hold a paintbrush, the veterinarian was shying away from the implications of the words themselves. It was as if Emory had drawn meaningless circles and squares, instead of informing us indirectly that we all needed to adjust our bedrock assumptions. Dr. Humphrey was looking at the words as objects and not part of a coherent sentence, so that the main mystery was how the bear had written them.

As Dr. Humphrey cleaned up I kept an eye on my dad and McHenry, who were having what looked like an urgent conversation up by McHenry’s pickup truck. I quailed inside when I saw my father showing him the Polaroid—McHenry was the last person I would trust with anything about Emory!

It was decided that McHenry would swing through town on the way back to his lodge and deposit Dr. Humphrey at his clinic, saving my dad the drive. The last I saw of him, Dr. Humphrey had fully recovered his normal demeanor and was talking animatedly to McHenry, for whom recovery would doubtless take a while longer.