Bears Discover Fire

The troopers were sniffing the air and nodding. The bear smell was still strong. Wallace and I wrapped Mother in the bedspread and started with her body back out to the highway. The troopers stayed behind and scattered the bears’

fire ashes and flung their firewood away into the bushes. It seemed a petty thing to do. They were like bears themselves, each one solitary in his own uniform.

There was Wallace’s Olds 98 on the median, with its radial tires looking squashed on the grass. In front of it there was a police car with a trooper standing beside it, and behind it a funeral home hearse, also an Olds 98.

“First report we’ve had of them bothering old folks,” the trooper said to Wallace.

“That’s not hardly what happened at all,” I said, but nobody asked me to explain. They have their own procedures.

Two men in suits got out of the hearse and opened the rear door. That to me was the point at which Mother departed this life. After we put her in, I put my arms around the boy. He was shivering even though it wasn’t that cold.

Sometimes death will do that, especially at dawn, with the police around and the grass wet, even when it comes as a friend.

We stood for a minute watching the cars and trucks pass. “It’s a blessing,” Wallace said. It’s surprising how much traffic there is at 6:22 A.M.

That afternoon, I went back to the median and cut a little firewood to replace what the troopers had flung away. I could see the fire through the trees that night.

I went back two nights later, after the funeral. The fire was going and it was the same bunch of bears, as far as I could tell. I sat around with them a while but it seemed to make them nervous, so I went home. I had taken a handful of newberries from the hubcap, and on Sunday I went with the boy and arranged them on Mother’s grave. I tried again, but it’s no use, you can’t eat them.

Unless you’re a bear.

THE TWO JANETS

I’m not one of those people who thinks you have to read a book to get something out of it. You can learn a lot about a book by picking it up, turning it over, rubbing the cover, riffling the pages open and shut. Especially if it’s been read enough times before, it’ll speak to you.

This is why I like to hang around used-book stores on my lunch hour. I was at the outdoor bookstall on the west side of Union Square, the one that opens out of huge crates, when my mother called. It is tempting here to claim to remember that I was looking at an old paperback of, say, Rabbit Run, but actually it was Henry Gregor Felsen’s Hot Rod, the cover telling the whole story through the hairdos.

The pay phone on the corner nearest Sixteenth Street was ringing and wouldn’t stop. Finally, I picked it up and said, “Hello? Mother?”

“Janet? Is that you?” My mother has this uncanny, really, ability to call on pay phones and get me. She does it about once a month.

Well, of course it was me: otherwise, would I have answered “Mother”?

“Did you have trouble finding me?” I asked.

“If you only knew. I called three phones, and the last two you wouldn’t believe.” It doesn’t always work.

“So how’s everything?” I asked. It came out “everthang.” My accent, which I have managed to moderate, always reemerges when I talk with anybody from home.

“Fine.” She told me about Alan, my ex-fiancé, and Janet, my best friend. They used to call us the Two Janets.

Mother keeps up with my old high school friends, most of whom are of course still in Owensboro. Then she said:

“Guess what. John Updike just moved to Owensboro.”

“John Updike?”

“The writer. Rabbit Run? It was about a week ago. He bought a house out on Maple Drive, across from the hospital there.”

“This was in the paper?”

“No, of course not. I’m sure he wants his privacy. I heard it from Elizabeth Dorsey, your old music teacher. Her oldest daughter, Mary Beth, is married to Sweeney Kost Junior who sells real estate with that new group out on Leitchfield Road. She called to tell me because she thought you might be interested.”

It is well-known that I have an interest in literature. I came to New York to get a job in publishing. My roommate already has one at S&S (Simon and Schuster) and I called her before I went back to work. She doesn’t go to lunch until two. She hadn’t heard anything about John Updike moving to Owensboro, but she checked PW (Publishers Weekly) and found an item saying that John Updike had sold his house in Massachusetts and moved to a small Midwestern city.

That bothered me. Owensboro sits right across the river from Indiana, but it’s still the South, not the Midwest.