Bear by Marian Engel Read Free Book Online Page B

aloud.The thought of the bear baited,flayed, pursued, was agony.Oh Lord, keep him safe from harm!” she heard herself saying. She had not prayed in years.

Chapter 11
    Homer came next day with his son, Sim, and a roto tiller and seed. She had forgotten he had said he would help her start a garden.To the north ofthe house there was a little path in the woods that led to a clearing full of fungus and poison ivy.“Them raspberries there,” he said. “You could cut back them raspberries. There’s nothing like the raspberries here.Some say old Colonel Cary brought them. You don’t get them down south like that.One thing about raspberries: they love wood ash. Sim ‘11 cut them back foryou— I can tell you’re notmuch of a gardener, the way you just stand there—and by the middle of the summer you’ll have some dandies.And you watch out around here in the summer, too: there’s lots of wild asparagus. Little narrow stuff. Sparrow grass, people call it. Whenever I find a bunch of wild asparagus I take off my hat and say a little thank-ee to Colonel Cary, because I know he brought that. Like mushrooms?“He stood staring at her, eyes gleaming, a strange salesman’s smile on his face.“Sure.” “Morels in the woods. May morels. Have you been in the woods back there?““Just the other way, to the beaver pond.” “Oh, it’s all bog, there, but up here,you know he used to have an apple orchard.Now Sim and I’ll get this part cleared up and tilled or you,and you just go back in there and look for morels. Ugly things they are, but they’regood eating. Fry ‘em in butter.Guess they’re why I never got excited about margarine, so many things are tasty with a bit of butter or bacon fat don’t work out with margarine. Now we’ll get this coarse-dug for you and then you can fork it and if you’re smart you won’t be too much of a lady to snatch some manure out of the bear’s stable — oh, 1 seen you, I know you can take him and tie him up the other side of the yard, you’re getting to be great friends with that bear — and manure the plot with that. Chicken manure’d be better but beggars can’t be choosers. Then about the end of the week you can put your seeds in. You’ll lose some to the rabbits but you should be able to get up some beans and a few cabbages and peas. There’re stakes in the shed.“Your turnip and your potato — that’s what the old folks used to live on— you won’t be around here long enough to wait for them,I reckon.” The rest of what he had to say was drowned out by Sim at the rototiller, a machine that made more noise than a hundred motorboats. She fled into the bush and discovered black, gnarled old apple trees, and dozens of the strange decayed phalluses that are morels. She thought of cooking them up for Homer and the silent, albino-looking Sim, but suddenly their racket topped, they waved good-bye and chugged off into the dusk.She cooked and ate her morels and found them good— they tasted the way truffles were supposed to taste in books but never seemed to in reality— and went upstairs to spend the evening reading, drinking Scotch whisky and licking a Lifesaver sucker Homer had stuck in her bag of groceries and seeds as a treat.It was long after midnight when she went to bed,none the wiser from the perusal of a book that purported to reconcile Genesis and The Origin of Species.

Chapter 12
    Now, the long warm days taught her the meaning of serendipity. She seeded the garden carefully, then on impulse took the bear to root in the morel patch, where he grubbed in a kind of ecstasy, digging and snuffing and once in a while raising his weak eyes to her, going back to work as if there might be no more time. Afterwards, she took him to the edge of the river, where he sat in the water like a large-hipped woman, dragging his bottom on the stones.“I love you, bear,” she said. That night, the bear’s heavy tread on the staircase did not disturb her. Let him come. She had taken