Stories about the bear who had tamed a man brought more than just onlookers, too. More farmers than usual came to Rack Miller to sell their corn, so they could see the sight; and more buyers went out of their way to come to buy, so there was maybe half again as much business as usual. At the end of the whole harvest season, there was Rack Miller with a ledger book showing a huge loss. He wouldn’t be paid enough by the buyers to come close to making good on what he owed the farmers. He was ruined.

  He went through a few jugs of corn likker and took some long walks, but by late October he’d given up all hope. One time his despair led him to point a pistol at his head and fire, but the powder for some reason wouldn’t ignite, and when Rack tried to hang himself he couldn’t tie a knot that didn’t slip. Since he couldn’t even succeed at killing himself, he finally gave up even that project and took off in the dead of night, abandoning mill and ledger and all. Well, he didn’t mean to abandon it—he meant to burn it. But the fires he started kept blowing out, so that was yet another project he failed at. In the end, he left with the clothes on his back and two geese tucked under his arms, and they honked so much he turned them loose before he was out of town.

  When it was clear Rack wasn’t just off on a holiday, the town’s citizens and some of the more prominent farmers from round about met in Rack Miller’s abandoned house and went over his ledger. What they learned there told them clear enough that Rack Miller was unlikely to return. They divided up the losses evenly among the farmers, and it turned out that nobody lost a thing. Oh, the farmers got paid less than Rack Miller’s ledger showed, but they’d get a good deal more than they had in previous years, so it was still a good year for them. And when they got to inspecting the property, they found the ratchet mechanism in the scale and then the picture was crystal clear.

  All in all, they decided, they were well rid of Rack Miller, and a few folks had suspicions that it was that Alvin Smith and his half-Black boy who’d turned the tables on this cheating miller. They even tried to find out where he might be, to offer him the mill in gratitude. Someone had heard tell he came from Vigor Church up in Wobbish, and a letter there did bring results—a letter in reply, from Alvin’s father. “My boy thought you might make such an offer, and he asked me to give you a better suggestion. He says that since a man done such a bad job as miller, maybe you’d be better off with a bear, especially if the bear has him a manservant who can keep the books.”

  At first they laughed off the suggestion, but after a while they began to like it, and when they proposed it to Davy and the bear, they cottoned to it, too. The bear got him all the corn he wanted without ever lifting a finger, except to perform a little for folks at harvest time, and in the winter he could sleep in a warm dry place. The years he mated, the place was a little crowded with bearflesh, but the cubs were no trouble and the mama bears, though a little suspicious, were mostly tolerant, especially because Davy was still a match for any of them, and could grin them into docility when the need arose.

  As for Davy, he kept true books, and fixed the scale so it didn’t ratchet anymore, giving honest weight every time. As time went on, he was so well liked that folks talked about running him for mayor of Westville. He refused, of course, since he wasn’t his own man. But he allowed as how, if they elected the bear, he’d be glad to serve as the bear’s secretary and interpreter, and that’s what they did. After a year or two of having a bear as mayor, they up and changed the name to Bearsville, and the town prospered. Years later, when Kenituck joined the United States of America, it’s not hard to guess who got elected to Congress from that part of the state, which is how it happened that for seven terms of Congress a bear put its hand on the Bible right along with the other congressmen, and then proceeded to sleep through every session it attended, while its clerk, one Davy Crockett, cast all its votes for it and gave all its speeches, every one of which ended with the sentence “Or at least that’s how it looks to one old grizzly bear.”

  1999

  Missed

  Tim Bushey was no athlete, and if at thirty-one middle age wasn’t there yet, it was coming, he could feel its fingers on his spine. So when he did his hour of exercise a day, he didn’t push himself, didn’t pound his way through the miles, didn’t stress his knees. Often he relaxed into a brisk walk so he could look around and see the neighborhoods he was passing through.

  In winter he walked in midafternoon, the warmest time of the day. In summer he was up before dawn, walking before the air got as hot and wet as a crock pot. In winter he saw the school buses deliver children to the street corners. In summer, he saw the papers getting delivered.

  So it was five-thirty on a hot summer morning when he saw the paperboy on a bicycle, pedaling over the railroad tracks and up Yanceyville Road toward Glenside. Most of the people delivering papers worked out of cars, pitching the papers out the far window. But there were a few kids on bikes here and there. So what was so odd about him that Tim couldn’t keep his eyes off the kid?

  He noticed a couple of things as the kid chugged up the hill. First, he wasn’t on a mountain bike or a street racer. It wasn’t even one of those banana-seat bikes that were still popular when Tim was a kid. He was riding one of those stodgy old one-speed bikes that were the cycling equivalent of a ’55 Buick, rounded and lumpy and heavy as a burden of sin. Yet the bike looked brand-new.

  And the boy himself was strange, wearing blue jeans with the cuffs rolled up and a short-sleeved shirt in a print that looked like . . . no, it absolutely was. The kid was wearing clothes straight out of Leave It to Beaver. And his hair had that tapered buzzcut that left just one little wave to be combed up off the forehead in front. It was like watching one of those out-of-date educational films in grade school. This kid was clearly caught in a time warp.

  Still, it wouldn’t have turned Tim out of his planned route—the circuit of Elm, Pisgah Church, Yanceyville, and Cone—if it hadn’t been for the bag of papers saddled over the rack on the back of the bike. Printed on the canvas it said, “The Greensboro Daily News.”

  Now, if there was one thing Tim was sure of, it was the fact that Greensboro was a one-newspaper town, unless you counted the weekly Rhinoceros Times, and, sure, maybe somebody had clung to an old canvas paper delivery bag with the Daily News logo—but that bag looked new.

  It’s not as if Tim had any schedule to keep, any urgent appointments. So he turned around and jogged after the kid, and when the brand-new ancient bicycle turned right on Glenside, Tim was not all that far behind him. He lost sight of him after Glenside made its sweeping left turn to the north, but Tim was still close enough to hear, in the still morning air, the faint sound of a rolled-up newspaper hitting the gravel of a country driveway.

  He found the driveway on the inside of a leftward curve. The streetlight showed the paper lying there, but Tim couldn’t see the masthead or even the headline without jogging onto the gravel, his shoes making such a racket that he half-expected to see lights go on inside the house.

  He bent over and looked. The rubber band had broken and the paper had unrolled itself, so now it lay flat in the driveway. Dominating the front page was a familiar picture. The headline under it said:

  BABE RUTH, BASEBALL’S

  HOME RUN KING, DIES

  CANCER OF THROAT CLAIMS LIFE

  OF NOTED MAJOR LEAGUE STAR

  I thought he died years ago, Tim thought.

  Then he noticed another headline:

  INFLATION CURB SIGNED BY TRUMAN

  PRESIDENT SAYS BILL INADEQUATE

  Truman? Tim looked at the masthead. It wasn’t the News and Record, it was the Greensboro Daily News. And under the masthead it said:

  TUESDAY MORNING, AUGUST 17, 1948 . . . PRICE: FIVE CENTS.

  What kind of joke was this, and who was it being played on? Not Tim—nobody could have known he’d come down Yanceyville Road today, or that he’d follow the paperboy to this driveway.

  A footstep on gravel. Tim looked up. An old woman stood at the head of the driveway, gazing at him. Tim stood, blushing, caught. She said nothing.

  “Sorry,” said Tim. “I didn’t open it, the rubber band must have broken when it hit the gravel, I—”

  He looked down, meant to reach down, pick up the paper, carry it to her. But there was no paper there. Nothing. Right at his feet, where he had just seen the face of George Herman “Babe” Ruth, there was only gravel and moist dirt and dewy grass.

  He looked at the woman again. Still she said nothing.

  “I . . .” Tim couldn’t think of a thing to say. Good morning, ma’am. I’ve been hallucinating on your driveway. Have a nice day. “Look, I’m sorry.”

  She smiled faintly. “That’s OK. I never get it into the house anymore these days.”

  Then she walked back onto the porch and into the house, leaving him alone on the driveway.

  It was stupid, but Tim couldn’t help looking around for a moment just to see where the paper might have gone. It had seemed so real. But real things don’t just disappear.

  He couldn’t linger in the driveway any longer. An elderly woman might easily get frightened at having a stranger on her property in the wee hours and call the police. Tim walked back to the road and headed back the way he had come. Only he couldn’t walk, he had to break into a jog and then into a run, until it was a headlong gallop down the hill and around the curve toward Yanceyville Road.

  Why was he so afraid? The only explanation was that he had hallucinated it, and it wasn’t as if you could run away from hallucinations. You carried those around in your own head. And they were nothing new to him. He’d been living on the edge of madness ever since the accident. That’s why he didn’t go to work, didn’t even have a job anymore—the compassionate leave had long since expired, replaced by a vague promise of “come back anytime, you know there’s always a job here for you.”

  But he couldn’t go back to work, could only leave the house to go jogging or to the grocery store or an occasional visit to Atticus to get something to read, and even then in the back of his mind he didn’t really care about his errand, he was only leaving because when he came back, he’d see things.

  One of Diana’s toys would be in a different place. Not just inches from where it had been, but in a different room. As if she’d picked up her stuffed Elmo in the family room and carried it into the kitchen and dropped it right there on the floor because Selena had picked her up and put her in the high chair for lunch and yes, there were the child-size spoon, the Tupperware glass, the Sesame Street plate, freshly rinsed and set beside the sink and still wet.

  Only it wasn’t really a hallucination, was it? Because the toy was real enough, and the dishes. He would pick up the toy and put it away. He would slip the dishes into the dishwasher, put in the soap, close the door. He would be very, very certain that he had not set the delay timer on the dishwasher. All he did was close the door, that’s all.

  And then later in the day he’d go to the bathroom or walk out to get the mail and when he came back in the kitchen the dishwasher would be running. He could open the door and the dishes would be clean, the steam would fog his glasses, the heat would wash over him, and he knew that couldn’t be a hallucination. Could it?

  Somehow when he loaded the dishwasher he must have turned on the timer even though he thought he was careful not to. Somehow before his walk or his errand he must have picked up Diana’s Elmo and dropped it in the kitchen and taken out the toddler dishes and rinsed them and set them by the sink. Only he hallucinated not doing any such thing.

  Tim was no psychologist, but he didn’t need to pay a shrink to tell him what was happening. It was his grief at losing both his wife and daughter on the same terrible day, that ordinary drive to the store that put them in the path of the high school kids racing each other in the Weaver 500, two cars jockeying for position, swerving out of their lanes, one of them losing control, Selena trying to dodge, spinning, both of them hitting her, tearing the car apart between them, ripping the life out of mother and daughter in a few terrible seconds. Tim at the office, not even knowing, thinking they’d be there when he came home from work, not guessing his life was over.

  And yet he went on living, tricking himself into seeing evidence that they still lived with him. Selena and Baby Di, the Queen Dee, the little D-beast, depending on what mood the two-year-old was in. They’d just stepped out of the room. They were upstairs, they were in the back yard, if he took just a few steps he’d see them.

  When he thought about it, of course, he knew it wasn’t true, they were dead, gone, their life together was over before it was half begun. But for that moment when he first walked into the room and saw the evidence with his own eyes, he had that deep contentment of knowing that he had missed them by only a moment.

  Now the madness had finally lurched outside of the house, outside of his lost and broken family, and shown him a newspaper from before he was born, delivered by a boy from another time, on the driveway of a stranger’s house. It wasn’t just grief anymore. He was bonkers.

  He went home and stood outside the front door for maybe five minutes, afraid to go in. What was he going to see? Now that he could conjure newspapers and paperboys out of nothing, what would his grief-broken mind show him when he opened the door?

  And a worse question was: What if it showed him what he most wanted to see? Selena standing in the kitchen, talking on the phone, smiling to him over the mouthpiece as she cut the crusts off the bread so that Queen Dee would eat her sandwiches. Diana coming to him, reaching up, grabbing his fingers, saying, “Hand, hand!” and dragging him to play with her in the family room.

  If madness was so perfect and beautiful as that, could he ever bear to leave it behind and return to the endless ache of sanity? If he opened the door, would he leave the world of the living behind, and dwell forever in the land of the beloved dead?

  When at last he went inside there was no one in the house and nothing had moved. He was still a little bit sane and he was still alone, trapped in the world he and Selena had so carefully designed: Insurance enough to pay off the mortgage. Insurance enough that if either parent died, the other could afford to stay home with Diana until she was old enough for school, so she didn’t have to be raised by strangers in daycare. Insurance that provided for every possibility except one: that Diana would die right along with one of her parents, leaving the other parent with a mortgage-free house, money enough to live for years and years without a job. Without a life.

  Twice he had gone through the house, picking up all of Diana’s toys and boxing them, taking Selena’s clothes out of the closet to give away to Goodwill. Twice the boxes had sat there, the piles of clothes, for days and days. As one by one the toys reappeared in their places in the family room or Diana’s bedroom. As Selena’s dresser drawers filled up again, her hangers once again held dresses, blouses, pants, and the closet floor again was covered with a jumble of shoes. He didn’t remember putting them back, though he knew he must have done it. He didn’t even remember deciding not to take the boxes and piles out of the house. He just never got around to it.

  He stood in the entryway of his empty house and wanted to die.

  And then he remembered what the old woman had said.

  “That’s OK. I never get it into the house anymore these days.”

  He had never said the word “newspaper,” had he? So if he hallucinated it and she saw nothing there in the driveway, what was it that she never got into the house?

  He was back out the door in a moment, car keys in hand. It was barely dawn as he pulled back into that gravel driveway and walked to the front door and knocked.

  She came to the door at once, as if she had been waiting for him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s so early.”

  “I was up,” she said. “I thought you might come back.”

  “You just have to tell me one thing.”

  She laughed faintly. “Yes. I saw it, too. I always see it. I used to pick it up from the driveway, carry it into the house, lay it out on the table for him. Only it’s fading now. After all these years. I never quite get to touch it anymore. That’s all right.” She laughed again. “I’m fading, too.”

  She stepped back, beckoned him inside.

  “I’m Tim Bushey,” he said.

  “Orange juice?” she said. “V8? I don’t keep coffee in the house, because I love it but it takes away what little sleep I have left. Being old is a pain in the neck, I’ll tell you that, Mr. Bushey.”

  “Tim.”

  “Oh my manners. If you’re Tim, then I’m Wanda. Wanda Silva.”

  “Orange juice sounds fine, Wanda.”

  They sat at her kitchen table. Whatever time warp the newspaper came from, it didn’t affect Wanda’s house. The kitchen was new, or at least newer than the 1940s. The little Hitachi TV on the counter and the microwave on a rolling cart were proof enough of that.

  She noticed what he was looking at. “My boys take care of me,” she said. “Good jobs, all three of them, and even though not a one still lives in North Carolina, they all visit, they call, they write. I get along great with their wives. The grandkids are brilliant and cute and healthy. I couldn’t be happier, really.” She laughed. “So why does Tonio Silva haunt my house?”

  He made a guess. “Your late husband?”

  “It’s more complicated than that. Tonio was my first husband. Met him in a war materials factory in Huntsville and married him and after the war we came home to Greensboro because I didn’t want to leave my roots and he didn’t have any back in Philly, or so he said. But Tonio and I didn’t have any children. He couldn’t. Died of testicular cancer in June of ’49. I married again about three years later. Barry Lear. A sweet, dull man. Father of my three boys. Account executive who traveled all the time and even when he was home he was barely here.”