Black Bears
Rickey Gard Diamond
She’d not remembered the bear for decades, until a day it was useful. But the memory had hunkered down near her brain stem, where fear and teeth live. When a girl, she had made it a habit to sit on the old, long-dead bear, its mouth open on the floor of her grandfather’s library, its ears moth-eaten. She’d been told that when the family first built the farm house where she grew up, black bear were easy to come by. Bear grease had kept their boots waterproofed and guarded their iron gears from rust, and the meat had lasted a long time, too sickening sweet except in small portions. The bears seen since then, when Grandpa was a boy, were hardly worth the trouble of hunting, not like the big one there in front of the wood stove. She didn’t know how old that bear must have been, older than Grandpa.
Brick suburbs had encroached on the bears’ woods by then, the farmhouse uncoupled from the farm. She never saw a live bear until a class trip to the Lincoln Park Zoo. That bear had tucked into himself to sleep with back toward them, disappointingly plump and humped and mild, not like the fanged one back home. It sprawled out footless with four legs flat, its belly flat, too.
She loved to feel her belly against his back, stroking his fur, which, though dry, remained oily enough to leave a dusty coating on her hands that smelled musty. She felt a pleasure fierce as her fear when she wiped hands clean on her clothes afterward. Only soap worked to rid her of what she imagined death must feel and smell like, yet she could never wait for the sink. First she’d rub the warmth of her thigh through her jeans, her muscle. She had touched the golden glass eyes of the bear, the ivory fangs and hard tongue, and the animal lay silent, unblinking.
Her cousins, Doug and Denny, used to scare her with the bear whenever they came over. They’d put their hands under its jaw and raise its head up to make it snarl at her. She shouldn’t have been scared, but she was, and they knew it. They’d chased her with it one time, wearing it like a cape until they were caught by their grandpa.
Her cousins wore holsters and had caps for their guns, cowboy hats and one sorry pair of spurs that had broken. They fought over them, jingling, until one of them had the idea of giving the broken pair to her, so she could play too. But mostly she pretended to be a wild mustang. They could never catch her, so after only a short run they lost interest. They had their brother-rivalries to maintain.
“Can so.”
“Cannot.”
“Can so.”
“Cannot, lemme see you.”
She was supposed to be playing with her doll house, but its plastic figures stood straight with their arms at their sides, never smiling or crying, and too tiny. She made them talk to each other, and sometimes they got into fights, bumping their bodies with sound effects, like the ones Grandpa read her in the Sunday Comics. Biff, bam, ba-boom. It made her grandmother come in and ask what she was doing.
“That’s not the way to play with your dolls,” she’d say. “I think they want to have a tea party, don’t you? What did you do with that pretty china set Santa gave you?” Sometimes Grandma would make Doug and Denny have a tea party with her, but they were only expected to put up with it for a minute or two. “Duke is barking, come on. Last one out’s a rotten egg.”
She couldn’t run outdoors in winter weather without stopping to put on her snow pants under her dress, and by then Dougie and Denny were gone. She rather liked it when they were gone. She was sick of their contests. That’s what she told herself.
They all grew up, and Denny, who was younger than Doug, finally won their rivalry. Doug had tested out 4-F for the draft, found out as nearly deaf—probably the reason he’d done poorly in school, everyone said, trying to make him feel better. Denny showed no such mercy, dare, double-dare you. As soon as he was 18, he signed up for the marines so he could go straight to Nam.
The marines were in the front lines, the toughest, everyone said. The family had a party and Denny wore his uniform, and Doug stayed at a distance, quiet. When it was time for Denny to go, Doug gave him a soft punch in the shoulder, saying, “You go get’em.”
Three months later, Denny stepped on a mine, exploded to death. Everyone said they couldn’t believe it, not even when the body came home; they kept the casket shut. Doug got quieter, off by himself. He lived with his mom, though he had a job at the garage, and this was way past the time when people thought he ought to get married and carry on the family name.
The family name didn’t matter for her. She’d already given that up, married at nineteen, hoping to save the young boy she’d been dating from the draft. He already had his number. She ought to have started in sooner having babies. That’s what she told herself. But the war had gotten worse, and she only discovered she was pregnant after he went straight to Nam. She let him down, having a girl-baby in war-time. She sent him a picture of their girl on the bear rug, hoping he’d laugh. She looked darling, but scary next to those teeth.
The war went on and on, as if it would never stop. She read about it and even began to think the students from Kent State might have been within their rights, protesting the war, although she wished more people would support the soldiers when they came home. It was awful, this killing coming so close. Soldiers had gone and shot kids on campus, but the soldiers were nothing but kids, she saw, because by then she’d birthed a boy herself, and it seemed if the war grew long enough, he might go straight to Nam next.
She voted in the next election, keeping it secret that her vote canceled out her husband’s, who was still overseas, determined we should win any war that we entered. She was sick of this war, sick of what she saw on the news every night. What chance had Denny ever had in those jungles? There were dozens of others whom she knew, equally dead. Those who remained alive had parts of themselves missing, sometimes feet or fingers, sometimes a heart, a light in the eye, dead as that black bear for all of their teeth-baring. What chance would her own boy have?
Her husband made it home from the war. He sat silent, almost as silent as Denny, as silent as Doug. There wasn’t enough left of him to care about their children, or about carrying on the family name, or much of anything. He had been a medic, but didn’t want to talk about it.
Then President Johnson stepped down and there was a mess in Chicago, everyone mad at everyone, so that Nixon ended up on top of the stack and the war kept on, coming closer to home now in other ways. She read with mixed excitement and fear about Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, both brave and both killed, on top of the second Kennedy, and then Martin Luther King. Biff, bam, ba-boom. She didn’t count up all those murdered men, the ones who had talked about dreams, until that day she was useful. Her memories of this had only blurred and sunk into something dark and frightening that became the floor of her life.
She tried not to care when they caught Kissinger in Cambodia and the papers leaked out of the Pentagon, and finally the men in charge grudgingly went to Paris for peace talks, because at least they still had their Cold War to prove things. All of this stayed jumbled underfoot, her own life mostly concerned with making ends meet and feeding her two kids healthy food and sewing them matching red plaid outfits for Christmas portraits, which she gave to what was left of the family. Some parts weren’t talking to other parts by now, opinions about the war heated. Mostly it was the women, who tried to talk.
Her aunt said one Christmas about this time that her son looked an awful lot like Denny had when he had been that age. Her mom added quickly, “And like his dad, too,” because he had come home alive at least, though he sat unmoved by any memory he could share. She longed for some difference she couldn’t describe.
She worked up nerve to divorce her husband after Nam was over, worn out by his never talking, his not liking her anymore, or much of anything. She went to school, she got a job, she met a guy who had never gone to Nam. Her kids hated him; then her kids hated her. They felt sorry for their dad, who was more a man than the man she’d fallen in love with, who played music and talked a lot, and whose family had real china for real tea parties, and who thought the war in Nam had been run by knuckleheads.
His family fought with words all the time. Biff-bam-ba-boom. They talked and talked and nobody won because nobody lost. That wasn’t the point; talking was. She decided that, however behind the times she might be, she would make love, not war. She and her new husband had great sex, including the weekend they went to Washington, D.C. on business, combining work with pleasure. Britain’s new prime minister was in town, her purse in hand, meaner than any men in Britain, and visiting with the actor who by then was the President.
From their hotel room, she watched Her Honorable Mrs. on television news, proof that women had been liberated, at last able to race as fast as boys all the way to the Falklands. It was enough to make her wonder if the women’s movement had been all that good a thing. Maybe none of the commotion over women and segregation had meant much of anything that would make a real difference. She had noticed every black person she saw in her nation’s capital was either cleaning with mops, or standing on corners, asking for coins.
All the suited people, white as she was, hurried for appointments, looking worried they were late. A careerist herself now, she took up the feeling, walking faster, hiding her mood’s darkness, which told her unless she hurried up and worked harder, she’d be poor again.
She and her husband could afford this time together because they were here on business and could legally deduct it from their taxes, paid to protect their nation’s privilege of winning whatever war they were in. Losers could not expect pleasures, and her pleasure was useful to what happened later. Sex would soften her cells, change dry bone fear into cartilage and blood. It would leave her mitochondria dancing, ready for shape-shifting.
Afterward, she and her husband went to visit the memorial that had been in all the news. The one designed by a woman, young and Asian, which gave her some hope that maybe some things could change, had changed. She wanted to see the thing. She wanted to see Denny’s name there on the wall.
The black of the stone was vast and polished and flat and angled to pierce the earth and sink itself and all who saw it. She stood in front of its shining panels with hundreds of other people, gazing up at dulled engraved names, all the war dead spelled out, every man and woman who had gone straight to Nam, who had come home, here to a black wedge that broke the ground and opened buried hearts who saw it. She didn’t want to cry, surprised by the urge. She barely remembered Denny as a young man; there hadn’t been much life lived when his had ended. She still thought of him as boy. He had been a boy.
Her own boy was in Macedonia, carrying a gun called a peacekeeper, as she stood there. Over my dead body, she had said to him about his enlisting, and he had signed up anyway, and now dressed in camouflage. He would learn skills in the army, most of them about killing, and now he was a man. His father didn’t say this, nor did her son, but this was how manhood proved itself, by what it never had to say. Her cousin Doug knew that, too, without ever having to see Denny’s name spelled out on stone.
Her boy would try to win the same rivalry: cannot, can so, cannot, can so. A bunch of knuckleheads, that’s what she told herself, but it wouldn’t help for her to say so. Only boys who ran in their races could say it to have it mean anything, she thought. She stood there, surprised by all she faced here: Sorrow. Helplessness. Frustration. Rage.
She stood at the wall and recalled a news report she had read not long before this and, unbidden, the story from Yosemite returned. Bears, dark as this marble, had made their rounds to raid trash cans at night, becoming so common, so present, people no longer took them seriously—as if their feet were footless, their spineless backs splayed out in some living room. Until one bear had come rippling on its blades of gliding shoulder, and they heard the woman in her sleeping bag, screaming, “Oh dear god!” Parts of her were eaten, missing until they shot the beast, who had only been hungry and tired of garbage.
A hollow inside her echoed, ohdeargod. Parts of her eaten and missing at this black marble wall, one bear tumbling out, its teeth locked with an older bear of flattened death and dry girlhood. Pleasure had moved her blood earlier, had flexed her heart and, now emptied by the glassy eyes of grief all around her, she smelled that gaping mouth of memory, and she wept.
Her new husband, guilty of living, looked grateful for the chance to put his arm around her huddled sobs and prove he was man enough not to cry, at least. She was useful, she saw then, and hated him as fiercely as she loved him for his part in the sham of walled protection, entrapping them both, and her own soft melting part in it, as practiced and as hateful and lovely as the flowers at her feet—some of them hers, cut off in full bloom. All their flowers broke open in colors more sorrowful than human eyes can swallow alone.
It was then her heavy-headed snuffling shifted its shape. Something toothed in her, large and shambling on warm thigh muscle, stood up inside, ferocious and whole.
She’d not remembered the bear for decades, until a day it was useful. But the memory had hunkered down near her brain stem, where fear and teeth live. When a girl, she had made it a habit to sit on the old, long-dead bear, its mouth open on the floor of her grandfather’s library, its ears moth-eaten. She’d been told that when the family first built the farm house where she grew up, black bear were easy to come by. Bear grease had kept their boots waterproofed and guarded their iron gears from rust, and the meat had lasted a long time, too sickening sweet except in small portions. The bears seen since then, when Grandpa was a boy, were hardly worth the trouble of hunting, not like the big one there in front of the wood stove. She didn’t know how old that bear must have been, older than Grandpa.
Brick suburbs had encroached on the bears’ woods by then, the farmhouse uncoupled from the farm. She never saw a live bear until a class trip to the Lincoln Park Zoo. That bear had tucked into himself to sleep with back toward them, disappointingly plump and humped and mild, not like the fanged one back home. It sprawled out footless with four legs flat, its belly flat, too.
She loved to feel her belly against his back, stroking his fur, which, though dry, remained oily enough to leave a dusty coating on her hands that smelled musty. She felt a pleasure fierce as her fear when she wiped hands clean on her clothes afterward. Only soap worked to rid her of what she imagined death must feel and smell like, yet she could never wait for the sink. First she’d rub the warmth of her thigh through her jeans, her muscle. She had touched the golden glass eyes of the bear, the ivory fangs and hard tongue, and the animal lay silent, unblinking.
Her cousins, Doug and Denny, used to scare her with the bear whenever they came over. They’d put their hands under its jaw and raise its head up to make it snarl at her. She shouldn’t have been scared, but she was, and they knew it. They’d chased her with it one time, wearing it like a cape until they were caught by their grandpa.
Her cousins wore holsters and had caps for their guns, cowboy hats and one sorry pair of spurs that had broken. They fought over them, jingling, until one of them had the idea of giving the broken pair to her, so she could play too. But mostly she pretended to be a wild mustang. They could never catch her, so after only a short run they lost interest. They had their brother-rivalries to maintain.
“Can so.”
“Cannot.”
“Can so.”
“Cannot, lemme see you.”
She was supposed to be playing with her doll house, but its plastic figures stood straight with their arms at their sides, never smiling or crying, and too tiny. She made them talk to each other, and sometimes they got into fights, bumping their bodies with sound effects, like the ones Grandpa read her in the Sunday Comics. Biff, bam, ba-boom. It made her grandmother come in and ask what she was doing.
“That’s not the way to play with your dolls,” she’d say. “I think they want to have a tea party, don’t you? What did you do with that pretty china set Santa gave you?” Sometimes Grandma would make Doug and Denny have a tea party with her, but they were only expected to put up with it for a minute or two. “Duke is barking, come on. Last one out’s a rotten egg.”
She couldn’t run outdoors in winter weather without stopping to put on her snow pants under her dress, and by then Dougie and Denny were gone. She rather liked it when they were gone. She was sick of their contests. That’s what she told herself.
They all grew up, and Denny, who was younger than Doug, finally won their rivalry. Doug had tested out 4-F for the draft, found out as nearly deaf—probably the reason he’d done poorly in school, everyone said, trying to make him feel better. Denny showed no such mercy, dare, double-dare you. As soon as he was 18, he signed up for the marines so he could go straight to Nam.
The marines were in the front lines, the toughest, everyone said. The family had a party and Denny wore his uniform, and Doug stayed at a distance, quiet. When it was time for Denny to go, Doug gave him a soft punch in the shoulder, saying, “You go get’em.”
Three months later, Denny stepped on a mine, exploded to death. Everyone said they couldn’t believe it, not even when the body came home; they kept the casket shut. Doug got quieter, off by himself. He lived with his mom, though he had a job at the garage, and this was way past the time when people thought he ought to get married and carry on the family name.
The family name didn’t matter for her. She’d already given that up, married at nineteen, hoping to save the young boy she’d been dating from the draft. He already had his number. She ought to have started in sooner having babies. That’s what she told herself. But the war had gotten worse, and she only discovered she was pregnant after he went straight to Nam. She let him down, having a girl-baby in war-time. She sent him a picture of their girl on the bear rug, hoping he’d laugh. She looked darling, but scary next to those teeth.
The war went on and on, as if it would never stop. She read about it and even began to think the students from Kent State might have been within their rights, protesting the war, although she wished more people would support the soldiers when they came home. It was awful, this killing coming so close. Soldiers had gone and shot kids on campus, but the soldiers were nothing but kids, she saw, because by then she’d birthed a boy herself, and it seemed if the war grew long enough, he might go straight to Nam next.
She voted in the next election, keeping it secret that her vote canceled out her husband’s, who was still overseas, determined we should win any war that we entered. She was sick of this war, sick of what she saw on the news every night. What chance had Denny ever had in those jungles? There were dozens of others whom she knew, equally dead. Those who remained alive had parts of themselves missing, sometimes feet or fingers, sometimes a heart, a light in the eye, dead as that black bear for all of their teeth-baring. What chance would her own boy have?
Her husband made it home from the war. He sat silent, almost as silent as Denny, as silent as Doug. There wasn’t enough left of him to care about their children, or about carrying on the family name, or much of anything. He had been a medic, but didn’t want to talk about it.
Then President Johnson stepped down and there was a mess in Chicago, everyone mad at everyone, so that Nixon ended up on top of the stack and the war kept on, coming closer to home now in other ways. She read with mixed excitement and fear about Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, both brave and both killed, on top of the second Kennedy, and then Martin Luther King. Biff, bam, ba-boom. She didn’t count up all those murdered men, the ones who had talked about dreams, until that day she was useful. Her memories of this had only blurred and sunk into something dark and frightening that became the floor of her life.
She tried not to care when they caught Kissinger in Cambodia and the papers leaked out of the Pentagon, and finally the men in charge grudgingly went to Paris for peace talks, because at least they still had their Cold War to prove things. All of this stayed jumbled underfoot, her own life mostly concerned with making ends meet and feeding her two kids healthy food and sewing them matching red plaid outfits for Christmas portraits, which she gave to what was left of the family. Some parts weren’t talking to other parts by now, opinions about the war heated. Mostly it was the women, who tried to talk.
Her aunt said one Christmas about this time that her son looked an awful lot like Denny had when he had been that age. Her mom added quickly, “And like his dad, too,” because he had come home alive at least, though he sat unmoved by any memory he could share. She longed for some difference she couldn’t describe.
She worked up nerve to divorce her husband after Nam was over, worn out by his never talking, his not liking her anymore, or much of anything. She went to school, she got a job, she met a guy who had never gone to Nam. Her kids hated him; then her kids hated her. They felt sorry for their dad, who was more a man than the man she’d fallen in love with, who played music and talked a lot, and whose family had real china for real tea parties, and who thought the war in Nam had been run by knuckleheads.
His family fought with words all the time. Biff-bam-ba-boom. They talked and talked and nobody won because nobody lost. That wasn’t the point; talking was. She decided that, however behind the times she might be, she would make love, not war. She and her new husband had great sex, including the weekend they went to Washington, D.C. on business, combining work with pleasure. Britain’s new prime minister was in town, her purse in hand, meaner than any men in Britain, and visiting with the actor who by then was the President.
From their hotel room, she watched Her Honorable Mrs. on television news, proof that women had been liberated, at last able to race as fast as boys all the way to the Falklands. It was enough to make her wonder if the women’s movement had been all that good a thing. Maybe none of the commotion over women and segregation had meant much of anything that would make a real difference. She had noticed every black person she saw in her nation’s capital was either cleaning with mops, or standing on corners, asking for coins.
All the suited people, white as she was, hurried for appointments, looking worried they were late. A careerist herself now, she took up the feeling, walking faster, hiding her mood’s darkness, which told her unless she hurried up and worked harder, she’d be poor again.
She and her husband could afford this time together because they were here on business and could legally deduct it from their taxes, paid to protect their nation’s privilege of winning whatever war they were in. Losers could not expect pleasures, and her pleasure was useful to what happened later. Sex would soften her cells, change dry bone fear into cartilage and blood. It would leave her mitochondria dancing, ready for shape-shifting.
Afterward, she and her husband went to visit the memorial that had been in all the news. The one designed by a woman, young and Asian, which gave her some hope that maybe some things could change, had changed. She wanted to see the thing. She wanted to see Denny’s name there on the wall.
The black of the stone was vast and polished and flat and angled to pierce the earth and sink itself and all who saw it. She stood in front of its shining panels with hundreds of other people, gazing up at dulled engraved names, all the war dead spelled out, every man and woman who had gone straight to Nam, who had come home, here to a black wedge that broke the ground and opened buried hearts who saw it. She didn’t want to cry, surprised by the urge. She barely remembered Denny as a young man; there hadn’t been much life lived when his had ended. She still thought of him as boy. He had been a boy.
Her own boy was in Macedonia, carrying a gun called a peacekeeper, as she stood there. Over my dead body, she had said to him about his enlisting, and he had signed up anyway, and now dressed in camouflage. He would learn skills in the army, most of them about killing, and now he was a man. His father didn’t say this, nor did her son, but this was how manhood proved itself, by what it never had to say. Her cousin Doug knew that, too, without ever having to see Denny’s name spelled out on stone.
Her boy would try to win the same rivalry: cannot, can so, cannot, can so. A bunch of knuckleheads, that’s what she told herself, but it wouldn’t help for her to say so. Only boys who ran in their races could say it to have it mean anything, she thought. She stood there, surprised by all she faced here: Sorrow. Helplessness. Frustration. Rage.
She stood at the wall and recalled a news report she had read not long before this and, unbidden, the story from Yosemite returned. Bears, dark as this marble, had made their rounds to raid trash cans at night, becoming so common, so present, people no longer took them seriously—as if their feet were footless, their spineless backs splayed out in some living room. Until one bear had come rippling on its blades of gliding shoulder, and they heard the woman in her sleeping bag, screaming, “Oh dear god!” Parts of her were eaten, missing until they shot the beast, who had only been hungry and tired of garbage.
A hollow inside her echoed, ohdeargod. Parts of her eaten and missing at this black marble wall, one bear tumbling out, its teeth locked with an older bear of flattened death and dry girlhood. Pleasure had moved her blood earlier, had flexed her heart and, now emptied by the glassy eyes of grief all around her, she smelled that gaping mouth of memory, and she wept.
Her new husband, guilty of living, looked grateful for the chance to put his arm around her huddled sobs and prove he was man enough not to cry, at least. She was useful, she saw then, and hated him as fiercely as she loved him for his part in the sham of walled protection, entrapping them both, and her own soft melting part in it, as practiced and as hateful and lovely as the flowers at her feet—some of them hers, cut off in full bloom. All their flowers broke open in colors more sorrowful than human eyes can swallow alone.
It was then her heavy-headed snuffling shifted its shape. Something toothed in her, large and shambling on warm thigh muscle, stood up inside, ferocious and whole.
About the author
Rickey Gard Diamond is both a journalist and a fiction writer, but her work in both realms most often concerns women and economic issues. She earned an MFA in Writing from Vermont College, where she was a professor of liberal studies in the undergraduate program for 18 years. Her fiction has appeared in The Sewanee Review, The Louisville Review, Other Voices, Kalliope, Plainswoman, and other journals. She has also written a novel, Second Sight. Diamond is also the founding editor of Vermont Woman, where she has widely published articles and book reviews. She is among the recognized writers in Vermont Odysseys: Essays on the New Vermont. Recently, she won an investigative journalism award from the National Newspaper Association for her Vermont Woman series: An Economy of Our Own.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.