Obit

TED SANDERS

The boy who will fall asleep to the story of the bear will grow old and wordlessly die. In the end he will die across his pancakes, coughing up blood in a restaurant in a distant town, blood freckling his arms and throat of his latest wife, the table, the dark stone floor where bright ice and dark water from his spilled glass will also fall. All of these event will occur, and more. But the boy who will become this man is still young. He still lives in the yellow house where he was conceived. He was conceived as the sun shone over spruce trees into the front bedroom, onto the face that would become his mother's, not far from the hall where the dog slept then, dreaming beneath the soft sounds falling through the open darkwood door.

The woman who lay in the buttress of sun slanted against the front window of the yellow house will explicitly recall her memories of that experience, of that day. She will continue to believe in these recollections steadfastly, long after the man that lay with her then had died. She will continue to believe in them even though, as she knows, there were a number of instances in the yellow house over the surrounding days which could, practically speaking, have been the act which led to conception.

The step that will never be fixed - the middle step on the short stairs of the front porch - will upend beneath the foot of the man as he comes to the yellow house on another sunny day, not so far off. He will, by then, have nearly forgotten what it is like to consider this house his own. The boy - who from his bedroom window at the front of the house will have watched his father come up the walk, through the shadow of the spruce tree - will hear the snap of bone. Neither man will ever forget this sound.

The dog that will die unseen in the winter - far from home, where the gate will have blown open in the snow - will be named after the dog that slept in the hall in the yellow house. The boy, grown into a man, will have named this new dog. He will remember the old dog, the one who lay in the hall and dreamt of berries and beasts, the sound of his owner's voice. This dog, the first, dies beneath the kitchen table, his feet stirring, as the bear's story is being told.

The woman who will die in the hospital bed late into the night - senseless and mute on morphine, breathing slow and shallow while her family around her in and out of the room, waits for her to die - once lay in another bed wishboned around the man, watching the basket colored sun make its urchin shapes through the spruce tree in the front yard. The man, moving above her, over her - with rigid arms and fisted shoulders, feeling the cool intermittent press of her breasts against his ribs - looked into the mottled sheet of sun that lay across the woman's face and the rumpled head of the bed. He considered, then, the wide hazel irises of the woman's eyes, eyes drawn to the window out into the sky over the front yard. The man believed at that moment that he would remember this sight of her: the sun across her skin, falling between her just-open lips where a fine mindless shape was curling, her skin lit and blooming, her carved arms raised around her head like a harp's arms, as if the delicate gesture unfolding through them were being sung wordlessly into sight in her face. The woman will survive this understanding.

The man who will wake in the night to the implausible pain of his own stopped heart will remember - as he is folding to his knees in the dark - standing outside the room of the boy, listening to the still young woman he once married sing to the boy a song as bear might sing. In the shadowed hall, he imagines the glint of peppermint. And the woman, the woman who will die in a dim hospital room, the mother of the boy who will die in a restaurant, the wife of this man who will die beside a bed in which a different woman will lie - this woman sings the bear's song to the boy, to the visiting man in the dark hall, to herself.

The man who will later break hi leg on the front step, will eventually marry a childless woman who is unable to conceive. To the boy, the new woman smells like the earth around trees, or honey and medicine, or wellwater. She will come to love the boy, will love the man he will become, will love the boy's child in turn. Years later, after the death of the father, this new woman will listen as the boy's mother recounts the moment the boy was conceived. The woman who smells like wellwater will hear the sight of the sun's spread across dusty glass, the spread of warmth up the inside of raised arms, the rumble of low sounds made by the husband, the sight of the sun itself - and she will know from her own memory the tree through which the sun shone, the window through which the sun must have fallen, though in her mind the room has always belonged to the boy. She will imagine, correctly or incorrectly, the sounds made by the man on that day.

The bear who lives in the woods licks peppermint from the palm of the old woman. From the steps of her porch each morning, the old woman feeds the peppermints to the bear - one after another after another - in order to keep him tame. The bear has no home that the old woman knows of. When the old woman walks to the white stream above the lake, the bear walks with her, and there as the old woman sits and watches, the bear slaps fish onto the bank. The bear eats his fill, and the old woman returns home, taking one fish or two with her, bent like silver moons inside her basket - all she can carry. She cooks the fish over the fire, gives silent thanks to the bear. Late each night, at bedtime, the bear returns. He sits at the bottom of the porch steps and sings to the old woman as she falls asleep. The bear sings deep and strong, a song of thankfulness and want. This is how the story ends.

The boy who will retell the story of the bear learns it from his mother. She tells him the story at night in his bed beside the window and she describes the whiteness of the peppermints given by the old woman, the gleam of the fish taken from the stream, and she sings the bear's wordless song to the boy, letting the bear's song press the boy to sleep - the boy who as a man will die in front of strangers, coughing blood onto his food. The boy dreams of the bear's song, fertile, low and wide; he will dream of the song as a man. He will tell this story to his own child, will mistake it for remedy, will elect to fail to sing the song.

The treehouse that will never be built will be described many times. A hackberry tree stands in the yard where he will later to pretend to introduce his son to the woman who smells like wellwater, though in fact they have already met. The leaves of the hackberry tree are perennially pocked with galls, and just over the man's head, high above the boy's, the tree's fingers open into a gesture of grasping, and the man imagines out loud to the boy a treehouse he believes he could build for them there. The boy tells his mother. The man mentions it to his new wife. The man and the boy discuss the treehouse occasionally at bedtime, with ambitious talk of trapdoors, rope ladders, spyholes. The man, eventually, will be survived by the possibilities of the treehouse; the boy will describe it, much later, to the young woman he believes he does not love.

The song that will be instead sung to the boy's child is sad and sweet. The boy knows the song, likes the song, but the young woman who will sing it to his child will sing an extra verse the boy will have never before heard - not a verse so much as a small chorus, with a quicker cadence than the rest of the gentle song, a song which is not a lullaby, not even a bear's song but which has a lullaby's earnest swoon, and the extra verse sung by the woman will feel to the boy, for years, like being startled from half sleep. The boy will come to believe that he does not love the woman who sings that song.

The young woman who will sing to the boy's child will never know that the boy himself dislikes the extra verse. It is a verse he would never have otherwise heard. But the woman will sing just as she is sung to. Her grandfather sings her this song, and she will sing it to the boy and his child in the car, on the way to the hospital, the day before the boy's mother will die. She will sing it to the mother herself, deep in the last full night. Long after, elsewhere, this woman will die in a different car, will be survived by a different man to whom she will also have sung the song.

Hesitantly, suspiciously, the man who fathered the boy will ask the woman he once married about the circumstances surrounding the conception of their son. He will, by then, have forgotten things the woman will continue to remember.

The tree under which a stranger's daughter will later play - kneeling into the bed of brown needles, pressing the hashwork of white and red grooves into her skin, peeling malleable balls of sap from the bark and murmuring to herself - is the same tree that stands aside the front walk, limbs nodded deep over the half wanted patio furniture tilting loose-legged and flaking in the shade. It is the same tree through which the sun for years has fallen, making his way to the window of the front bedroom of the yellow house, the house the man has already left behind.

The bear in the story told to the boy does not enjoy the taste of peppermint. He licks the old woman's palms, slaps fish to the shore for her, but he is drawn to the whiteness of the peppermints, he imagines himself wounded by their bite. The truth reveals itself near the story's end, but the mother will never reveal it to her son, his father, the dog in the hall. She will have no cause to reveal it because the story, in the mother's telling, fails to end. Instead it is survived by this tune, by the sad braided rumble of the bear's voice.

The boy's child will never know the yellow house. He will never firmly believe in his memories of the woman who once sung there. He will know different houses, different songs. He will know different mothers. He will know the bear's story, but not his song. Nevertheless, he will die in sadness, far from the girl he will never learn not to love.
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Neither the man nor the boy nor any of the women loved by them each will ever notice that the bear's story, as told by the boy's mother, does not return from song. They will fail to suspect the things that will befall the bear, the old woman. Nonetheless they, and others they love in turn will sing songs to themselves which resemble the bear's song. They, and others, will encounter and remember days full of voice. They will weep, celebrants and mourners, they will share breath with lovers, possessed by moments of unassailable faith; children will croon inaudible over busy new hands; dogs will dream and mutter, safe in warm houses, paws trembling; bones will mend; trees will seek sun. These things will grow and turn bare. And after all there will be survivors.