Two She-Bears Read Free Page A

me when I bandaged it, but I was filled with joy: He’s alive. His blood is as red as ever. If only I could, I would have taken that second white and strange husband and cut him open, birthing my other husband from inside him.
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    I looked at him, all set to go: I was confident that he had prepared thoroughly and happy for the small details that had returned to his mind and his hands. He put the food into two plastic containers that he took from the kitchen cupboard. He tucked the containers in his pack along with two bottles of water and did something, strange and new, that he’d never done before on those hikes of ours—he wrote down on a slip of paper all the items he was taking. Like a grocery list: “6 slices of bread,” “2 cucumbers,” “3 granola bars,” “1 sour cream,” “2 hard-boiled eggs.” Also “2 plastic containers,” “thermos,” “spoon,” “2 water bottles,” “backpack,” “toilet paper,” “this note,” and “pen.”
    He stuck the note and pen in his pocket, then surprised me with one more thing: he took our thick little bath mat and walked out of the house, taking it and the backpack to the plant nursery.
    I followed him: the wife knowing the events to come, the mother imagining them, the granddaughter happily anticipating—Come, bring it on, breathe life into our dry bones—and watching and remembering every detail. From the tool rack in the nursery he took items not taken on an ordinary hike: pruning shears, a sinister Japanese folding handsaw, a roll of green duct tape.
    The slow, purposeful pace of his activity suddenly quickened. More items were added to the list and the backpack—a spool of cord, a pocketknife, and, of course, the constant friend: the small pickax used for uprooting the bulbs of wildflowers, which in his hands, I knew, was likely to be a terrible weapon. All these he wrote down on the slip of paper, adding “car keys” to the list. He pocketed the keys, went out to the pickup truck in the carport, and put the pack on the backseat.
    Now he returned to the tool rack, took down the big scissors, and cut the bath mat into two equal pieces. He bored holes along their edges and attached pieces of the cord and placed them near the knapsack. From a pile in the corner of the carport he pulled a faded-green tarpaulin with metal-rimmed holes along the sides and slipped pieces of cord through them too and fastened them with knots. He put the canvas tarp in the back of the pickup and threw in a leaf rake and small broom; he rinsed out and cleaned the portable sprayer, filled it with water, pumped the compressor, sprayed some water on the ground, and then released the pressure valve, opened the tank, poured plastic glue into the water, closed and shook it, and compressed it again, put it in the back of the pickup truck, and added it to his list, along with “tarp,” “rake,” “broom,” and “sheep-shoes.” What sheep-shoes are and why one wears them I discovered only the next day, when he returned from the place he had gone and from the deed he had gone there to do.
    Now he turned to the old storeroom in the yard, a small wooden shed, a vestige of the early days of Grandpa Ze’ev and Grandma Ruth in the village, and emerged after a few minutes with a bundle in his hand: something long, rolled up in an old blanket with faded flower embroidery and tied with rope, like a corpse in a shroud bound at the ankles and neck.
    He laid the bundle on the floor by the backseat of the pickup, wrote down “rope,” “blanket,” and “
the
rifle,” the definite article. He bent down and locked the front wheel hubs manually the way guys do on trips for guys in treacherous off-road terrain, then sat down in the driver’s seat and shoved a hand in his shirt pocket, suddenly recalling the pack of cigarettes that had sat there for years, which he tossed with perfect aim into the trash bin.
    I was thrilled: something in the movement of his hand reminded me of his old