The Third Bear Read Online Free PDF Page A

shoes Aunt Etta had dug up out of the closet pinched my feet.
    Sensio had said nothing as he was bound, nose twitching at the sharp citrus of the orange blossoms behind them. He'd said nothing as we'd formed our peculiar circus procession from the bungalow where we lived to the waiting photographer. No reporters had come, despite Aunt Etta's phone calls, but she'd hired the photographer anyway - and he stood there in white shirt, suspenders, gray trousers, black wingtip shoes. He looked hot even though it was only spring, and was so white I thought he must be a Yankee. His equipment looked like a metal stork. A cigarette dangled from his lips.

    "That's him," Aunt Etta said, as if Sensio were her rabbit and not mine. Shameful, but that's what I felt that long-ago day: Sensio is mine, not hers. I was twelve in 1955, and big for my age, with broad shoulders that made me look hunched over. I did chores around the orange groves. I helped to get water from the well. I'd driven the tractor. In the season, I'd even harvested the oranges, just for fun, alongside the sweating, watchful migrant workers, who had no choice. But I was still a kid, and as Aunt Etta put Sensio down and bound him to the post I'd pounded in the day before, all I could think was that Aunt Etta had no right to do anything with him.
    "Do you have to tie him up like that?" the photographer asked Aunt Etta, but not in a caring way. He reached down to ruffle my hair and wink at me. I flinched away from him, wrinkling up my nose. People were always touching my head because of my curly red hair, and I hated it.
    Aunt Etta just looked at him like he was stupid. She was stiff that morning - a broken hip that had never completely healed - and further trapped in her ridiculous dress. She grunted with effort and no little pain as she leaned precariously to loop the rope over and over again across Sensio's chest. "Shit," she said. I heard her, distinct if soft. She looked over as she straightened, said, "Rachel, finish it for me."
    So it was I who tied the last knots, who knelt there beside Sensio, smelling the thick yet sweet musk of his fur.
    "It's okay," I said to him, thinking, Aunt Etta 's just gone a little cracked. She'll be better soon. I tried to will the message into that deep, liquid eye, through to the brain beyond.
    Aunt Etta tapped my shoulder with her thick fingers. "Come away."
    "Are we ready, then?" the photographer asked. Aunt Etta wasn't paying him by the hour. He was already looking at his watch.
    In the photo, Aunt Etta has the end of Sensio's rope in her right hand, arm extended down, while her left arm is held at a right angle, palm up, thumb against the index finger. At first, people think she's holding a cigar in her hand, because the photograph is so old. Then they realize that's just a crease in the image and they think she holds something delicate - something she's afraid to close her hand around for fear of damaging it.

    But I know there was nothing in Aunt Etta's hand that day.

    We lived in a land of gentle hills, farms, lakes, and small towns. We lived on an orange grove in the middle of the state of Florida, near a place that's now a favorite truck stop on the freeway, Okahumpka. The attraction called Dog Land lay to the west and Orlando to the east - a sleepy town that didn't know that Walt Disney's touch would one day awaken it. My parents had died in an automobile accident when I was four. I had a confused memory or two of life with them that involved the snow in Minnesota and bulky, uncomfortable coats, but nothing more. At age five, after living for a few months with a cousin who didn't really want me, I was sent to live with Aunt Etta, who, it soon became clear, wanted me mostly for the modest life insurance my parents had left for me. Etta Mary Pitkaginkel was her full name, but no one dared call her that because no one could say it without laughing.
    She worked for A. C. Pittman, who owned over ten thousand acres of orange groves