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Our family has always had well-used books scattered and stacked throughout our house. Dad was a newspaper editor. Mother a high school English teacher who could spout Shakespeare at the drop of a ladle. And both families were large, loud and loquacious. Relatives dropped in constantly with jokes, gossip, and stories, often of unfortunate cousins or neighbors. And we lived in the woods where wild animals were curious, occasional visitors.
One day in December when I listened to Rancourt, the visiting storyteller at the Museum, tell a story about a bear, I wished my brother could hear him. I wished these rapt children could sit in his bedroom at my parents' house and gasp with him in suspense and wonder as Rancourt plunged tantalizingly toward the end of a colorful tale.
I had been to stores and searched. I had asked my parents what I might buy for them to give my brother for Christmas because they were too involved with his care to consider shopping. They had no suggestions. Their life was beyond suggestion.
So the next time I was at the Museum, I asked Rancourt if he might do a most unusual thing. Unusual for southern Caucasian Americans at least. I asked if he would come to my parents' house a few days before Christmas, and tell my brother one of his stories.
At the Museum, Rancourt was dark, slight, and unimposing until he began a story. Then he rose like the tale in our imagination and filled the room, filled the world around us. To my question, he answered, "Of course. Where do you live? When can I come?"
This was the man who was the designated storyteller for his tribe, as his father was before him. He was the man who said, "My people are the people of the bear. I tell the stories as they were told to me. My people have always hunted the bear."
The morning he was to come, my parents were ready. They had extra chairs in my brother's bedroom. David Huey, the black nurse who had become our dear friend, had bathed and dressed my brother Jim early. In his pale blue pajamas, Jim was raised in his adjustable bed and ready. The doorbell rang in my parents' small ranch-style house in the woods, and I went to answer.
There he was. A simple shirt and jeans. His long, dark hair. Those piercing eyes. But also, he held a large bird with a hood over its head. It clutched Rancourt's cloth-wrapped forearm.
"Come in," I said, as though it were the most normal thing in the world. From then on anything was possible.
The bird was a hawk and as we entered Jim's bedroom, David and my parents shrank visibly against the wall. A large hawk was hardly what they had expected. But Rancourt proceeded as though he had brought an apple pie or flowers. He sat down in an empty chair, took the hood from the hawk's head and began to speak.
I wish I could remember what he said. I think it was one of the remarkable animal stories he told at the Museum, a story about a bird, a strange marvelous creature. Or maybe it was about the bear, the story about which the children always said, although they had heard it many times, "Tell it again, the story about the bear." They always leaned intently forward as he told it.
David, my brother's nurse, relaxed and leaned forward as he stood by the wall. My parents stood in rapt attention. Because of an injured wing, the bird had been brought to the Nature Museum to heal, Rancourt explained. The regal, alert, fierce-eyed hawk totally dominated the room. After the first few minutes, there was no question but that he belonged there, was calmly pre-eminent in this odd gathering.
And my brother. Oh, his face shone. The delight in his eyes. The clear joy, the pleasure of what he beheld. The story that unfolded in that simple, bare, suburban bedroom dispelled the sorrow that resided there. It encompassed all the possible, all the sky- soaring wideness of the most marvelous place, the most fantastic story.
We are a family who often leans more to fiction than to reality, a quality that stood us in good stead when death waited at the end of the difficult hallway. But that morning with the hawk clutching the protected arm of my friend the Indian Rancourt, we knew transcendence. We had wildness among us. We stood within an ancient tale, a truth that swept around us.
He was soon gone, that hawk. And the Abenaki Indian Rancourt. But we had known gift. My speechless brother beamed pleasure beyond description. He was to live only one Christmas more.