The Big Black Bear / Bete Noir

 "Yes," I said. "I saw it."   Back in the time when parents, at least ours, asked very few if any questions of their children, my mother was intensely questioning me as to what I had seen on the porch next door. We lived then in the tenant house of a working farm on Route 40 in Melrose. The main house was directly across the driveway from where we lived, its porch in direct line with our side porch.
   My mother was upset, young as I was I knew that, but of course I didn't understand the reason why, though understanding would come later:  My mother's older sister, Marguerite, was for some reason "not quite right." Medical conditions at the time were not understood and therefore not spoken of, not even among the family. It seems, from a later viewpoint,  that Marguerite nay have had epilepsy, or some seizure disorder that prevented her from being completely healthy, She was to die in the great flu epidemic, so no other information about her ever became known.
     But, strong as she was, my mother  had a deadly fear of anything that affected the workings of the brain. When any of her grandchildren came down with fever, that was a time for prayer and the lighting of candles before the statue of the Virgin Mary. She probably did the same for her own children, but that was lost in our memories.
    Back to the story of so long ago, my mother had asked me if I had seen a black bear on the porch next door. I told her I had. My brother had pointed it out to me. Could it have been a dog, she asked. I said no, it was a bear. That was what I'd been told and that was what I saw. Even now I remember the  sight of it---a big black bear, on the porch, Over there. I may have been three years old or even less, but I'd seen it.
   Turns out my brother had come down with a fever, and, as it was called then, was raving.  Something about the claw feet of an old mahogany chair had triggered the vision of a bear to him. Why I saw it, I can't say.