Two She-Bears by Meir Shalev

Author:Meir Shalev
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-ONE

“So what did they send me from home in the wagon?” Grandpa Ze’ev would quiz me and Dovik when we were little. And we were supposed to answer him in rhymes that he composed: “A rifle and cow / A stone and a plow / A mulberry tree / And Grandma for me.” The mulberry tree, by the way, he loved no less than he loved Grandma, and out of love he didn’t plant it in the ground but left it in the barrel it came in and on the same wagon, and everywhere he rode, so he told us, he rode with his tree.

And the mulberry grew and grew, and grew and grew, until what happened? “What happened, Dovik? Ruta? What happened, Neta?”

The roots of the mulberry tree burst through the barrel, and Grandpa Ze’ev filled the whole wagon with earth, and so the wagon became a giant flowerpot on wheels, and Grandpa Ze’ev and his tree continued to go out to work together. The magnificent ox pulled the wagon, and when they got to the field it was harnessed to the plow, and Grandpa plowed and planted and seeded, and at lunchtime he lay in the shade of his tree and ate and rested: “I ate what Grandma Ruth prepared for me, and for dessert I had berries from the tree, I cut grass for the ox and piled it up for him, I gave his poop to the tree, and the ox pulled it and me in the wagon. That’s how families are.”

Ultimately the mulberry grew so big that even two pairs of oxen couldn’t pull the wagon, and the wagon itself began to fall apart from the pressure of the roots and weight of the tree and wetness of the soil.

“And what happened then, Dovik? And what happened then, Ruta? And what happened then, Neta?”

“Grandpa dug a long deep hole at the edge of the yard, the oxen pulled, he pushed, the wagon went into the hole.”

“And what happened then, Dovik, Ruta, Neta?”

Grandpa Ze’ev released the oxen, and they climbed out with their harnesses; he removed the wagon shafts and covered the wagon with a lot of dirt. That’s it, that’s how he planted the mulberry tree in the yard and how it became our big mulberry tree today, which looks as if it was there forever, as if it hadn’t come to Grandpa Ze’ev and been planted in his yard, but instead that Grandpa Ze’ev came to it and decided to build a house in its shade. But we knew it came in a wagon, which was buried beneath it, and Dovik—who was a very active child and wanted to make an impression on other children and also to make money, so he said, to buy plane tickets and visit our mother in America—kept nagging Grandpa to dig out the wagon and attach it to a tractor instead of an ox so we could ride in the shade of the tree as he had in his younger years and maybe sell tickets to people who wanted a ride.

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