The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  I’m beyond coitus myself, she said, and then she explained what she really wanted Yowrfrowr for: to help her find Robin and the bear. It took her a while to explain the whole situation, and to bring him up to date on what had been happening on the mountaintop since last she had seen him. He was considerably impressed at her recital of the expansion and variety of the menagerie, and confessed that he had always been eager to see the Madewell place, especially since his wife spoke so fondly of her memories of it. Truth be told, since their brood had been born and grown now into their second year, he had urged Hruschka to take him on a sentimental journey back to her birthplace, but Hruschka had had such a terrible experience finding her way down off the mountain, including a plunge over a waterfall, that she was reluctant to attempt the journey.

  Hrolf and I have found a new way to get up there, from the north, Hreapha declared. Come go home with us.

  Hhmm, hummed Yowrfrowr. It’s a magnificent temptation. But it would just be a visit, you understand. I can’t join your menagerie.

  You couldn’t anyway, not unless Robin asked for another dog for her next birthday, Hreapha said. And she wants an elephant.

  Elephant? said Yowrfrowr. Did I hear you correctly? My ears are going bad in my old age.

  Yes, that’s what she says…although I warn you, she has a weird sense of humor.

  An elephant, eh? Of course they don’t grow in these parts. But I’ve heard of them. Mistress’ son-in-law, Hank Ingledew, has told the story of his experience as a boy, many years ago, visiting something called a ‘circus’ that came to Jasper, and encountering there an enormous elephant. As the story goes, the elephant used its long snout to fling Hank through the air, and Hank said to the elephant, “If Godalmighty made you, He orter make one more and quit.”

  Most of the way back up to Madewell Mountain, Yowrfrowr romped on ahead of her with Hrolf, the two of them talking and laughing up a storm, and while she was happy to see father and son becoming so chummy she hoped they weren’t having any laughs at her expense.

  When they finally attained the upper reaches of the mountain, near the spot where the man’s burnt car had crashed, Yowrfrowr remarked, It has been a long time since I caught the scent of bear, so correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this a bona fide bear scent?

  She sniffed at the place he indicated but could scarcely detect any scent at all. Of course, Yowrfrowr’s nose was much longer than hers, which was one among many reasons she wanted his help in searching for Robin. Hrolf also sniffed at it but shook his head.

  Not only is it distinct, Yowrfrowr declared, but it’s heading that way. And he indicated a westward route up through the forest, in the same area where Hreapha had been diverted by the sight of a deer with two fawns when she was supposed to be guarding the man’s truck, and had been punished for wandering away from it. The distant memory gave her a peculiar sense of freedom to be now following Yowrfrowr up through the same woods where she had followed the deer and fawns.

  Yowrfrowr’s unerring nose led them a long way, until Hreapha herself could detect the scent, and was sure that it was Paddington’s, not, as she’d feared, some other bear’s. They went on, and emerged from the forest at almost the crest of the mountain, where the old orchard of the homestead met the woodland, and there, under an apple tree, both of them sound asleep, were Robin and Paddington!

  “Hreapha!” she shouted exultantly, and woke them. The bear leapt up, snarling, and rose in front of Yowrfrowr to his full length, with his claws bared and raised, and his voice cursing to high heaven in a grinding roar that sounded much worse than any of the man’s snores had ever been.

  “Hreapha!” said Robin and embraced her. “And Hrolf!” She embraced him too. “But who is this?” she pointed to Yowrfrowr, who was trying to defend himself against the menacing bear.

  “YOWRFROWR!” Yowrfrowr barked at the bear, who in return said some obscene curses in his own language.

  “Y’all hush!” Robin said to them. “They’ll hear us down there. Look, there’s a house down there and it looks like people live in it. But I’m afraid to go meet them. Looking like this, without any clothes. And what if they try to take me away, back to Harrison?”

  Hreapha was slow in understanding what must have happened: Robin and Paddington, lost and like anyone lost, moving in circles, had made a huge circle that had brought them finally to the rear of the Madewell place, the northwestern side at the orchard, from where the house could be only distantly seen, and Robin with her poor eyesight, not even recognizing her own orchard from that angle, had not yet recognized that the house was her own.

  Hrolf told Paddington to shut his yap. The bear cub, who was hardly a cub any more, understood that Hrolf was the boss.

  “Hreapha Hreapha,” Hreapha said quietly to Robin, meaning, You silly thing, that’s your own house down there. Why don’t you go see?

  But of course Robin couldn’t understand her, and looked fearfully toward the house. Fortunately, they were within the haunt, and thus it was not long before Adam In-habit made his presence known, saying, Boy howdy and jumping grasshoppers, I had done give you’unses up for lost.

  Yowrfrowr was spooked at the voice and the presence of the in-habit, although he had encountered a number of in-habits in Stay More, left behind by the many citizens who had abandoned the town. Hreapha introduced them to each other, explaining to Adam that this was the selfsame Yowrfrowr she had told him so much about, the father of her children.

  Right pleased to meet ye, Yowrfrowr. I’ve heared so much about ye.

  Hreapha said to the in-habit, Could you please explain to Robin that that’s her own house down there? She’s confused.

  I think she’s a-figuring it out on her own, the in-habit said. On account of I’m here, and so it must be in my haunt.

  So they all walked joyfully down out of the orchard and to the house, where the others were waiting for them. And there they all lived happily ever after.

  And these are the birthday presents that Hreapha arranged for Robin to receive in the years to come:

  For her thirteenth: not an elephant, of course, but something pretty big and far more useful—a cow.

  For her fourteenth: a pet rock, a chunk of crystal quartz which she named Sparkle.

  For her fifteenth: a pair of mourning doves.

  For her sixteenth: an opossum.

  For her seventeenth: an armadillo.

  For her eighteenth:…but let us, Hreapha will urge, be patient. As she will be.

  Chapter forty

  Dear Hreapha’s characteristically optimistic notion of that standard catch phrase, “happily ever after,” was not meant to imply any finality or even perpetuity in the ongoing saga of Robin’s adventures. The whole concept of “ever after” for a dog is limited mostly from one meal to the next, and the concept of “happily” can apply to anything which induces the wagging of one’s tail. Hreapha’s tail wasn’t very long but she wagged it often, and in those years to come she would have countless occasions to keep on wagging it, although of course there would be, in the great balance of things, a number of sadnesses, hardships, deprivations, disappointments and general malaises.

  Earlier I proffered the caveat that we should not be lulled by the excitement of Robin’s life into feeling that her experience was totally idyllic. Her larder was empty and she had run out of such basic amenities as salt and kerosene and was essentially living directly from nature and from whatever her garden could provide. On the positive side, she was spared some of the grief that most girls suffer during adolescence, particularly in social relationships. For example, never would she feel slighted and lonely because her boyfriend ignored her whenever he was with his pals. Never would she be hurt because her boyfriend took out on her his anger or rage from fighting with his parents or peers. Never would her desire to belong and be popular compel her to have her body tattooed and to pierce various parts of it, including her tongue, for adornment. Her social calendar, her dance card, as it were, was filled with
lovely interactions with her zoological garden, which, as Hreapha’s birthday list has already indicated, constantly grew from year to year.

  Alas, Robin mostly lost interest in me, perhaps feeling she had outgrown me, which in fact she had, not just physically but intellectually. If she thought of me at all, it was as a kid brother. The only time she ever called upon me or solicited my help was once in her fourteenth year when she finally decided to finish that firkin she’d abandoned years before and she needed from me a brief refresher course on the use of the cooper’s tools. I was more than happy to oblige. She not only completed the firkin successfully, but, since the fractured churn of mine she’d been using to make butter was malfunctioning, she decided to start from scratch and see if she couldn’t make a churn entire, and I was pleased to guide her. Indeed, by the time of her seventeenth birthday she had made an active hobby of cooperage and was even riving her staves from the oak forest with axe and saw, and actually completed a not substandard barrel before she was eighteen.

  During those years of her adolescence, she missed out on all the things that were happening to her generation’s delight in movies, music, literature and culture in general. In music alone, she never had the experience of hearing all the fabulous new songs and rhythms, just as she was also denied exposure to the great classical composers. But it may be observed that what she missed, she invented. Art, after all, is the expression of that which the ordinary mortal cannot express. Her solitude forced Robin into extraordinariness, and she filled the air with her own music, her own attempt to translate into pure sounds those universal emotions—exultation and despondency, the yearning and seeking and the glory in finding—out of which all music, classical and popular, springs.

  Her health was quite good, in fact remarkable, but of course there were no communicable diseases for her to catch, not even the common cold. In her fourteenth year she had the usual problems with complexion: pimples, blackheads, pustules, and blotches, with no one to explain them to her (since I at twelve had not yet experienced these dreads the way that Adam in California would endure acne but grow out of it) and there were times she worried her complexion would be permanently disfigured. She continued to be (as she always would be) a chronic worrier, and sometimes her tension gave her stomach-aches or headaches, although she had long since discovered the very best outlet for tension was simply a quick (or leisurely, depending on her mood) reach, having eventually convinced herself that it was not the reaching which brought about the monthly bleeding.

  She had remarkably few dental problems. In her sixteenth year she had a yeast infection, but in time it cleared up. It may safely and incredibly be said that she never had anything wrong with her that demanded a visit to the doctor or dentist.

  A visit to an ophthalmologist might have been desirable, but the only real inconvenience her myopia caused her was in her shooting: it became impossible for her to bag game with the rifle, and her use of the shotgun was limited to things within easy view. In her thirteenth September a wild razorback hog, which she could not have caught in the rifle’s sights, happened to discover her sweet potato patch and was so busily preoccupied with rooting up and munching the yams that it didn’t notice Robin sneaking within range. She fired pointblank and enjoyed ham and bacon again for a whole year or more, although she had run out of salt with which to cure it and had to condescend to accepting my instructions on how to extract salt from hickory ashes, cow parsnips, and pigweed. By her fourteenth year she had run out of everything that Sog had originally stocked, except for a few jars of pickled pig’s feet, and of course the huge supply of Jack Daniels, which, by the way, she had begun imbibing on occasions. One summer she had an unusually severe problem with chiggers, those maddeningly itchy mites, and I happened to mention to her that whenever the chiggers had caused great distress in my family, we treated the bites with small applications of Chism’s Dew, as the local moonshine was called, a jug of which my mother kept strictly for such medicinal purposes (ironically, although their lives were devoted to making whiskey barrels, neither Braxton nor Gabe Madewell ever touched the stuff). Robin wondered if Jack Daniels might effectuate the same result as Chism’s Dew, and tried it, pouring some on the bites on her long lovely legs, and sure enough it did the trick, killing the chiggers, and as long as she had the bottle open she poured a small amount into a glass, diluted it with water, sipped it, and made a variety of grimaces which diminished on the second sip and disappeared on the third. She finished the glass and poured another, and, as the saying goes, acquired a taste for it. She learned it could greatly enhance her music.

  Out in California Adam acquired a taste for the wine that went into the barrels which gave the wine the many flavors of the oak. Although California law prohibited Adam from going to work in the cooperage until he was sixteen, his father circumvented that restriction by taking Adam into the cooperage after hours, when Gabe Madewell, eager for the time-and-a-half they paid him for working overtime, often toiled at the cooper’s trade, sometimes late into the night. There, as Adam grew older and stronger, he learned the advanced labors and tricks of coopering, until, by the time he was sixteen and allowed by law to become officially employed, he was no longer an apprentice cooper but a journeyman. Still, despite being able to do anything his father could do as well as him, he was only his father’s assistant, constantly under orders and instructions and criticism from his father, who, when their arguments grew bitter, reminded him that he might have been left a corpse on Madewell Mountain, a notion that Adam sometimes dwelt upon, thinking he could still have inhabited the place as a ghost and not knowing that he was definitely inhabiting it as an in-habit.

  The Inglenook Winery was in a great stone chateau, with the cooperage in one basement of it, and some nights when his father had no immediate task for him to do, Adam would wander into other parts of the chateau, where he discovered the sampling room and could help himself to different tastes of wine, always careful, of course, not to consume so much of it that his father would notice. Thus at an early age he learned how to avoid drunkenness.

  The topography of Napa County bears some resemblance to that of Newton County, enough to have kept Adam from being hopelessly homesick. To the west of Rutherford rise the Mayacama Mountains, the highest point, Mt. Veeder, being the same height, 2,500 feet, as the loftier mountains of Newton County, and another peak, Mount St. John, still wild enough to remind Adam of his explorations of Madewell Mountain back home. To the east could be seen a muscular mountain called Stag’s Leap, the very name of it suggesting an affinity to Stay More’s Leapin Rock, from which at least four people had been known to commit suicide (and Robin in her now-outgrown paper doll period had emulated that tradition by having four paper dolls fall from the top of the davenport to their deaths, each followed by her ad libitum descant of “Farther Along.”)

  Every available slope and terrace of the valley was covered with vineyards, all lovingly cultivated, the neatness of which presented a striking contrast to the wildness of Newton County. Whenever he could, Adam would get out into the countryside and wander limpingly among those vineyards, or hike up into the semi-wilderness of Mount St. John, where he found an abandoned house to explore, and a quicksilver mine. East of Rutherford the Napa River flowed, with a swimming hole that Adam visited on hot summer afternoons, although the other kids there teased him and mocked his Ozark pronunciation and vocabulary, and came to call him Arkie. There was also a large reservoir called Lake Hennessey, unlike anything Adam had seen before, since Newton County does not have a single lake. Nor does Newton County have a single mile of railway, and there was a track of the Southern Pacific Railroad running through Rutherford, which carried the huge cargo of wine off to market. Adam liked to visit the Rutherford Depot, a plain building in a long shed, and watch the loading of the big tank cars with wine or the loading of cartons of bottled wine into boxcars. Studying the train’s schedule and behavior, Adam learned how to climb aboard unnoticed and ride the train five miles down to Yountvil
le, which wasn’t as big as St. Helena but possessed more shops than Rutherford and had a building that became Adam’s refuge during those years when he awaited the legal working age of sixteen: a public library. The kindly librarian, a young woman from San Francisco who told him it was all right for him to call her Frances, said to him at closing time one day, “You know, if you like, I could issue you a library card and you could take some books home with you.”

  “I reckon not, ma’am,” he said. “Paw don’t allow no books in the house.”

  “That’s too bad,” she said. Then she asked, “Why aren’t you in school?”

  “Iffen I was let to go back to school, ma’am, I’d just be in the fourth grade, and I’m too big for that.”

  “Oh. How old are you?”

  He told her he was fifteen and she kept on asking him questions. He told her his whole story so far, how he’d hurt himself trying to get to school in the wild mountains of the Ozarks, how he’d lost the index finger of his right hand working in his father’s cooperage, and so forth. He even told her how he’d been coming to Yountville to visit the library by climbing up on the freight train. She told him she admired his desire to give himself an education, and she wondered if he needed any help picking out books. He told her he’d just been picking them out at random, but he hoped eventually to read every book she had.

  “Who are your favorite authors, so far?” she asked.

  “Arthurs, ma’am? You mean the folks who wrote the books? Tell ye the truth, I never paid much attention to that, just the titles.”

  And from then on she told him some authors she thought he would like. Joseph Conrad. Mark Twain. Thomas Hardy. Did he know, by the way, that Ambrose Bierce, who wrote some fine satirical fables and some short stories shot through with savage irony, had lived just up the road at St. Helena? Yes, she said, and after Adam finished reading some of Bierce’s tales, she would be happy to drive him up to St. Helena some Sunday and show him the house in which Bierce had lived. Also he ought to know that the splendid Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, before he became famous, lived with his California bride in a squatter’s shack up the road on Mount St. Helena.