The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  “You’re much better off now,” Robin said.

  “Hreapha,” she agreed.

  “And so are you,” the woman said to Robin. “Now let’s get on back home.”

  That afternoon, as the two women sat in the dogtrot of the cabin (and Hreapha did not trot but sat), sipping their lemonades and taking in the breeze, Robin asked, “How do you manage to keep so many pets?”

  And the woman returned the question, “How do you?”

  “Well, I don’t have to feed them, much. They feed themselves.”

  “My very generous and wealthy grandson Vernon, who is virtually my sole means of support apart from Social Security, regularly stops by to visit and always brings several boxes of canned cat food and dog food.”

  “Is he also not married?”

  The woman laughed. “No, but he’s been living for years with a woman, his cousin Jelena, and if you’ll stay with me for several days I’ll tell you their story too.”

  “I’d really love to stay, but I do have to get home. You have such a nice house. And you and I are alike in so many ways, especially because we’ve learned how to live alone.”

  “We certainly are alike, you and I. In fact, you remind me of myself at your age. Except you are much more beautiful.”

  “I doubt that. When you were my age, you must have been the most beautiful woman on earth.”

  “I doubt that. But why can’t you spend a week with me?”

  “I’ve got to get on back home and milk the cow, for one thing.”

  “Oh, when you first said ‘home,’ I thought you meant your former home in Harrison. You have no plans for returning there? Even though your mother remarried and lives in Little Rock now?”

  “Really? No, I haven’t given any thought to going back to Harrison. I could never give up my friends, not even Adam, whom I was becoming too supercilious toward.”

  “Does the in-habit know words like ‘supercilious’? Where’d you pick that up? Do you have books to read up there?”

  “The only books I have are the Bible and a manual on farming and housekeeping, which Adam’s mother left behind, and one of those books must’ve had ‘supercilious’ in it.”

  “It’s too late for you to start your journey home today,” the woman said. “So you’ll have to stay at least one more night with me.”

  “Okay. I’ll be very happy to do that.”

  “If I can find the number from Information, could I persuade you to call your mother and tell her you’re okay?”

  Robin did not answer. Hreapha minded her and got an electric blast of panic, which was somewhat surprising. Didn’t Robin want to make any contact with her own mother? Finally, Robin said, “Please.” That’s all she could say for a while, and then she was able to add some more: “Please don’t let anybody know where I am. Don’t you understand?”

  “Sure, Robin, I understand. Even if you told your mother that you want to stay on Madewell Mountain, there would be so much publicity over the news that you’re still alive that you’d be mobbed with tourists.” The woman laughed at her own exaggeration, then added, “Still, I think it might mean the world to your poor mother if somehow you could let her know you’re alive and well.”

  “I’ll think about it,” she said, but before she said anything further on the matter, she and the old woman went inside the cabin to begin preparing their supper, and except for a brief moment when Robin reappeared to give Hreapha a nice dish of dog food, Hreapha didn’t see her again until the morning. Hreapha spent a good part of the night just visiting with Yowrfrowr, Hruschka, and their children. One of Hreapha’s grandsons said to her, “Granny, Pa says there’s all kinds of critters living with you up on the mountain. Is that true?” And Hreapha regaled her grandchildren with stories about the menagerie, particularly the additions that had been made since Yowrfrowr had visited. She told them about some of Pogo’s hilarious antics. Later, when all of them slept, Hruschka didn’t mind that Hreapha slept snuggled up next to Yowrfrowr, whom she might never see again.

  In the morning, early, Robin and the woman came out of the house. Robin’s backpack was bulging with things the woman had given her. The woman asked, “Can you manage to take some kittens with you? I’ve got plenty. More than plenty.”

  “Oh, I’d love to,” Robin said. “But one is all I could manage.”

  “Take your pick.”

  Robin picked out a very young, cute, female calico kitty, and nestled it into the open top of her backpack. “Thank you so much for everything,” Robin said to the woman. “Especially for the books and the paper and the pencils. I’ve already written on the first sheet of paper. Would you like to read it?” And she handed the woman a sheet, which the woman read aloud.

  “Dear Mommy, I want you to know that I survived my kidnapping, and I am alive and well and happy and the man who did it is dead. Some day, not soon, I hope to see you again and tell you all about it. But for right now, I want with all my heart to stay where I am, so I can’t tell you where it is, and I hope you won’t try to find me. Please know I’m just fine and I love you very much. Robin.”

  Robin said to the woman, “If you can ever find her address, and have your grandson or somebody mail that from Harrison so it has a Harrison postmark, do you think that will help?”

  “Thank you,” the old woman said.

  “No, thank you,” Robin said. “Thanks beyond words for everything. Thanks also for showing me how nicely you can live all by yourself. I hope you will stay alive forever because I want to see you again.”

  “And you take care of yourself because I want to see you again too. Are you sure I can’t persuade you to take some oranges and bananas with you?”

  “If I did, I might develop a hankering for them,” Robin said, and both women laughed.

  The women hugged each other for a long moment, and then Robin said one more thing, “Remember your promise never to tell anybody where I am.”

  Hreapha licked Yowrfrowr upside his handsome face, and he returned the lick, saying, Take care, old girl.

  And then they were on the road home. Hreapha’s sadness was relieved by the gladness of going home, and apparently Robin was joyful too, because they were hardly out of sight of the dogtrot cabin before Robin began singing, not any of her songs or hymns with words but just those pure tones of hers that were so beautiful, rising and falling and revealing the colors of her heart. Hreapha felt like singing herself.

  But going back up the mountain was much harder than coming down the mountain. Halfway up, Robin had to stop for a long time, panting and trying to get her breath back, and she said to Hreapha, “I don’t know if I can make it. Maybe you ought to go on ahead without me.”

  “Hreapha,” she said, meaning, I wouldn’t hear of it.

  So they sat for a while beside the trail and Robin got her lunch and the kitty out of the backpack, shared the lunch with Hreapha and the kitty, who, she said, she had decided to name “Latha,” and then she showed Hreapha the various other things the woman had given her: a package of writing paper, several pencils, a ballpoint pen, three thin books with paper covers, two packages of spaghetti noodles, a cylinder of Morton’s salt, six packages of yeast, as well as a dress, a pair of panties, a brassiere, a bath towel and washcloth, a hair comb, etc., etc. No wonder Robin was winded, trying to backpack all that stuff up the mountain.

  “Wasn’t she the nicest person you could imagine?” Robin said. “I never could have dreamed up anybody like her. None of my paper dolls, not even Doc Swain, was as good as her. I left her some money. On the bed where she’d find it. Ten thousand dollars.”

  After lunch Robin was ready to resume the climb, although she had to stop several more times before reaching the end of the trail. While they were resting again, they were startled by the appearance of a small but strange creature which Hreapha had not often seen but recognized as an armadillo, which looks like an opossum wearing armor.

  “Good heavens! What’s that?” Robin asked.

  “H
reapha,” she said, meaning, an armadillo.

  “Okay, you might as well get me one for my next birthday.”

  “Hreapha,” she said, meaning, It is done.

  When they finally emerged into the pasture, the first of their friends to greet them was Bess, who mooed loudly. Bess’s udder was utterly swollen, and Robin took off her backpack and squatted to milk Bess right there, allowing the milk to run out on the ground. Robin explained to Hreapha, “Adam said the first milking after a delay wouldn’t be fit to drink, but we need to relieve Bess.”

  Adam was the second of their friends to greet them. So how did Stay More suit ye? his voice asked.

  “I had a wonderful time,” Robin said. “I stayed two nights with Latha Bourne Dill.”

  You wouldn’t fool a feller, would ye? Is she still going strong?

  “Adam, tell me something. What did she look like the last time you saw her? She wasn’t white-haired and stooped then, was she?”

  Why, no, I reckon she must’ve been close to fifty but she still had a full head of dark hair and I relished her, I thought she was ripsniptious, I mean swelldifferous, I mean she was a real sight for sore eyes.

  “That’s good, because she told me she thought you were the best-looking boy she’d ever seen. She said you were a ‘dreamboat.’” Robin waited, then said, “Adam? Did you hear me?”

  I’m abashed, he said quietly. I caint imagine what would’ve give her that notion.

  “Oh, I wish I could see you.”

  I’ve got a gimpy leg and a missing finger, he said. I’m a freak.

  “But your face must be lovely. Latha told me that Roseleen Coe thought you were a prize, and it broke her heart when you had that accident and couldn’t come to school any more. By the way, Latha showed me that schoolhouse, and I sat in your desk.”

  That was Roseleen’s desk too. I’m happy to know it’s still there.

  “Latha also said that when Roseleen left with her family for California, she said for Latha to tell you that she would always see you in her dreams, but Latha never saw you again herself.”

  Who knows, maybe Adam ran into Roseleen out in California.

  Chapter forty-three

  Indeed he did, but not for a number of years, and I hope to reach their vital meeting somewhere in this chapter. We have left Adam still a teenager, about to become the protégé and assistant to the great oenologist (who preferred to spell it simply “enologist,” either form deriving from the Greek for wine, oinos) André Tchelistcheff, whom Adam began to worship and eventually to emulate, even to his detriment. For example, while T (as Adam and Frances began to refer to him to each other) taught him patiently and meticulously how to discriminate among the subtle tastes of different wines and of same wines of different age or quality, he also taught him how to smoke cigarettes, practically to chain-smoke, although strangely this did not affect his acute senses of taste and smell. Once on his doctor’s orders T attempted to give up smoking, and Adam dutifully gave it up along with him, but they both quickly discovered it ruined their taste discrimination, and they just as quickly resumed their constant nicotine habit. T told him that when he’d first come to work at BV for the legendary Georges de Latour, T had insisted on being allowed to sample everything in the winery, and De Latour had identified each of the samples, “This is Sauvignon Blanc,” or “This is Riesling,” and so forth through all the wines. “But I could not tell one from another,” T said, “not because I lacked the judgment but because they were all the same!”

  When Adam first went to work for T, California wines were still cheap and undistinguished. Americans for the most part preferred sweet wines—ports and sherries—and they considered good table wine to be “sour.” Beaulieu Vineyards, under T with help from Adam, gradually changed all that. At the time Adam met him, André Tchelistcheff had already left the day-to-day winemaking business and spent most of his time in his small research lab, the Napa Valley Enological Research Laboratory, located up the road at St. Helena, conducting experiments and seeking to improve the quality of the wine. Adam was not merely a lab assistant; T taught him how to conduct experiments, chemical analysis and complicated tests upon different types of oak for the barrels, as well as different methods of “toasting” the oak. Nominally, Adam was the master cooper for BV, but actually he spent more time in T’s St. Helena laboratory, and he eventually became the leading expert on the composition of oak barrels. T had amassed a large library on wine and wine-making, most of it written in French, a language he insisted that Adam teach himself (with Frances’ help and with daily conversation from T, who said, “When I think about wine, I think in French, not English”). Neither T nor Adam were above mucking in the vineyards themselves, especially if frost threatened and help was needed at night setting out the smudge pots, whose kerosene smoke always reminded Adam of the fuel used in the Ozarks for illumination and starting woodstove fires.

  Adam’s refined senses were constantly detecting something that reminded him of the Ozarks. Especially his sense of sight. On their rambles together, T showed Adam a one-room white clapboard building that had once been the Rutherford schoolhouse, which reminded Adam almost painfully of the Stay More school. T had a son named Dimitri, several years older than Adam, who had gone to school there. The author Nabokov also had a son named Dimitri, the same age as T’s son, although T had never read nor heard of that other marvelous Russian-American, who had many things in common with T, even the fact that they were both from aristocratic families who had lost everything in the Russian revolution, and T had also fought with the White Russian army against the Reds. Adam continued to buy and read each new book by Nabokov as it came out, until, by the time of the great writer’s death, he owned all of his novels that had been written in or translated into English. Otherwise his library consisted only of various wine books T had given him, or cast-offs from the Yountville Library that Frances had given him.

  He continued living with Frances for several years. His father evicted him from his own home, not because of his relationship with Frances but because of his relationship with T, which Gabe Madewell bitterly begrudged him, since Adam was no longer obliged to his father for employment and thus Gabe could not continue his longstanding habit of criticizing everything Adam did. That habit had been the core of their father-son relationship, and breaking the habit cold turkey threw Gabe Madewell into a depression so irrational he would no longer tolerate the visits Adam tried to make occasionally to see his mother.

  So Adam had moved in with Frances, and they lived as common-law man and wife (the acronym POSSLQ was just coming into vogue) for several years through Adam’s twenties, until Frances, nearly forty and beginning to lose her looks, insidiously stepped up her consumption not just of the splendid wines Adam brought home from work but also of more potent beverages such as vodka, rum, and scotch. For a while Adam appreciated that her regular intoxication left her completely free-spirited and uninhibited. But then she lost her library job as a result of her drinking, and while Adam could easily afford to support her so that she didn’t need to work, the absence of regular employment gave her more opportunity for drinking. Once she asked him, “Do you still want to marry me?” and he had to say in all honesty that he hadn’t given it any further thought. Whenever he came home from work, she was too far gone to speak coherently to him, let alone prepare meals or make love. He had his own car, and drove her to Napa city in the evenings to attend meetings of A.A., but that organization was not able to remove her thirst, which had gone beyond her control or his.

  One year during his twenties, Adam was sent to France, at the expense of Beaulieu Vineyards and at the suggestion of T, who wanted him to study first-hand everything connected with the making of French wine barrels, from forest management to stave production to the actual methods of cooperage. Adam was thrilled, and not at all nervous, since he had learned to speak French so well. The problem was that Frances wanted desperately to go with him, and he couldn’t take her. Not that he (or BV) could
n’t afford it, but he was going as a businessman, not a tourist, and she would be in the way, and in the back of his mind he kept saying to himself I’m giving up Frances for France and indeed he hadn’t been in Merpins, his first stop after Paris, for two nights before he was sleeping with a tantalizing femme named Felise, who not only relaxed him after a busy day but began to accompany him as aide et secrétaire as he toured the tonelleries of France. Felise was his constant companion for three months as he absorbed everything there was to be learned about French cooperage, most of what was to be learned about French wine, and a good deal of what was to be learned about French lovemaking. About the latter Felise knew things that wanton Frances couldn’t have dreamed. For example, while Frances had shown him when he was only fifteen how a “French kiss” was done, Felise introduced him to maraichinage, the prolonged caressing of each other’s tongues, sometimes for hours, and usually to the point of orgasm. When it was time for Adam to return to America, he invited Felise to come with him; short of proposing marriage outright he made her an offer she couldn’t refuse, but she refused it, with the revelation that all along, she had been hired by a major tonellerie to entertain and assist him.

  And when he got home, there was a note from Frances saying she’d gone back to San Francisco to live with her sister. Thereafter he dwelt alone for several years, except for occasional dates with women he met in the bars of St. Helena, until on one of his annual two-week vacations, he decided to visit San Francisco, which he had not yet seen. He had the address of Frances’ sister, and he intended to see Frances again and apologize in an effort to relieve the guilt that had been nagging him since his return from France. The sister would not let him in the door. “So you’re the famous Adam Madewell,” she said. “I have heard so awfully much about you. I thought of phoning to see if you’d want to attend the funeral, but I didn’t.” She told him which cemetery to go to and he put a dozen red roses on her grave. He wanted simply to drive on back home, but he spent a couple of nights in town, went to a Giants game, rode the street cars, visited the Palace of Fine Arts, and toured Haight-Ashbury, still inhabited by the counterculture. On a crowded sidewalk outside the Psychedelic Shop he bumped into a woman who cursed him, then grabbed him and said, “Man, you still smell like oakwood smoke.”