The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  It took him too long to recognize her, with her long beribboned dirty-blonde hair, her floppy hat, the bangles and beads and all. “Well swoggle my eyes!” he exclaimed. “If it aint Roseleen!”

  “My, my, I’d hardly know you, you’re so tall, and you’re even better-looking than, like, you ever was. Man, I always thought you was the best-looking feller I ever knew, you know? And I’ve loved you all my life, man.” She tried to sell him some crystals. He offered to take her to dinner. They went to an Italian restaurant, where, over the second bottle of wine, they told each other all about themselves. The reason he still smelled like oakwood smoke was that he’d been conducting a number of experiments on the optimum amount of charred “toast” on the inside of barrel staves. Roseleen had been married twice and had a daughter living with her father over in Fillmore. “It aint Stay More but its Fillmore, you know?” she said. Roseleen was “into” Zen Buddhism, if he wanted to hear about it. He didn’t. Would he like to crash at her pad? He would, if only to finally consummate the passion he’d felt for her when he first learned what passion was. As it turned out, she wasn’t spectacular, or even particularly adept, in bed. As she struggled to reach orgasm, she began to grunt, “Fuck me! Oh, fuck me, man!” and he suspected that the orgasm she reached was pretended. Later she said, “Man, that was like what I used to like dream of you doing to me like when we was only like ten years old, you know?”

  “Me too,” was all he could say.

  At breakfast the next day, she said, “Do you ever think about going back to Stay More?”

  “All the time,” he said.

  “But you haven’t, ever?” she said. “Me neither. I’d sure love to. Do you have a car? Let’s just like jump in your car and take off, okay? Man, let’s me and you just go like right home to Stay More.”

  Oh boy, was he tempted. But whatever passion he’d felt for Roseleen Coe in their childhood was just a distant memory, indelible and remote, elusive as the fragrance of vanilla in oakwood. It made him sad to think that he’d probably changed as much as she had, maybe for the better, but still not the same Ozark boy he’d been. Frances and T had both kidded him sometimes about certain words he still used: he said “ary” and “I reckon” and “dusty dark” but for the most part his manner of speaking was much more sophisticated than it had been. Roseleen had lost all trace of her Ozark accent too but had replaced it with a kind of coarse hippie talk. “I dig but I don’t groove,” she said when Adam tried to tell her why he couldn’t take her back to Stay More.

  But in the months ahead, while he was overcoming a serious case of gonorrhea he had probably contracted from Roseleen, he allowed his mind to fantasize that trip with her back home, if only just as a lark. He had been truthful in telling her that he thought constantly about going back to Stay More, but he had never admitted it, even to himself, and now that she had raised the subject, he couldn’t shake it loose. It would keep on bothering him until he did something about it.

  André Tchelistcheff retired once again, as he had been doing periodically ever since Adam had met him and as he would keep on doing until he retired to that great Vineyard in the sky at the age of ninety-three. But this time, he had another reason: Beaulieu (the name means “beauteous place”) had been sold to Heublein, the liquor giant, who had also swallowed up Inglenook and Italian Swiss Colony and would eventually absorb Almaden and Glen Ellen. Heublein had bought the Regina Winery and turned it into a vinegar plant, and T loudly speculated that it might do the same to Beaulieu. “Or if we not make vinegar, what we make tastes like vinegar,” he said. He also advised Adam to get out. More than that, he offered to help Adam get set up in his own cooperage, an independent cooperage that would sell its barrels to all the Napa Valley winegrowers. Adam recalled that the top price Braxton Madewell got for a barrel was five dollars, the top price Gabe got was ten; now an American oak barrel was selling for hundreds of dollars (a French oak barrel for twice as much), with no end in sight to the rising price, the steepness of which was largely responsible for the increase in the price for a bottle of good California wine. Thus, with some backing from T and with the assurance of steady customers among the wineries of the region, Adam founded the Madewell Cooperage, whose name, it was widely assumed, boasted of the workmanship put into the product. In fact, the making of oak barrels was becoming increasingly automated, from start to finish, free from human hands, and much of Adam’s startup expenditure was for fancy machinery. Adam himself never again built a barrel from scratch at his giant cooperage. He spent most of his time at his large desk (made of oak, naturally), with paperwork or customers, or inspecting the products of his assembly line. Occasionally he sneaked away to the Napa Valley Research Laboratory, where T kept on tinkering, and where Adam could continue his own research and his search for the best possible oak and treatment thereof. Then the University of California, Davis, which operated a branch at nearby Oakville devoted to enology and viticulture, offered Adam an adjunct professorship. When they learned from his resume that he hadn’t even finished grade school, they changed the title to adjunct research specialist, but the job was the same: teaching one evening course each semester in the history, making and use of oak barrels. He certainly didn’t need the salary, and taught the course purely for pleasure. The students, including several women, were eager and hardworking, and they would go on after graduation into vineyards and cellars all over California. A few of the best Adam would hire for Madewell Cooperage. He enjoyed his students as much as they enjoyed him, and in time he would become so fond of one of them, named Linda, that he would ask her to marry him.

  He was in his mid-thirties and she hadn’t quite reached her mid-twenties. Her father owned a vineyard in Sonoma County, and Adam was invited there for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and for Linda’s birthday, and he got along well with her parents and siblings. The wedding was planned as a big event for the fall to coincide with the grape harvest and be part of its celebration. But first, that summer before he tied the knot, he had a little thing he wanted to do, and he did it. He thought of it as strictly business, but he wasn’t fooling himself: somewhere in the back of his mind, homesickness was lurking. He was going to visit the Ozarks in search of the best possible oak for his barrels. He had searched the oak forests of Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin for the best-grained and best-fragranced standing oak, and his cooperage used staves from all those places, but most of his staves were cut from the big river oaks along the Mississippi near Perryville, Missouri, and he maintained a constant nagging suspicion that mountain oaks would have better flavor than river oaks. In the back of his mind was even the idea of getting up to Madewell Mountain and reclaiming some of its magnificent wood.

  Surprisingly Linda didn’t ask to go with him. He was prepared to talk her out of it if she did, as he had talked Frances out of France or talked Roseleen out of Stay More. He knew he couldn’t use “business” as an excuse because Linda herself was just as fascinated with oakwood as he was. But he didn’t need any excuses. Have fun, was all she said. He said, “I reckon I’d like to take just one good look around the Ozarks before I settle down forever in California.”

  “I don’t suppose you’re planning to search for some childhood sweetheart you don’t want me to know about,” she said.

  “Yeah, maybe that’s it. Only she never wore a dress nor had long hair nor even a cute little nose like you’ve got. She was just a place, for heaven’s sake.”

  He let her have the fancy German sedan and he took the sports-utility vehicle, as they were just becoming known in those days. In fact, his was a top-of-the-line English model with powerful four-wheel drive, which he assumed he’d need if he ever decided to climb Madewell Mountain. He drove up into the Rockies and across the plains, taking his time and studying a few stands of oak en route, spending a couple of nights on the road before finally reaching the place he’d spend the third night, Harrison, Arkansas. Although it was one of the principal trading centers of the Ozarks, he’d only been
there once before in his life, when his father had put them into the back of a rickety truck headed for California. He spent the night at the Holiday Inn and had a decent supper and breakfast at their restaurant, where someone had left the Harrison Daily Times at his table, which he read while eating. Crossing the state line into Arkansas had thrilled him, entering Harrison had been a triumph, picking up this newspaper and seeing the names of his people (even if he saw no familiar names) gave him a sense of controlling his destiny.

  The main local news concerned the continued search for an abducted girl, only seven, last seen in a roller skating rink, and the subject of a massive search by the state and local police as well as the FBI. The girl’s mother, Karen Kerr, had agreed to the organization of a national support group named after her daughter for parents of missing children. Adam wondered how he would feel if his daughter were kidnapped. He wondered how he would feel if he had a daughter. Linda had not yet broached the subject of whether they’d have children.

  He drove to the dying village of Parthenon, which still had a post office in a humble stone building, where he made inquiries. There were no Madewells still living in the area. Adam’s mother’s sister, Aunt Effie, had died. The man who had owned the Parthenon Stave & Heading Company was still alive and in his eighties, and Adam visited him and was taken to the site of what once had been a school, the Newton County Academy, where only one ruined building remained, the former gymnasium, a dilapidated old stone building being used for the storage of what was thought to be worthless oak staves. He and the man went inside, and Adam staggered at the sight of thousands upon thousands of oak staves, neatly stacked and turning gray as they aged. He lifted one at random, scratched it with his thumbnail, and inhaled an oaken fragrance that he had not smelled since the age of twelve and which he’d been searching for ever since.

  The man told him that most of the staves had been deposited there by Braxton or Gabriel Madewell, and since Adam was their heir, he was free to help himself. He gave the man the address of Madewell Cooperage in California and wrote him a check to cover the cost of hiring a convoy of trucks to deliver the staves.

  The business part of his trip, to all intents and purposes, was accomplished.

  Did he want to visit Stay More? It wasn’t a matter of did he but rather could he? He’d found that childhood sweetheart in San Francisco and knew her only in the Biblical sense.

  Could he drive his powerful SUV up Madewell Mountain? He could try, although he discovered he was sweating and nervous.

  His progress up the steep trail was halted when he encountered a pick-up truck mired squarely in the road. The owner of the truck, who said his name was Leo Spurlock, told him there was probably no way to get on to the top of the mountain, not even on foot.

  Adam had a bad leg. Worse, he had a great fear that if he succeeded in reaching the top of the mountain and finding the place where he’d willed a part of himself to stay forever, he would never want to leave again. He just couldn’t do it.

  So he returned to California. André Tchelistcheff was honored to be asked to serve as his best man at the elaborate wedding, held in the glowing, lovely vineyards of Linda’s family, a Madewell barrel serving as altar.

  Chapter forty-four

  She was a woman now. Latha had said so. She remembered how, long ago, the Woodland Heights Elementary had wanted her to skip a grade because she was so advanced over the others, and now she felt that she was not merely seventeen, she had grown entirely out of adolescence and if anybody asked her how old she was (if there was anybody anywhere to do such a thing—like Latha) she would have to say she was well along into her twenties. Maybe close to thirty. Yes, she was at least as old as her mother had been the last time she’d seen her. And much better than her mother in so many ways. Prettier. Smarter. Funnier. Shapelier. Friendlier. Sexier (God, yes). If only she had a man (not a boy but a man) to demonstrate it with. At her birthday party, when the dogs had presented her with the petrified but soon relaxed Armageddon, her armadillo, she had worn the dress Latha had given her, an old-fashioned country calico dress that Latha herself had worn in her twenties, and it made her look much older than seventeen, and she enjoyed being clothed for that one day, and finally understood for herself why human beings are the only creatures who wear clothes, not so much for bodily protection but rather because what is hidden is more tantalizing than what is revealed; that humankind, blessed with greater imagination than animalkind, needed to play a kind of constant hide-and-seek with the body itself, as all human creative work, which animals cannot do, is the expression of a hiding and a seeking and a finding, especially stories, and even music, yes, musical notes hide themselves and find themselves constantly (what else is melody?), as she demonstrated in her birthday descant. Then she said, “Adam, do you think I look more appealing in this dress than I do stark naked?”

  He was slow in answering, as usual. Sometimes she didn’t know whether his slowness was just a matter of being an ignorant twelve-year-old, or because the older she got the more reserved he was toward her, and now the five years that separated them was actually like ten or more. Finally, he said, rather wistfully, Tell ye the truth, hit don’t matter too awful much, one way or th’other, since I caint have ye, anyhow.

  “Have me?” she said. “Do you really want me?”

  Again he took a while pondering or formulating his answer. I’ve always wanted ye. But come to think on it, I reckon I’d want ye more in that ’ere dress than I’d want ye as you generally are, a-running around all over creation a-wearing nothing but a smile.

  “There!” she said. “That’s what I figured. Clothes can be naughtier than skin, if they stir up your thoughts.”

  My thoughts don’t need no stirring up.

  “You’re clothed, aren’t you?” she asked him. “What are you wearing?”

  Just my same old overalls.

  He pronounced it “overhauls.” She pretended to be staring down at him. “Don’t look now,” she said, “but you forgot to button your fly.”

  There was almost a visible stirring in the air; she could imagine him trying to button himself. Darn ye! he said. That weren’t funny.

  An idea occurred to her, but they were surrounded by all their friends, including the innocent new kitty, Latha, and the latest haunter, Armageddon, who hadn’t made up his mind (actually, as she’d soon learn, it was her mind) whether he (or she) liked birthday cake or not. “Adam,” she requested, “sometime before the day is over, as one more birthday present, even an immaterial one, let’s you and I get together for a private conversation. Would you do that for me?”

  He didn’t answer, and she wondered if her tone had once again been too supercilious for him. She finished her own piece of cake and offered seconds to all the guests, but only Ralgrub and Pogo wanted more. She thanked Hrolf for leading the expedition to procure Armageddon. Then she went into the storeroom and got a fresh bottle of Jack Daniels and opened it. She offered it around, but nobody wanted any. Paddington would have been glad to have some, but she hadn’t seen her bear for quite some time, and his absence was the only shortcoming in her birthday celebration. While she was relieved to be free from his constant devotion, she hoped that she hadn’t hurt his feelings by locking him out of the house. She was sorry that he had never acquired the ability of the other animals to understand her; he had never grasped what she had tried to tell him: that he was too rough, and sometimes his claws raked her. Probably, she had consoled herself, he had simply wandered off across the mountain in search of a female bear who could love him in a way she could not. But giving up this Paddington had been far more difficult for her than giving up the original stuffed Paddington that she had loved so much. Now she drank what would have been Paddington’s portion of the Jack Daniels, in his memory or honor or whatever.

  After a while she needed to pee and she stumbled out to the yard but instead of lifting her dress and squatting there she had an impulse to use the outhouse, which she hadn’t done for nine years. One
of the two holes was still occupied by the skeleton, who was still holding his own bottle of Jack Daniels, and when she sat down over the other hole and began to tinkle, it was somehow more embarrassing, or more daring, to be doing it in the presence of Sugrue’s skeleton than it would have been to be doing it in the presence of all the live creatures who inhabited these premises. She knew she wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t been drinking so much. “Excuse me,” she said to him, rather tipsily, “but maybe I’m getting too old to squat in the yard. Tee hee.” Then she asked, “How’ve you been?” And she said, “Latha Bourne was asking me how’ve you been, and I had to tell her you were dead. She seemed to think that was good news. She’s doing just fine, herself, despite being past eighty. I had a real nice visit with her. She gave me some nice things to bring home with me. She gave me three books, or she let me pick them out, telling me just to take whichever three I wanted and she could have her grandson Vernon replace them if she still wanted copies, although I left behind ten thousand dollars of your money. I picked Mythology by Edith Hamilton, which is very interesting and a lot of fun. Also I took a handbook on wildflowers, which has been very helpful in my study of my favorite subject. And finally just for fun I chose a book called Lightning Bug, which is a novel-book but has some interesting stuff on fireflies, and I’ve also started studying bugs a lot lately, even spiders, and you’d be surprised if you ever stopped to count the different kinds of bugs that are running and flying around all over this place. Latha also gave me a little bottle of cologne, because she doesn’t ever use it any more. It’s called “Tabu” and I’m wearing it right now. Can you smell it? Hey, it’s my birthday, did you know? I’m seventeen, ten years older than when you first took me. There’s not a single present left for me in all that stuff you left behind, except your whiskey, and I suppose there’s enough of that for me to have a birthday bottle from you for the rest of my life. I’m all finished peeing but I’ll just sit here a while with you, and bring you up to date.”