But it wasn’t a joke that her father had never paid him for the barrels, and certainly Adam had never considered sending his father-in-law a bill. Adam’s bookkeepers had complained; his sales manager had complained, but Adam had his accountants write it off as a loss for tax purposes, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of barrels. Sometimes, particularly after one of his bitter quarrels with Linda, he wondered if indeed she and her father had simply plotted to have her marry him in order to get all those barrels. André Tchelistcheff had been furious when Adam had confided the situation to him. T remained Adam’s principal confidant and, to the extent he had any friends at all, his only friend. For a number of years, they had lunch together at least once a week at Terra, St. Helena’s best restaurant. It was T who had to listen to Adam’s gripes about the wine industry in general, and to Adam’s revelations of disharmony with Linda, and to Adam’s increasing dissatisfaction with the whole state of California, which he had come to feel had lost its soul, if ever it had one in the first place. T never disagreed. “Yes,” T said, “Californians are all a bit runny around the edges.” Adam could never forget those words.
When Adam was in his early forties and beginning to brood that his life had never yet reached any sort of fulfillment, Linda stopped speaking to him. But of course as with any marital rift, she claimed that he had stopped speaking to her. Eventually they visited a counselor, and Linda played back for the woman a recording she had made of Adam’s silences, that is, her own observations and questions captured on the tape followed by complete silence from Adam. So all right, he no longer spoke to her, because, as he told T, “The more we talked, the more reasons we found for not talking.” The counselor had also told him that his nightly dreams of flying were a wish to escape from his marriage.
Linda used that as the primary excuse for her affair. She announced, “I met someone who listens to me, who pays attention to me, who cares who I am.” For a while, a few months only, Adam moved into an apartment in St. Helena, but then one day when he dressed for work in his suit he poured into his trousers pocket the handful of dirt from the floor of the cooper’s shed he had kept since he was twelve. Then he simply called a meeting of the board of directors, resigned as chairman and CEO, appointed his able COO as the new CEO, sold all his stock in the company, and had a long final lunch with T, who was stricken to hear of Adam’s intentions, but kissed him on both cheeks in parting and said, “Send me your address when you have one, and each holiday season for your birthday and Christmas I will send you a case of my ’79 Pinot Noir.”
But Adam wasn’t sure he’d have any address to send to André Tchelistcheff. He had no idea what would become of himself. He only knew that, having felt homeless for over thirty years, he was going home. In the back of his SUV he had folded up a tent and a sleeping bag and an air mattress, as well as cooking equipment. He didn’t know what to expect; his grandfather had built the house and barn and cooper’s shed to last forever but they might have rotted away or been hit by lightning and burned…or maybe his failure to piss on the fire as his father had demanded might have caused the house to burn down. He also had with him all of his possessions worth keeping; three boxes of his favorite books, two boxes of his wine collection, and all the clothes he’d ever need, and he made a last stop at a supermarket in Harrison to pick up as many provisions and groceries as he still had room for.
He noticed that nearly all the houses between Parthenon and Stay More were abandoned. One of them, a ruin he recognized as the old Alan place, had a sign taped to the front door, and he drove up close enough to read it: “GONE TO CALIFORNIA.” He breathed a sigh of relief because he hadn’t relished the idea of having any contact with Sog Alan. As he approached the village itself, or what had once been the thriving little town of Stay More, tingles ran up his spine. This here’s my town, he said aloud and laughed to hear himself speaking in his old Ozark accent.
There was just one building in town that still seemed to be occupied, the house and store that had once been Latha Bourne’s and had once held the post office, shut down even before Adam had reached school age. On the long front porch, upon which he had sat himself many times in the company of other citizens of the town, there was now a man and a woman, neither of whom he recognized. He didn’t know how to ask if Latha was dead. So he asked, “Latha Bourne don’t live here no more?”
The woman said, “She lives up yonder a ways at the old Dill place.”
“Thank ye kindly,” he said, and drove on. He hadn’t intended to visit Latha Bourne Dill, he hadn’t given it a thought, but he was so delighted to know that she was still alive that he decided to stop at the old Dill dogtrot which he’d passed every day on his way to school.
He pulled into the yard, which was filled with cats and dogs. He remembered fondly how much she liked cats, but he hadn’t known she liked dogs too. The dogs were yelling their heads off at him, and one of them, a big handsome golden retriever, was really yowling or yowering at him. Very soon Latha came out of her house and he got out of his SUV to meet her. She was white-haired and a bit stooped but just as gloriously glamorous as he’d always remembered her.
“Howdy, Miz Latha,” he said bashfully.
She did not stare long at him. “Goodness gracious,” she said. “Lord have mercy. Is that you, Ad?”
“Yes’m,” he said. “You’re sure looking pretty good.”
She held out her arms to him, and they embraced. He had never been touched by her before, but now, as they held each other tightly for a long moment, he remembered one of his favorite movies, “Harold and Maude,” and decided that he would just ask Latha to marry him, even if she was…he suddenly realized that she and T were exactly the same age.
“So how was California?” she asked.
“It was real sorry,” he said. “It was the sorriest place on earth.”
She invited him to lunch—dinner actually, which, he recalled, the noon meal was always called in this world. He furnished a 1973 Stag’s Leap Cabernet. They talked well into the afternoon, and he reflected that she was easier to talk to than T had been. She brought him up to date on everything, that is to say, nothing, that had been happening in Stay More. He told her what he’d done in California. He mentioned having run into Roseleen Coe, and remarked, “I hope she doesn’t bump into Sog Alan too.”
“No danger of that,” Latha said. “He passed on some ten or eleven years ago.”
“Oh. I wish I could say that’s too bad but I can’t.”
“Yes. It’s a better world without him,” she said. Then as he got up to leave she said, “So what are you fixing to do? Don’t be a-rushing off. Stay more and spend the night with me.”
“Thank ye kindly, but I reckon I’d better just get on up home.”
“Home?” she said. “You don’t mean the old Madewell place, do ye?
“Yes’m,” he said. “That’s where I’m a-heading. Why don’t you just come go home with me?”
“Thank ye, I’d admire to, but I reckon I’d better not, this time.” Before he got back into his SUV, she gave him another hug, and said, “You must’ve really left a part of yourself up there at the old place.”
“I sure did, ma’am,” he said.
“You’uns be sure to come and visit me whenever you can,” she said.
As he drove off up the Right Prong that skirted the east end of Ledbetter Mountain, he reflected that maybe he didn’t remember Ozark speech as well as he’d thought. He’d always considered “you’uns,” which is a contraction of “you ones,” to be plural, referring to more than one person. In the Deep South, supposedly people said “You all” or “Y’all” when they were addressing only one person, but not in the Ozarks. Maybe he simply hadn’t heard her correctly.
When he turns into the mountain trail at the north foot of Madewell Mountain, he notices another grammatical oddity, which gives him pause: time seems to have reallocated itself into the present tense, which doesn’t bother him greatly. He understands that the
present tense is more cozy and immediate, at least if you don’t allow the urgency of it to make you nervous. And he isn’t nervous at all. He’s exultant. He’s rapturous. He’s going home.
Hardly has he turned up into the trail when he encounters a man in a pickup. He is quick to recognize good old George Dinsmore, who’d been just a year ahead of him in school. He is glad to have learned from Latha that George is one of the few remaining citizens of Stay More. But it takes George a little while to recognize him, and when he does he is flabbergasted.
They chat a while, and he asks George, “Have you been up yonder to the top lately? Do you know if my house is still there?”
George laughs. “I aint never been to the top of that mountain. I been practically everywheres else, but for some reason I never been up there. If you’re a-fixing to go and see if you caint make it up to your old homeplace, why, good luck to ye.”
Further up the steep trail, which is in such terrible condition it gives his mighty SUV the workout of its life, Adam encounters a bobcat, who scampers off into the woods. Before Adam reaches the gulley where he’d had to turn back before, where that fellow named Leo Spurlock had mired his pick-up, he encounters, or catches glimpses of, several other animals: a mongrel dog, a possum, three raccoons, and that thirteen-point buck that George had mentioned, a magnificent animal. Adam knows that this isn’t typical of the animal population of these environs; he’d never in his boyhood seen such a diversity of animals together in one spot. As he is rounding a hairpin curve on the trail he glances into the rear view mirror and it appears that all those animals are following him! He stops, and waits, to see if they catch up with him, but the animals stop too, and keep their distance until he drives on.
Maybe it is the present tense, after all, which is making him feel funny. He is having distinct premonitions of disorder even before he reaches the spot where, he discovers unhappily, the trail comes to a complete end, far short of its original destination. He must stop and exit the vehicle, taking his rifle with him. He examines the terrain, trying to spot anything familiar, but apparently time and thunderstorms have transformed everything. The original course of the trail, over which his grandfather and father had driven so many mule-team loads of barrels and staves, has been totally obliterated. Not a trace remains of the ledges his grandfather had hacked into the bluffs. Now in every direction there are only deep gullies and ravines. In one of the ravines appears to be the remains of a burnt pick-up which had crashed, maybe years before.
Adam makes slow progress on foot. His bad leg hampers his descent into the ravines and his climbing out of them. Looking behind him, he catches an occasional glimpse of one or more of those animals who have been following him, even that big buck.
Finally he comes upon a very strange thing: in a clearing above one of the ravines, in a patch of grass, is standing a bottle of Jack Daniels Black Label whiskey! He opens it, sniffs it, and determines that it is a fresh bottle, untouched, undiluted, unpolluted, perhaps recently left behind by some hunter. But the hunting season, as George has reminded him, hasn’t yet begun. His hiking has left Adam thirsty, so he takes a generous swig of the stuff, and it tastes just fine. He lights himself a cigarette. He carries the bottle with him as he continues his hike. But then he comes to another bottle, identical to the first. He does not open the second bottle but continues onward with the first, until he comes to the third, at which point he is distinctly beginning to feel funny, and needs more than a swig from the bottle to settle his nerves. From the lay of the land he has a distinct feeling that he is nearing his destination, and this drives him onward. By the time he arrives at the tenth bottle, he is stumbling not because of his bad leg but because he has consumed nearly a third of the one bottle he carries.
And then he hears the sound. At first he thinks it is just the wind in the trees, but as he listens, limping onward toward the source of the sound, he realizes that what he is hearing is too liquid to be the wind—it is an angel singing, or, no, not singing but vocalizing in wordless tones that rise and hide themselves and then reappear. He stops and listens, entranced. He is reminded of the soprano solo in Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 3, the Pastoral, the soft off-stage cantilena, incredibly beautiful and incredibly haunting. Yes, that is the word: haunting. When he reaches the eleventh bottle he converts that adjective into a noun: haunt, and he looks down at the earth beside the eleventh bottle, seeing there an imaginary boundary line, and knows that something truly fantastic is happening to me.
This is not merely present tense, it is present tense first person singular, and I having reached my haunt have come at long last into full possession of myself.
But perhaps not completely full, just yet. Because as I reach the twelfth and last bottle, which stands at the very edge of my meadow, and I happily behold in the distance that my beloved house and its outbuildings are all still standing, I descry the source of that lovely singing. In the yard of my house stands a tall woman, nude, her blonde hair cascading to her knees but not concealing her nakedness. There is a serpent entwined around her neck and upper torso. My whisky-fuddled head is a vortex of thoughts; I am thrilled beyond measure to be home at last but I am uncertain if I am actually alive or just dreaming of some Eve in Paradise. I am Adam. And then practical reality takes hold of me, and I realize that probably my homestead has been expropriated by some hippies, and she is just some free-spirited flower child left over or lost from a previous time, as the Ozarkers themselves were left-over and lost from the mainstream. This thought fills me with chagrin.
And then she spots me. She seems to be having trouble focusing her eyes on me, but she has seen me. Although I have an impulse to turn and flee, I am visited by the last and most powerful of this day’s haunting oddities; she may or may not be Eve, but I am certainly Adam, and I have not ever left this place, my haunt, nor shall I ever leave it again.
Chapter forty-seven
It was the most challenging and wracking thing she’d ever had to do, and the doing of it had practically ruined this special day of days. She cared so much for his feelings and did not want to hurt him in any way. She really was deeply in love with him, but she had to make him understand that she simply could not face a future in which he not only remained ethereal and invisible but also remained twelve years old forever. What would it be like when she was thirty or forty or fifty years old, and he was still only twelve? She had hoped that his wisdom and mother wit, greater than she herself had possessed at twelve, would permit him to accept and even welcome the presence of the newest addition to the circus, but she could hear her own voice quavering when she said to him, “I think I’d better ask you how you’d feel if my eighteenth birthday present from the others was a man, I mean a real live one, I mean one who could truly lift things and eat what I cooked for him and even be able to go to sleep at night…”
In yore bed. His voice was matter-of-fact, and he added, Tell ye the honest truth, I druther see a man a-sleeping there than a bar, but you’uns would just have to be able to sleep with me a-watching over you’uns.
“And you’d be watching everything else we did, wouldn’t you?” she asked. “Would you be terribly jealous of him? Would you hate me for it?”
As was so often the case that it didn’t even bother her, he did not answer. She waited, as usual, giving him plenty of time to come up with the courtesy of a reply, and, as usual, he did not. She had much to do today, to get ready, and as she put the layer cake into the oven, she went on talking. “Don’t you see? That’s one of the main things I want him for, that he’ll answer me when I say something to him, which you won’t do.” But he still did not speak. “Or at least, if he won’t answer, at least I can see his face and tell what he’s thinking or feeling. Don’t you understand how frustrating it is for me that I can’t even see your face?”
There was not any response to that question, either. She poured hot water into the tin tub and got a fresh bar of her special lavender-scented beeswax lye soap. She climbed into the tu
b and said, “Would you like to get in here with me? I’ll scrub your back and behind your ears and under your cods.” But he did not make his presence known or felt. She decided, for the first time, for this special occasion, to shave her legs, which were just too downy and even hairy in places, and she used Sugrue’s razor to scrape it all off, although she nicked the skin in a couple of places. “There,” she said when she was finished. “See how smooth they are. Put your hand on them and feel them.” But he did not.
She trimmed her fingernails and her toenails and cleaned under them. She washed her hair and was tempted to cut it, and she asked Adam if he’d mind if she cut her hair, but he wouldn’t answer. She decided not to cut it; she started braiding it but then determined it would look better if she just let it hang loose to her knees. She studied herself in the mirror, and carefully brushed some pokeberry juice onto her lips to empurple them. She dabbed a generous amount of Tabu around her chin, her neck and the top of her full breasts. “Before I get dressed,” she said to Adam, “could you see your way to making love once again?” Surprise: he didn’t answer. “Oh, Adam,” she sighed. “Don’t you understand? When the man is here, I’ll still always love you and I’ll still make love to you whenever you want to. Whenever you get hard, all you’ll have to do is let me know. We’ll have to keep it a secret from him, but that shouldn’t be too difficult, should it?”
She put on Latha’s old-timey dress, which had already gone through several washings since Robin had acquired it, and was beginning to look faded and frayed. She studied herself in the mirror again with the dress on and was skeptical. She wondered, for the first time, how particular the man might be. Would he think she looked cheap? She had no idea what sort of man she’d be getting for her birthday. All she knew about him was that he’d have two arms, two legs, a head, and a dood…no, that would have to remain Adam’s private word. And it was to be hoped that the man would be able to speak English. She believed without any doubt that Hreapha and the others would be presenting her with a man for her birthday. If she had asked them for an elephant, they would have got one for her. Or at least a horse, and now with her misgivings she began to wish that she’d asked for a horse instead.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 186
