“Sugrue told me what it was.”
That was the last thing I made afore we left. I mean the last thing that Adam made afore his folks up and took off for California. Can you turn it upside down and look at the bottom?
She did so, and there were the initials “AM” that Adam had burned into the wood with the branding tool.
“You made this?” she asked.
Adam Madewell made it well, I said with a giggle. Recall I aint Adam, jist his leavings. What ole Hreapha calls a “in-habit.”
She was smiling. “So this ‘AM’ is not just your initials, but it means you are.”
I didn’t yet follow her. At twelve I was slow in realizing that she had recognized and was referring to the first person singular present indicative of be. As in the Cartesian axiom. Am = sum. In all his years of living with those initials—and he was still very much living with them—it had never occurred to Adam that the initials were an assertion of his existence, his being. When Adam’s twelve-year-old in-habit finally got the concept through his thick skull, his admiration for Robin was greater than ever: he fell in love with her, although what he had been feeling for her already amounted to slavish devotion.
That shore is real clever, I granted.
“So can you teach me how to make a fuckin?” she asked.
If you can learn to say the word proper.
“Firkin! Firkin! Firkin!” she said, and giggled.
My daddy never believed that I could make that ’ere churn, I related. Matter a fact, I aint made it just yet. I’m not but twelve and Adam made that churn when he was twelve just before he left me behind, so you could even play like the churn aint been made yet. Not “am” but “aint.” Wal, little lady, I’ll tell ye: you’d want to make your firkin out of cedar, not out of white oak the way all these barrels has been made. I made my churn out of cedar. Cedar don’t shrink when it dries. But you’ve got to cut the cedar in the fall, not the spring when the sap’s a-rising. Come to think on it, there’s a stack of cedar staves out to the barn that I already split with the stave froe.
“Sugrue told me not to go near that barn,” she said. “It could come crashing down on top of me.”
Naw, it won’t. Grampaw built that barn to last forever. Braxton Madewell had made the barn as well as he made anything, and the barn might still be standing years after I no longer inhabit the place.
“I could just tiptoe in there and grab them,” she offered. “How many would I need for a firkin?”
A dozen ought to do it, I said.
Robin brought an armful of cedar staves from the barn. They had been seasoning for two decades and were thoroughly dry. “Now what?” she asked.
I sniffed one of the staves. All the cedar smell is gone, so it won’t give your butter a cedar taste.
“What butter?” she asked, and laughed. “I can use it for a water bucket instead of a firkin. What do I do next?”
Them is churn staves. You’ll have to saw ’em down to firkin size, if you can. That’s the stave saw hanging on the wall yonder. She looked around but couldn’t seem to find it. It was a damned nuisance for me not to be able to point. See all them things a-hanging yonder by the window? Naw, to your right. That’s it. The third one over is the stave saw. Now prop a stave here on this horse and see iffen ye can cut it in half.
It was slow work. Robin simply didn’t have the muscle for sawing, but she persisted, and managed after a long while to cut the stave in half. I might have become bored or restless during the long passage of time required for her to do all the cutting, but for the simple fact that just as I was free from appetites and susceptibility to the physical world, I was also free from the passage of time, its speed or dragging. But Robin’s pets, seven in number now, grew tired of observing her and went off to play elsewhere. Or, more likely, they went off into the woods to rustle up their supper.
The shaving horse was just a little easier, not much. She had to sit on the horse, and draw the two-handled bucket shave toward her again and again along the edges of the stave, to shape it. She began intoning aloud a little work-chant: “Shave the stave. Shave the stave. Shave the stave.” Why hadn’t I ever thought of that? Or rather Adam, when he worked? Because he lacked her imagination, and her sense of words. I joined my voice to hers: Shave the stave. Shave the stave. Shave the stave. She had to stop to laugh more often than she had to stop to rest.
But then, as I pointed out, it was necessary to sharpen the bucket shave. Blades has got to be kept keen, I told her. Sog had already shown her how to use the treadle whetstone, although she was always catching and bumping her knees in it and had hobbled for a week the first time she’d tried to use it. That had been for sharpening the kitchen knives and the hog butchering knives and occasionally her scissors. Now she had to learn how to keep the cooper’s knives and shaves razor-sharp.
Paw allus tole me, “Ever a tool falls off the bench, don’t never try to grab it. It’ll slice your fingers off.” It was something Robin would have to learn and remember because one always instinctively tries to keep something from falling. If a cooper’s tool falls, you must let it fall.
I couldn’t show Robin my right hand—I didn’t have one—and I couldn’t show her Adam’s right hand, which was missing the index finger, from an accident in which he forgot that warning, grabbed for the backing knife as it fell, and not only sliced off the finger but hurled the knife against his leg, causing a deep gash that left him unable to walk at all for months and to walk only poorly thereafter. Only once again was he able to try to make the long hike to Stay More, and that, as we’ll see, ended in an accident which kept him at home thereafter, which his father considered a blessing, for two reasons: one, his father despised education and books, and two, Adam was able, once he could walk again, to spend all his time helping his father in the cooperage.
Nor could I show Robin Adam’s left thumb, which was severely callused from the hammering and driving of the hoops onto barrels. His hands in general were covered with hard skin, although not nearly as bad as his father’s, which were grotesquely callused all over.
I did not want Robin to get any calluses, let alone cuts. But she was determined to make her firkin. The days were still short, and it grew dark before she had completed the task of dressing the staves, and I half hoped that her enthusiasm for the job might drift away overnight if she got interested in something else. But she returned to the cooperage early the next morning, and it was my painful duty to point out to her that while she had successfully shaped the staves she had not yet jointed them, that is, tapered their sides so they would fit together in a circle. It was hard to explain to a girl so young that backing a stave, which she had done, must be followed up by jointing the stave, with the upturned plane called a jointer. And first she had to sharpen the blade of the plane. By the time she had successfully reassembled the plane with the sharpened blade and was ready to use the long-jointer, I had to explain the gauge to her: a two-pronged wooden thingamajig which determines the angle of each stave to make them fit snuggly into an exact diameter of, in this case, ten inches.
This here’s the most important job of all, I said, meaning to encourage her, but it seemed to dispirit her.
She did a fair job of angling the edges of four or five staves, but then her eyes moistened and tears began running down her cheeks and into her work. She returned the jointing plane to the bench and said, “Adam, I don’t think I’m big enough to do this. Would you mind if I waited until I got bigger?”
Her words touched me. If in-habits could weep, I would’ve. Something in her words seemed to suggest a kind of resignation: she truly understood that she would have to go on living here until she grew older and bigger. Or even until she died.
But the twelve-year-old in-habit was somewhat scornful that she could not finish a job that she’d started. I pouted, You was the one who wanted a firkin. I realized the sexual suggestiveness of those words. I rephrased it, You was the one who wanted to be learnt how to make you a little ca
sk. But heck, I won’t hold it again ye.
“Thank you, Adam,” she said, and went on back to the house, where she took advantage of her pets being out of doors to spread out her paper doll town of Stay More on the newly swept floor. But she took one paper doll house and three of the paper dolls and put them not on the floor but on the topmost part of the davenport. “This is the Madewells and their house, way up here on a mountaintop,” she said, in case I was listening. “Someday soon you’ll have to tell me all about them.”
Any old time, I said.
Chapter twenty-nine
Stay More was a relief to her, it helped her get away from herself and her plight and her most recent failure. Maybe she never could build a firkin, but she could always build Stay More, not just the town itself but all the people in it. She lost herself in their lives. It was hard to feel lonely when there were all these Ingledews and Swains and Dinsmores and all of them let her make them and follow their feelings and their doings. So easily she took on their voices. So easily they softened her solitude.
She had the town (and the Madewells up on their davenport-mountain) arranged so neatly that for many days she would not let the animals come back into the house, for fear they would mess up her paper dolls in their paper houses. It was getting warm enough now that even though the nights went below freezing Hreapha’s pups and Robert could snuggle up with Hreapha somewhere out in the yard or maybe the cooper’s shed and keep warm until the sun rose.
And that good old sun started rising earlier and earlier and hotter and hotter. One morning Robin realized it was just too nice outside to stay indoors with her paper dolls, so she put on her light jacket and went out. The lovely daffodils had drooped and shriveled and would soon be finished with their flowering. Robin decided she might have to plant some flowers, if she wanted any more other than wildflowers. She went out to the garden spot and kicked out around the leaves that covered it. She was uncertain about that garden. On one hand her attempts to spade it up and plant it and all might require more muscle than she’d had to use in her failure to make the firkin, and she didn’t need another failure so soon after that one. But on the other hand, she really did love corn on the cob and muskmelons and even the vegetables that weren’t green, such as yellow squash and potatoes and onions and, yes, those big juicy tomatoes that Sugrue had grown which were so much tastier than the bland tomatoes her mother used to bring home from work.
While she was kicking around through the leaves, she uncovered some spinach and turnips that had survived the winter. She was amazed that they were still alive and growing, even though she wouldn’t eat spinach and positively hated turnips. But later that same day, while she was poring over “The Garden” parts of her 1888 Cyclopædia, she came across the following, in a section on starting tender seeds such as tomatoes, squashes, and melons: “It is desirable in transplanting not to check the growth by disturbing the roots. A good way to avoid this is to scrape out turnips, fill them with good soil and plant in two or three seeds, setting them in a warm, light place, and keeping them moist. When the weather is suitable, place these out in the garden at the proper depth. The turnip will decay and the plant will thrive unchecked if properly cared for.” It sounded like a lot of fun, so Robin took the shovel and went back out to the garden and dug up all the turnips, just a dozen or so, and took them to the house and scooped out their insides. The pulp was earthy and piquant and she was almost tempted to cook it and see if she could stand to eat it.
Where had Sugrue told her he was keeping the seeds? She searched through the storeroom (Adam’s room once, and now again) looking for the little box that contained the packets of seeds, but couldn’t find it. “Adam?” she called out. “Can you help me find the seeds?” There was no answer. She should have known better. She had learned that Adam would never “come” when called. In fact, she had learned that it was almost a guarantee he’d stay in hiding if she tried to find him or reach him or call him. It was frustrating. And it also made her think again that Adam was simply somebody she’d made up in her own head, the same way she made up all those paper people of Stay More. But how could she have even started on that firkin without his help? How could she have helped Hreapha give birth without his help? No, she knew that this place really was inhabited by Adam’s—what was that word he had used?—his leavings, his inhabit. She knew she didn’t have the imagination to come up with that name, in-habit, just as she didn’t have the imagination to come up with firkin or even the name of Adam’s dog, Hector. “Adam?” she said, louder. “Don’t you want me to have a garden? Can’t you help me find the seeds?” But there was no answer. She went on searching. The Madewell house had no closets or cabinets the way other houses do, so there weren’t any places like that to search in.
She practically turned the storeroom upside down, moving all the boxes and bags and sacks. But the box wasn’t there. The only place she hadn’t looked was inside the Sentry money-box, and she opened the lid just to see if all her money was still there. And there amidst the money was the box of seeds! She certainly hadn’t put it there. Or she certainly didn’t remember putting it there. Had Sugrue’s ghost possibly put the seeds in the money-box? The thought made her flesh crawl. But she had enough trouble with in-habits, she didn’t want any trouble from ghosts. She knew that it wasn’t impossible that she herself had absent-mindedly put the seeds in the money box, because she was often confused and distracted with all her responsibilities that cluttered up the world worse than all the actual clutter that was everywhere.
Anyway, she now had the seeds. She sat and slowly sorted them, setting aside any that she either wouldn’t plant or wouldn’t plant until she was old enough to develop a taste for that particular plant: green beans and peas and spinach and lettuce and cabbage and cucumber and beets and turnips and okra. To the other side she placed the packets for sweet corn, popcorn, tomatoes, squash, cantaloupe, wax beans, onions, carrots, and radishes. She couldn’t find the seeds for the potatoes, but then she remembered the instructions Sugrue had given her for sprouting a sweet potato to make “slips,” and how to cut up the Irish potatoes so that each had an “eye” that could be planted. She also added to the “using” pile the seed packets for some flowers: nasturtiums and marigolds and zinnias and petunias and sweet peas and morning glories and cosmos. The Cyclopædia didn’t say anything about planting and raising flowers; it had a whole chapter on “Floriculture,” but that was mostly on how to decorate with flowers after you’ve grown them.
There was one thick envelope in the seed box that simply said “wheat” on it. She couldn’t remember that Sugrue had planted any wheat. She could remember a film she’d watched in school about gristmills and how they ground up wheat to make it into flour. She hadn’t been thinking of flour as something that was grown but she suddenly realized that the big cloth sack of flour on the storeroom floor was the last one; they’d had several to start out with. When that sack was used up, she wouldn’t have any more flour. She wouldn’t be able to do any more baking.
“ADAM!” she called out. “Please help me. I’m frantic. Where did you get your flour? Did you grow wheat?” But again there was no answer. She decided to look up wheat in her Cyclopædia, but all it told her was how to harvest it and stack it into shocks. It didn’t say anything about how you could make your own flour.
She took the scooped-out turnips and filled them with dirt and planted in each of them seeds of tomato, cantaloupe, and squash, as the book had said. She set them on the south window sills and forgot about them, until one day Robert knocked them all off, and she had to replant them and tell Robert that he was no longer allowed in the house.
It was lonelier for her at night, not sleeping with her kitty (who wasn’t a kitty any more but a large cat), or her dog, and she started pining for Paddington again. And some nights she had to cry herself to sleep.
Thinking of Paddington, she wondered how long it had been since she had seen him last. So one afternoon, after she was tired of trying to spade
up the garden (the Cyclopædia talked about plowing your garden with a cultivator pulled by a horse, ha ha), she took a break and put her Ouija Board on the floor of the porch and called Hreapha to play with her. Hreapha was such a devoted mother that Robin didn’t see very much of her these days unless she made an effort to look her up, and often Hreapha took her pups out into the woods to run around and play and even hunt little animals to eat. Both Robert and Hreapha had learned to catch squirrels and rabbits and chew them up, which was a good thing, because Robin had nothing in the house to feed them with.
The first thing they asked the Ouija Board was how to spell the names of the five puppies. Although Robin had been able, from the sounds of their barking, to guess roughly what Hreapha’s babies were named, it was good to find out how their names were actually spelled, and Robin was interested to note that they all started with “Hr” like their mother’s name, except for the odd one, the one who didn’t look at all like the others, and whose name wasn’t spelled at all like theirs, Yipyip. While Hreapha herself seemed partial to the firstborn, Hrolf, and Robert liked to play with the one named Hroberta, Robin had from the beginning felt more affection for Yipyip, possibly because he was so different from the others, and Robin herself, as long as she’d had other children to compare herself with, had prized the differences in herself, how she was distinctly her own person and would not like anything simply because other kids liked it, and how she was often at odds with everyone else. Yipyip preferred to go his own way. And of course he spoke his own language.
“Now,” Robin said to Hreapha, “what I want to ask the Ouija Board is how long I’ve been here at this house. Have I been here a whole year yet?” She tried to explain to Hreapha—and to the Ouija Board—that she wanted to do something to observe the occasion (she vaguely recalled the word “anniversary” but wasn’t certain about it), not that she wanted to celebrate, because she didn’t intend to celebrate a year of being taken away from her home and mother. “Whenever it’s a full year that I’ve been here, a whole twelve months, the earth has gone all the way around the sun. Does that mean anything to you?” She looked into Hreapha’s eyes and caught a glimmer of understanding. Then Hreapha put her paw on the planchette and moved it to the “YES.”
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