But back to that bear. Another mistake people make when they attempt to “tame” a bear is to feed it. Feeding wild bears simply turns them into greedy, lazy parasites. Robin didn’t have an awful lot around the house that the cub would eat, but she apparently reasoned that since she’d seen bear tracks around the trees where’d she got her honey, bears must be fond of honey, so she spooned up a dollop for Paddington and sure enough he was crazy about the stuff, so much so that before she could stop him he had swiped the honey bucket from her and was dipping his cute little nose into it. And before she could stop him he’d eaten it all. And before she could stop him she learned that she couldn’t stop Paddington from doing whatever he damn well pleased. And he seemed to get angry with her for not being able to furnish a perpetual supply of honey.
He would never look her in the eye, even when she tried to make him do so. He might look overhead or sideways or down or behind him, but he would never look her in the eye. It was easy to believe that Paddington might simply be shy, but I don’t think this was the case. I think he had some peculiar notion that as long as he didn’t look at you, you weren’t there, or you couldn’t see him. And therefore he was safe from you. It wasn’t simply Robin he refused to look at. He wouldn’t make eye contact with any of the other inhabitants of the place, even including, for heaven’s sake, the in-habit, me. Did he know I had eyes? Could he see my eyes? It always bugged him if I ever tried to look him square in the eye. Maybe, I decided, he was afraid that making eye contact would allow us to “read” the mischief that was brewing in his mind. I’ve heard that many rapists can’t make eye contact with their victims.
Almost a month had gone by since the episode of Robin’s bleeding, and during that month, although she felt itchings and longings, she did not again attempt to touch herself down there, out of fear. But the time came when she simply had to try it again. With soap and plenty of water. And wouldn’t you know it? She started bleeding again, without even reaching. Wouldn’t she ever learn? She got out the supply of rags (Sog’s ripped up shirts) she’d laundered from the previous experience with bleeding. We all assumed that whatever wound she’d suffered had not healed completely. So she was having a relapse. Again, I didn’t know what to do. Adam out there in California would turn fifteen years old before he learned that fertile females bleed each and every month, year around, and it is a non-threatening condition called menstruation. He learned quite a few of the slangy synonyms as well, one of which, “on the rag,” referred literally to Robin’s method of dealing with the problem. But Adam In-habit, age twelve, had never heard or imagined that such an affliction would curse all womankind periodically from puberty to menopause, and in his isolation on Madewell Mountain he had been ignorant of all the quaint Ozark superstitions, such as that a menstruating woman must never take a bath and must always bury rather than burn the contaminated rags. Robin went on bathing during her periods, now that there was a plentiful supply of water, and with that water she washed and rinsed her bloody rags, month after month until sometime in her fifteenth year it finally dawned on her that her recurrent bleeding was not caused by her fondling of herself but rather had something to do with being ready for reproduction. She would even attempt to explain it to me, three years her junior by that point and still as ignorant as ever.
Which raises an interesting question. If in-habits never change and never grow old, but always remain the age they were when they were installed with their real self’s departure, are they capable of learning anything? Wouldn’t the acquisition of knowledge imply a change? Oh, as we’ll see, I learned as much from Robin as she ever learned from me; we grew in wisdom together, but she would eventually outgrow me in every way. I would always be essentially a boy; she would become a woman. It was fun to watch. I had been able for years before her coming to take pleasure in the mere act of observing the development of an acorn into an oak sapling and thence into a sturdy tree. Robin’s maturity came faster and more spectacularly.
Was she happy? I like to think so. She did not often dwell upon the world she’d left behind in Harrison, or have intolerably painful yearnings for her mother (Karen Kerr had married Hal Knight and reluctantly moved to Little Rock to live with him, despite her fear that Robin might any day return to her old home and find Karen gone from it. Karen and Hal Knight became the parents of a little boy, Robin’s half-brother, Richard Knight, but Karen’s new motherhood, while it eased some of the pain of her loss, did not stop Karen from remaining always active in an organization, called The Robin Kerr League, devoted to the prevention of child molestation and the recovery of kidnapping victims). Of course Robin no longer pined for Paddington the First, now that she had a breathing, snorting Paddington the Second to entertain her. She missed being able to go roller skating and bicycle riding and having a sparring partner for taekwondo, although eventually she’d teach Paddington how to stand up and take it. Sometimes when she had nothing better to do (which was rare) she would fantasize about, and make mental lists of, all the things she would spend her money on if she had an opportunity to spend that nearly half a million dollars. She’d get herself a fabulous wardrobe out of the kind of women’s catalogues her mother used to receive in the mail. She would buy huge quantities of all the foods she hadn’t had for years: spaghetti, ice cream, pizza, hot dogs, milk shakes, Kool-Aid, Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, Dr. Pepper, Seven-Up. She would of course have to have herself fitted for eyeglasses, but she would buy the most attractive and expensive kind, maybe seven pairs so she could wear a different one each day of the week. But all of these expenditures would only make a tiny dent in her fortune. She needed to buy something that really cost a whole lot. What?
One afternoon when she was trying to teach taekwondo to Paddington (he always fell on his butt when he tried to kick a chagi), she heard a rumble up in the air, and thought for a while it was only thunder, but as it grew and changed in tone to a rhythmic drone, she looked up and saw a helicopter.
She knew what it was although she could not remember what it was called; she had seen photographs of them during the Vietnamese war. Forgetting that she was stark naked, or having been so long out of the habit of clothing herself that it didn’t even occur to her, she started waving her hands overhead to attract the attention of the pilot. Was this her rescue? Did she really want to be rescued? Even if the helicopter landed in the yard and offered to take her back to the world, would she be willing to leave all her friends? Of course not. But maybe she could tell the helicopter people to let the world know that she was okay.
The pilot and one other man in the helicopter finally caught sight of her and waved back at her. The other man put two of his fingers in his mouth and made a shrill wolf whistle which she could barely hear over the sound of the helicopter’s rotors. Then he made a circle of one thumb and forefinger and took the index finger of his other hand and poked it through the circle and thrust it in and out. The pilot blew her a kiss. Then the helicopter drifted on away and never came back.
I have tried to imagine, or to learn, what might have been going through the heads of those guys. Supposedly during those years there was a hunt for marijuana growers in the Ozarks that involved using one or more helicopters for surveillance. Is that what those two men were doing, hunting for patches of pot? Then what did they think, finding a homestead on a mountaintop at which no marijuana was growing but at which there was plenty of evidence of habitation, including a lovely young nubile nude, waist-length blonde hair barely concealing her breasts, with a rapidly-growing black bear cub in her company? Maybe those guys were smoking pot themselves. Why didn’t they land? I suppose we shall never know.
But that helicopter gave Robin a bright idea for how she would spend her money, if she could. She would buy one of those aircraft and hire a pilot to fly her over Harrison and all the rest of wherever she wanted to go. She would take Paddington with her, to see what he could see. She sang:
The bear flew over the mountain
To see what he could see.
&
nbsp; It was an entertaining fantasy to which she often returned whenever she played “How I’ll Spend My Money.”
Around Thanksgiving, Paddington, having fattened himself up on mast and forbs, decided that the best den for his hibernation would be Robin’s bed. Actually black bears don’t truly hibernate, at least not that far south, but they go into a kind of dormancy that amounts to the same thing, except that they can be easily awakened. Robin didn’t try to wake him. She just snuggled up through those cold winter nights, and put herself to sleep each night imagining what she’d have to do to get ready for school in the morning.
Had she been at Harrison Junior High in the eighth grade, she would have had to submit two practice letters for the Language Arts class, one addressed to her Congressman, the other to her best friend; for Social Studies class she would have had to submit a report on the native Americans who inhabited the Ozarks; for Science class she would have had to be prepared for a test in the winter positions of the constellations; and she would have skipped Algebra class because her homework wasn’t done and she needed to practice several a cappella lieder for the concert choir. Of course she would not have been able to do any of these things because she had missed so many years of school leading up to them.
Likewise, I could easily identify with whatever yearning for school had befallen poor Robin. In Rutherford, California, there was a public elementary school just a few blocks from the little house in which Adam lived, but he had not attended school since the fourth grade in Stay More and now he should have been in junior high but was several grades behind, and his father’s stubborn resistance to the whole idea of education continued in the face of the fact that Adam’s hike to school there would have been immeasurably easier than his hike to the Stay More school, and he could have ridden a bright yellow school bus to St. Helena. California law prohibited him from holding down a job at the age of twelve, so his father’s idea of having Adam beside him at work as a journeyman cooper was a vain dream. The Madewells had, upon arrival in California, been detained and interviewed by a state agency responsible for resettlement of migrants, principally Okies and Arkies. (Eventually, having fallen in love with cinema and having made a hobby of watching it, Adam saw a movie called “The Grapes of Wrath,” greatly identifying with Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, and he was inspired to read the novel on which the movie was based, and while he didn’t think that Steinbeck had a very good ear for the speech of Ozarkers, he was inspired by the novel to read many other novels.) Because Gabe Madewell was not just a farmer but a highly skilled cooper, he was not sent to the fields to be a picker but found a job in the barrel works of a Rutherford winery called Inglenook. Back home in Stay More, the dominant family (for whom Robin had cut many a paper doll) was named Ingledew, and Gabe Madewell always believed that perhaps the Inglenooks were Ingledews from Stay More who had gone to California and couldn’t spell their name, as he could scarcely spell his own and had to have somebody fill out his application forms for him. Actually the name, which was famous as a label of wine, was bestowed in the 19th Century by a Finnish fur trader named Gustave Neibaum, who had bought a “Nook Farm” on which to grow grapes and called the winery after an “inglenook,” a nook or cranny beside a fireplace.
In the years the Madewells settled in Rutherford, wine-making in California had fallen on hard times, and the Inglenook vintage itself was inferior to the great wines that Gustav Neibaum had produced, equaling the best of Europe (and in fact winning awards at the Paris Exposition of 1889 at which the Eiffel Tower was dedicated) and continuing until the 1930s to win awards as the best American wine.
When Gabe Madewell went to work as a cooper for Inglenook, there were only two other men in the cooperage, and they used redwood staves to make the wine barrels. French wines have always been racked in oaken barrels. Gabe Madewell had been accustomed to making 50-gallon whiskey barrels of oak; he had just a little trouble learning to make the standard 59-gallon French Bordeaux barrel out of redwood. In time, he would persuade his superiors to switch to oak, which would eventually become the standard. In later years, Adam liked to think that his father was the “inventor” of the American oak wine barrel, which lends its distinctive flavors to even a jug of the cheapest grocery store wine. Whether or not Gabe Madewell actually deserved the credit, the aromas or flavors of wine, such as coconut, caramel, vanilla, fresh toast, dill, nuts and butter, or spices like clove and cinnamon are not inherent in the grape but come from the oak barrel. Adam was destined to become the foremost expert in these aromas.
If Adam couldn’t work beside his father making barrels (at least not until he turned sixteen), what could he do with himself? Rutherford was just a village, not much larger than Jasper, Newton County’s tiny seat, but it didn’t even have Jasper’s supermarkets or movie theater or newspaper. For major shopping, people in Rutherford had to go into the city of Napa, fifteen miles away, and Gabe Madewell would not be able to buy a car and learn to drive it until he’d been there for a few years. Meanwhile, Adam, hobbled by his bad leg, led his blind mother to one of the two grocery stores in Rutherford and helped her shop, a wonderful thing she’d never done back home.
The two things he remembered most about his first year in Rutherford: attempting to describe to his sightless mother the items on the shelves and in the cases of the grocery store (she had not dreamt you could buy meat in a store), and, one Saturday, limping four miles (the same distance he’d hiked to the Stay More school but over far more hospitable terrain) to the town of St. Helena, where there was a movie theater. Adam had never seen a movie before, and it would be several years before his father would buy a television.
The experience of that movie (although he cannot remember its title or cast or plot) made him almost glad he no longer dwelt on Madewell Mountain.
Chapter thirty-eight
She had grown at last into Sugrue’s clothes. Not that they really fit, but with the pants cuffs rolled up and the shoulder straps taken in as far as they would go, a pair of Sugrue’s denim overalls would hang from her body, at least during cold weather, which was the only time she ever wore clothes, together with one of Sugrue’s thick sweaters, which made her wish she had something knitted of her own. The winter of her twelfth year was very cold, in fact the coldest of all the winters she had been there, and she really envied Paddington his ability to sleep through most of it, at the same time that she was grateful for the warmth of his body and the softness of his fur under the covers on the worst winter nights. The howling winds outside left long icicles hanging from the eaves of the house, and tree limbs snapped all over the forest, and she was moved to permit all her friends to move into the house temporarily, even Sheba, who, Robin had learned, actually did hibernate every winter. For that matter, so did Ralgrub; on the awfullest day of winter Robin put on Sugrue’s thickest jacket, and his boots that were much too large for her, and trudged out through the snow to the barn to lift Sheba out of the pile of leaves in which she was coiled into winter sleep, and reinstalled her on a pile of leaves in the corner of the living room. Then she went back out in the snow for a considerable distance to the hollow tree where Ralgrub had settled into hibernation. The raccoon woke up when Robin tried to lift her out of the tree’s interior.
“Sweetheart,” Robin said, “it’s absolutely freezing, and it’s going well below zero tonight and you won’t survive. Wouldn’t you like to come in the house?”
Ralgrub moaned and squirmed and chittered but allowed Robin to carry her into the house, where she was given a new den among the debris in the storeroom, Adam’s room, which was the coldest room in the house, but much warmer than outdoors, and of course Adam didn’t care what the temperature was.
Better than growing into Sugrue’s clothes was growing into Adam’s age, and Robin didn’t have to feel younger or inferior to him any more. He might know an awful lot that she didn’t know about how to live in the country and how to take care of a homestead, not to mention how to make a churn and firkin (and she was determined dur
ing her twelfth year to finish that firkin), but now he wasn’t any older than she, and he certainly wasn’t that much smarter than she, and she bet she knew a lot of things he didn’t know. Maybe his ignorance of sex was just the result of growing up among people who considered anything sexual as unmentionable or forbidden. He’d told her that Hereabouts, it aint fitten to say ‘bull.’ You have to call ’em ‘topcow’ or ‘brute’ or ‘cow-critter.’
“By the way,” she’d said, “when is that cow you mentioned going to come wandering into the pasture, so I can make some butter in your churn?”
Haw, he’d laughed. Why don’t ye jist ask Hreapha to get ye a cow for yore thirteenth birthday? That’d be sure to do the trick.
With Page 35
