With

by Donald Harington

  Ralgrub and her sons, true to their assbackward names, stole the contents of a case of whiskey from the Queen’s storeroom, and under the cover of darkness positioned the contents at intervals away from the house, a bottle every so hither and yon left standing upright along a route from the house to the end of the North Way trail, a total of twelve bottles.

  Then, on or around the Queen’s birthday, Dewey, a magnificent buck with a rack of antlers having a dozen points, would be positioned strategically at the point where the North Way trail met the road at the foot of the mountain. It was going to be tricky, man. Dewey said he’d sacrifice his life if necessary for the Queen’s birthday.

  The idea was that George would come riding along, spot Dewey and take off after him. Dewey would head up the mountain trail as fast as his legs could carry him. George would not stop to load his gun but would keep driving in pursuit of Dewey, all the way to the top, where he would discover, just as Dewey disappeared into the woods, the first of the twelve bottles of good booze. George would take the edge off his disappointment at losing Dewey by sampling the fine whisky. At that point Ralgrub herself would sneak up behind him, snatch that prized cap off his head and run with it toward the second bottle of whiskey, where she would deposit it atop the bottle. George would find the second bottle, drink therefrom, replace the cap on his head, drink some more, and one of the other raccoons, Rebbor, Tidnab, or Feiht, would grab the cap off his head and take it on to the third bottle. And so on, on up the path that led to the house. It was assumed, or hoped, that by the time he reached the house, George would be completely docile, if not totally sloshed, and would not object to becoming a birthday present for the Queen.

  It is an ingenious strategy, but Robert, although he is proud of his contributions to the planning of it, is skeptical that it will work. And sure enough, as he takes his supervisory position at the foot of the trail on the afternoon of the appointed day, things begin to go haywire. For one thing, the whole motherfucking tense switches from past to present, a sure sign that expectations are either getting out of hand or else are so supercharged you can’t tell your ass hair from your whiskers. He tests it: he turns this way and that, he shakes his head. No mistake, he’s caught tight in the present. Hey Hrolf buddy, he calls to his companion, did you notice? Are we now in the now? You know, the present tense?

  Yeah, Hrolf says, and don’t look now but there comes our man George.

  George drives his present-tense vehicle up the road, spots old Dewey, slams on his brakes, reaches for his gun, Dewey takes off lickety-split up the mountain trail, George turns into the trail, shifts into low-lock, spins his wheels, takes off after Dewey, but then slams on his brakes again.

  George rolls down his window, sticks his head out, and yells at Dewey, “You’re shore lucky it aint hunting season yet!”

  Then George looks for and finds a place to back his truck and turn around and leave the mountain trail.

  Ralgrub, Robert shouts, grab his cap now!

  She leaps for the open window but misses and crashes into the door. George says to her, “It aint coon season yet neither!”

  And then, in this crazy present tense, another vehicle appears. It is one of those big rugged automobiles, not a pick-up, which can go anywhere in the back country. The man driving rolls down his window. He and George exchange howdies.

  “Have you been up there on the mountain?” the man asks.

  “Naw,” George says. “I was a-fixin to take off after a thirteen-point buck, and then I recollected the season don’t start till November. If I had me a bow ’n air I reckon I could shoot him commencing October first, but that’s still a ways off.”

  “Say, aren’t you George Dinsmore?” the fellow asks. “Latha told me you were still around.”

  “Yeah, that’s me. Don’t I know you?”

  “I reckon you ought to. We went to school together.”

  “Holy hoptoads, don’t tell me you’re old Ad Madewell! Why, I aint see you in a coon’s age. And yonder runs the old coon.”

  Woo.

  Chapter forty-six

  Woo indeed. I have forgiven Bob for not believing in me. I had noticed, very early on, another difference between dogs and cats that he did not consider in the above soliloquy: dogs just drop their business in the yard; cats cover their business. They conceal it. As Robin had recently realized, apropos the wearing of clothing, all art is a form of a hiding and a seeking and a finding, and that which is hidden is more magically stimulating. Which is not to suggest, or even hint, that Bob, or any cat, considers his feces a work of art to be secreted and secreted. Rather, the point I’m clumsily trying to make is that Bob ought to have believed in me, as most who believe in God do, because I was hidden from ordinary perception.

  Soon enough, in another tense, he will have plenty of reason to have faith in me, just as the clever reader has long since grinningly suspected that somewhere toward the conclusion of this marvelous tale I would materialize in the flesh so that we all could go have our breakfasts and get on with the workings of our lives.

  I said to my darling Robin, early that day, Darn if it aint your birthday again, and I reckon I caint give ye ary a thing. I had spent considerable effort taxing my twelve-year-old brain to think of some way to give her, without the power to lift a gift, something.

  And she said, “Dear sweet Adam honey, you don’t have to give me anything. You know that. But there is something that the others are possibly going to give me, and I think I’d better ask you how you’d feel if…”

  At that moment Adam Madewell, 46, was driving his expensive four-by-four SUV up the dirt road that winds out of Parthenon, and instead of bearing left toward the Madewell Mountain road he kept on going up the road that led to Stay More, which he had not taken on his previous visit eleven years before. As one’s thoughts while driving have a habit of coming and going in rapid, random succession, he was recalling the way Linda used to challenge his occasional use of the Ozark language. “Do you ‘reckon’ on an abacus or a slide-rule?” she’d say. “And is it ‘ary’ or windy or gassy or what?” She couldn’t even allow him to speak of “dusty dark” without asking, “Why can’t you simply say ‘dusk’? I don’t see any dust.”

  There had been a time that Linda had taken an interest in his “roots,” as she referred to them, wanting, as she said, to learn what made him tick. She had taken an interest in genealogy, long enough to thoroughly research his name, which she’d traced through its variations—Maydwell, Maydewell, Maydenwell, Maidwell, Maidenwell, Medwelle, Meidwell, Meadwell, etc.—back to Alanus de Maidwell of Northhamptonshire in the time of King Henry ii in the 12th Century and his son Alan de Maydewell, Sheriff of Northhamptonshire (Adam was uncomfortable at the spelling of the given name, identical to the family name of his old nemesis Sog) but Linda had not been able to establish any connection between the titled Maydwells and those who settled in the Ozarks. “I guess you were white trash,” she once said to him. One of the few magazines he subscribed to was The Ozarks Mountaineer, but Linda was not interested in glancing at it.

  They had so few common interests, apart from barrels and wine. From the beginning, while still on their honeymoon in the Bahamas, they had disagreed on where they’d make their home. He liked his fine big house in St. Helena, but she wanted to live in Glen Ellen, near her father’s winery (of which she was now manager), and talked him into it. The Mayacamas Mountains separated the two places, and there was a steep winding road between Glen Ellen and Oakville which he had to take to get to work, a daily nuisance. They were almost in different worlds, Napa and Sonoma counties. Red and white. Steak and lobster. Cabernet Sauvignon was the principal wine of the former, Chardonnay of the latter. Linda’s father owned Chateau Duplessis, one of the best vintners of an award-winning Chardonnay, although at the time of their marriage the wine had not yet acquired its reputation; in fact, California wine in general was still little more than jug wine or at best the “fighting varietals” as the affordable but undistinguis
hed table wines would come to be known. Linda’s father was the first to admit that his Chardonnay did not acquire its excellence until he began to store it in barrels that were not merely from Madewell Cooperage but were the special “private reserve” barrels made well from Madewell oak staves from Madewell Mountain, Arkansas. Adam, wisely, was stingy in his distribution of these special barrels to certain select customers for their certain select wines, which, because he charged so much more for the barrel itself, became the first truly expensive California wines. Adam, while he still had a sense of humor, liked to joke with Linda that she had married him not for his money or his looks or his brains but for his barrels, which had made the Chateau Duplessis Chardonnay famous.

  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 s
aid.

  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.”