The Madhatter's Guide To Chocolate

by Rhett DeVane

  The Madhatter’s

  Guide to Chocolate

  a novel by

  Rhett DeVane

  The Madhatter’s Guide to Chocolate

  Copyright © 2003 Rhett DeVane

  All rights reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or person—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing.

  Cover art by Rebecca Greulich

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2003094674

  First Edition print version published in 2003 by Rabid Press, Austin, Texas

  Dedication

  In memory of my father and mother, J.D. and Theresa DeVane.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  October 3, 1960

  West Washington Street

  Chattahoochee, Florida

  Max the Madhatter shuffled slowly down the main street of Chattahoochee, peeking in the store windows, clutching his treasure—a weathered gray notebook. He was going to Mr. D.’s store today. Mr. D always had a chocolate bar for Max, and his little girl Hattie talked to Max like he was anybody.

  Max touched the brim of his new hat. It was purple and tall, with a wide round top. Nurse Marion gave it to him. Maybe, this hat would keep the voices away.

  Suddenly, as if summoned by the thought, the voices came, painting in his mind the bright colors of another place. Max crumpled to the pavement. He held his head and moaned. Sometimes, the pictures hurt his head.

  When the pictures finally faded, Max found himself staring at the cracks in the sidewalk between his knees. The notebook was open. The voices had made him draw again. He looked at the scratchy sketch on the very last page—a little girl sitting by a spring.

  “Mr. Max?”

  Max looked up to find lil’ Hattie standing a few feet away. In her hands she held a yellow daisy. She offered him the flower with a smile.

  “It’s for your hat.”

  Max scrambled to his feet and carefully took the flower. He fit the stem into the worn hatband, and then tried it on. No voices came. Perhaps, this would keep them quiet a little longer. If they talked too much, he would have to go to the room with the bright lights. They would tie him down, and the zap thing would make him not remember.

  Hattie was still smiling at him, and Max smiled back tentatively. He picked up his notebook. As he followed Hattie into her father’s shop, Max decided he would work extra hard for Mr. D. today, even if there wasn’t any chocolate in return.

  Excerpt from Max the Madhatter’s notebook, November 2, 1960:

  Little Hattie Davis has a kind soul, and she’s easy to bruise. If her daddy speaks harshly to her (not often, she’s a good girl, that one), the hurt sparkles in her eyes. She doesn’t cry. The tears seem to suck back up inside of her. She’ll get solemn for a bit, then dance around or cut the fool—anything to get a laugh. Folks handle pain in different ways.

  Chapter One

  THE VISITATION

  May 5, 1998

  “Mom’s gone, Hattie.” My brother’s words echoed in memory.

  “How? When?”

  “Last night,” Bobby’s voice cracked slightly, “in her sleep. Miss Margie found her this morning. She checked on her when she didn’t show up for her usual cup of coffee.”

  “I’ll call the airlines and be home as soon as I can.”

  The emergency return trip from a massage-therapist retreat in Sedona, Arizona—a much-needed vacation to heal the wounds of my latest doomed love affair—combined with the insomnia accompanying sudden grief, numbed my senses. The forty-mile stretch of state highway between Tallahassee and my hometown was so familiar, my mind drifted into automatic mode as soon as the cruise control engaged and the engine eased into a gentle hum. Fresh tears stung my eyes. The edges of the windshield blurred like an Impressionist painting.

  “C’mon, Hattie. Hold it together! The last thing everyone needs is for you to wrap your truck around a pine tree.”

  I dabbed the corners of my eyes with a tissue. “Oh, Mama. I’m just not ready for you to go. There are so many things I needed to talk to you about.”

  I passed an open field dotted with black and white dappled dairy cattle. The pungent scent of manure penetrated the humid air.

  “And, what about Bobby? How can we ever get past our differences without you to run interference?”

  The Mount Pleasant Cemetery sign loomed in the distance, and I slowed slightly, intending to visit my father’s gravesite as I often did on my way to Chattahoochee.

  A flash of my mother’s freshly prepared burial site caused me to accelerate sharply. “Better not, this time.”

  I gestured toward the sky. “Did I spend enough time with you, Mom? Not that I hated Chattahoochee, exactly. It wasn’t easy growing up in a small Southern town with a mental institution on the main drag. There was a stigma attached to it. As if crazy could somehow rub off on me. As if the raving-lunatic virus floated through the air. One day, the latent loonies would surface in heavy 5 o’clock traffic, and I’d grab a finger nail file and try to take the inept driver in front of me out of the gene pool. Understandable, they would say, you know she was originally from Chattahoochee.”

  In the formative years before I understood mental illness, the horror of being affiliated with my hometown was profound. I told most folks I was from three miles out of town on the Greensboro Highway. In my estimation, even a small distance from the Hooch made one sane.

  Once old enough to develop a clear sense of myself, I felt as if I’d been plopped down in the heart of Dixie by accident. After graduating from Chattahoochee High School, I was rabid for release. In the twenty-two years since, I had visited my parents at the farmhouse on Bonnie Hill three miles outside of the city limits and escaped the prying eyes of the town yahoos.

  I flipped the radio off and continued the one-sided conversation.

  “The questions your friends ask are always the same, over and over, Mother: ‘Why aren’t you married yet, Hattie? You serious with anyone? I’ll bet your mama and daddy wish you’d give ’em some grandchildren!’ I’ve always been just Hattie Davis, Mr. D and Mrs. Tillie’s errant daughter. You know, the one who nev
er married and hasn’t amounted to much.”

  In the past few months, as my relationship with Garrett Douglas hacked its final death rattles, I felt a gnawing need to renew family ties. My mother was an only child, and my father had one sister—far from the large extended family of Southern farmhand days. Now, with the death of my mother, the sum total of my kin consisted of my older brother Bobby, my elderly Aunt Piddie, cousin Evelyn and her husband Joe, and Evelyn’s two children, Karen and Byron.

  As I drove, dazed from grief and lack of sleep, I felt keenly isolated. My parents were gone. In the selfish quest for independence, I had ignored the remainder of the family. Other than an occasional update gleaned during one of the infrequent visits to the Hill, I knew little of the minutiae of their daily lives. Though the townhouse in Tallahassee was less than an hour drive from my hometown, it might as well have been across the country.

  Passing the Chattahoochee City Limit sign, I snapped to attention. Noting the first in a series of stark white institutional buildings at the entrance to the Florida State Hospital, I crept below the speed limit. Was it the nineties or the fifties? Hard to distinguish. Other than a row of freshly-planted crape myrtle trees, the landscape had changed little.

  Chattahoochee had been an interesting place to grow up. Where else would one see a guy dressed in a Wild West sheriff’s outfit patrolling the sidewalks? Or that little guy who used to come into Daddy’s shop all the time, the one with the weird hats?

  The truck slowed to a crawl in front of a number of empty storefronts where thriving businesses had once been, their taped, dirt-pocked windows a yawning memorial to a dying town. A chiropractor’s office occupied the space formerly housing the Davis Electronics Shop. I flipped a quick U-turn at the second of two signal lights and turned onto a narrow side street.

  Avoiding the bustling front entrance, I entered the aged funeral home from a side door. Hidden from the milling crowd in the Memorial Memories viewing room, I cowered behind a towering spray of maidenhair fern and white carnations. Jesus Waits was spelled out in glittering gold calligraphy on a broad white silk ribbon.

  Waits for what, exactly? I wondered.

  The ingrained Southern guilt immediately clawed at my brain. Jeez, Hattie. Here you are making jokes at your own mother’s wake. Get a grip!

  I stared blankly across the dimly-lit room. A pale pink casket rested on a red velvet draped table surrounded by a moat of flowers. My mother. She’d been the straight-man half of my parents’ slapstick comedy team. For fifty-four years of marriage to Mr. D., she’d patiently tolerated pranks and practical jokes, providing a showcase for his satirical wit. In the seven years since his death, she exhibited an acute sense of humor, as if she, alone, had to carry on the vaudeville show as a one-woman act.

  I couldn’t bring myself to look at her. I wanted to remember her smiling, bustling around the house on the Hill, intent on some purpose—not cold and still, skin painted like a wax effigy. I watched the surreal scene with the detachment of a movie patron.

  Finally, I sighed deeply and allowed myself to be sucked into the swarm of mourners. Dressed in Sunday go-to-meeting regalia, people I’d known from birth murmured comforting words. The women dabbed sodden eyes with embroidered hankies tucked discreetly into the underside of lace cuffs. The suited men looked stiff and uncomfortable, occasionally tugging at collars and waistbands too tight to allow a decent amount of breath.

  In one corner, my Aunt Piddie Longman perched on a maroon velvet Queen Anne chair. A tall beehive of lavender-tinged hair swirled in stiff curls atop her head. Miniature blue lace butterflies and silk flowers were stuffed randomly between the ringlets to disguise bare spots.

  Actually, she looked pretty darn good for ninety-plus years. Did she still carry my uncle Carlton’s driver’s license and voter’s ID around with her? How long had he been dead now? Had to be close to forty years.

  “Hattie!” Aunt Piddie waved a dainty hankie.

  I took the chair next to my elderly aunt. She leaned over and planted a kiss on my cheek. “Hi gal, I’m surely glad to see you. I been up most the night worrying you wouldn’t be home in time.” Piddie shook her head. The rigid mass of curls quivered slightly. “I worried myself sick ’bout your brother plannin’ the visitation so fast, what with you half way across the country in Cee-doner, and all. I didn’t think that was right a’tall. I told Evelyn, we could’ve helt up the funeral for a couple of days to let you get home to help with the arrangements.”

  Piddie reached over and rested her hand gently on my shoulder. “You holdin’ up okay, gal?”

  “Yes’m. It’s hard, you know…doesn’t seem real to me.”

  We sat in silence for a moment.

  “Don’t be mad at Bobby, Aunt Pid. He’s gone out of his way to annoy me many times, but this wasn’t one of ’em. When he finally got through to me at the resort, I told him to go ahead and make the arrangements. I gave him my flight plans, and there was a little time for me to stop by the townhouse to grab some clothes. Besides, Mom had already picked out the casket and paid for the funeral. She took care of it all, right after Daddy died. She wanted to spare us from that part of it.” I glanced toward the flower-rimmed casket. “I just talked to her three days ago, right before I left. It’s just—”

  “Hard to fathom,” she finished. “It near’bout kilt me when your daddy passed. You know, I pretty much raised him after our mama died. I thought on him more as a son than a brother. And your mama, well, she was just precious in my eyes. I couldn’t have picked a better wife for Dan than Tillie.”

  Piddie dabbed a tear from her heavily-powdered cheek. “The sad fact of livin’ as long as I have—you lose so many folks to the other side, and it doesn’t get any easier with practice. Always hits you square between the eyes. I just keep tellin’ myself what my Aunt Ruby used to say: ‘The more sorrow carves out your soul, the more joy you can hold later on.’”

  I smiled slightly and nodded. My aunt had a wise-ism for every occasion, good or bad.

  “You want me to go over with you to see her, sugar?” Piddie asked, her soft voice gentle with concern.

  “Um…no.”

  “You’re just like your daddy, Hattie. He couldn’t abide lookin’ on a person after death, neither. He said he wanted to remember them like they was in life. Well, it’s up to you on the way you need to settle things—long as you’re easy with it in your own mind.”

  I searched for a subject to lighten the moment. “You still make those great biscuits of yours?”

  She reached over and stroked my face. “You and those biscuits. When you was a little bitty thing, you could near’bout eat your weight in my catheads, Hattie.”

  Years had passed since I’d heard that term. Cathead biscuits—made with lard and big as a cat’s head. Tormenting my friends from up North with the expression provided hours of entertainment. Just us God-forsaken Southern folks. No accounting for the stuff we’d eat! I had to work to convince them we didn’t actually consume domestic-animal parts. How did all of my aunt’s generation live to be so bloomin’ old? I was lucky to eat even a gram of fat without feeling guilty.

  I held her wrinkled hand. “I only eat your cooking that way, Piddie. You can run circles around any of the upper-crust chefs I know.”

  “Oh, you do go on so,” Piddie blushed slightly with the compliment. “I don’t cook so much anymore, honey. I’m just not able. I’ve taken to fallin’ out every now and then. One minute I’m standin’ up and the next I’m flat as flitter on the floor. Fell down the back steps last time, like to have broke my dang neck! Evelyn put her foot down after that one, so I’m livin’ with her and Joe now. You know they built a little mama apartment off the big house for me.” Piddie’s cornflower blue eyes watered.

  “Mom told me you were having balance problems, but I didn’t realize the addition had been completed. I bet you must miss your little house. You didn’t sell it, did you?”

  My mind flashed back to the spacious yard surrounding the
tiny white frame house on Morgan Avenue. I once played in the springtime between islands of blooming seven-foot azaleas that divided the yard into magical pink-flowered pathways swarming with bumblebees. In the front yard, the bushes hid the porch so well, I could sit in a rocking chair, shelling peas in the cool shade, watching the occasional car swoosh by, and no one from the road would know I was there.

  Piddie smoothed a lacquered curl. “Lord, no! I couldn’t bear the thought of letting it go. It’s been in the family too many years. We closed it up for a while till Joe decided it would be good to have someone livin’ in it. House’ll run down without someone livin’ in it, you know. We just now rented it out to a nice young fella and his wife. He moved over to work at the Hospital. Believe he’s from over around Grand Ridge.”

  I spotted my cousin across the room. “’Scuse me, Aunt Piddie. Let me go speak to Evelyn. I’ll see you in a bit.”

  Piddie grabbed my hand and patted it softly. “You go ahead, honey. I know you have to talk around to everyone. Make sure to come by for a long visit before you leave town, now. Your mama and daddy would be so proud of you, Hattie. You’re always so nice to us old folks.” She paused and looked toward the flowered casket. “I’ll be there right beside you tomorrow at the service. Don’t you worry.”

  The tears I had been holding threatened to wash over me. “I’ll be staying around for a while, Piddie. Bobby and I will have to take care of things out on the Hill. I won’t be a stranger, especially not to you. Maybe you can coach Evelyn into making some biscuits one morning. I’ll surely come for that.”

  Piddie’s glossy red lips pinched into a thin line. “The fruit fell far from the tree as far as Evelyn makin’ any kind of a cook. She can take a ten-dollar pot roast and turn it into somethin’ not fittin’ for a stray dog! She don’t hold a candle to the slop Carlton’s mama used to make, though. That woman cooked ever’thing down to mush—till it was pure gray.” She lowered her voice. “I’ll see if I can manage long enough to make you breakfast, honey.”