With (41 page)

Not until they bite first, she said. Her boys were full grown and had their father’s muscular build, and she knew they could hold their own in a fight with these bastards. As her own mother had done for her, she had taught all her offspring the full array of martial skills: each of them was an excellent fighter, although none of them had had a full chance to put their skills to the test. They hadn’t yet encountered a bear.

One of the coyotes, possibly the alpha male who had inherited the position from the leader of the previous pack Hreapha had encountered, spoke at length to Yipyip, who listened with excitement and then turned to her and said, Ma, they’re inviting me to go hunting a bear with them. Can I?

What could she say? He was too old even to be asking her permission. It’s your decision, she said. Don’t stay too long. Then she addressed the alpha male, You’d better take good care of him, and let him come home when he’s ready.

But she wasn’t at all certain the alpha male knew her language. She could only watch as the pack loped off into the woods with her Yipyip in their midst.

Hreapha resumed the journey and they came at last to the head of the waterfall, the place where she had attempted to swim across the little creek and had been caught up in the water and swept over the falls. She had told this story several times to her offspring. I recognize it, Ma! Hrothgar exclaimed, and before she could stop him he leapt into the water and attempted to paddle his way across it, and was seized by it and carried over the falls, and, as his mother had done, plummeted fifty feet down to the pool beneath, where he disappeared underwater. Hreapha and Hrolf crept warily to the edge of the precipice and peered over, waiting to see Hrothgar emerge from the water, but he did not. “Hreapha!” she wailed down to him.

“Hrolf!” howled his brother.

They waited a long time but Hrothgar did not come to the surface. They searched all along the cliff for some way to get down to the pool. They found the remains of the trail, in the place where it was nearly vertical, the place where Adam had fallen on his last attempt to reach the Stay More school, a place that was nearly impossible for humans and completely impossible for dogs.

There was no way that Hruschka could have gone down there. She must have gone northward, or, as Hreapha herself had done the first time she’d tried to reach Stay More, taken the road that ran along the east side of Madewell Mountain.

Hreapha and her one remaining boy returned sadly homeward, their heads held low and their tails drooping. They waited a long time, months and months, to see if either Hruschka or Yipyip might come home, but they did not. Nor, of course, did Hrothgar.

Chapter thirty-four

M
y heart went out to Hreapha. It went out to all the survivors but especially to her, the mother, who had lost three of her progeny and was disconsolate for a long time. Eventually I got them all together—Hreapha, Hrolf, Hroberta, Robert, and Robin, as well as Ralgrub, Sheba, and Dewey, the fawn that Robin got for her eleventh birthday—and told them something that I had been keeping to myself: how Grandma Laura Madewell had lost three of the children she’d had after my father, Gabriel, was born. I did not wish to malign either Laura or Hreapha with the comparison, but they had much in common, especially that their mates were so much alike: Braxton Madewell wasn’t as well-spoken as Yowrfrowr but he was very like him, even in his shaggy, droop-eared appearance. I told my audience about the romance of Braxton and Laura, pointing out how similar it was to that of Yowrfrowr and Hreapha, with one important exception: that the latter two were not permitted to live together. There were some marvelous parallels, even including the fact that Laura had hiked a long way from her home, in a place called Boxley, in order to be with Braxton and try to persuade him to move to Boxley, and just as Yowrfrowr was too devoted to his mistress to leave her, Braxton was too devoted to his, the oak-forested mountain. Gabriel was their first born male, as Hrolf was Hreapha’s…but I would save for another day spelling out the many similarities between Gabe and Hrolf. Laura would have two other boys, and two girls. One of the girls ran away from home—like Hruschka? Eventually there was only one remaining, Gabe, my father—like Hrolf?

In the earlier part of my childhood I knew Grandma Laura well. She was a small woman, as Hreapha was small, and her white hair was the color of Hreapha’s. What I remembered most about Grandma—and this held my audience, who began to drool—were the buttermilk biscuits she made, light as feathers, which practically dissolved just as you sank your teeth into them. Robin wanted to know if she’d got the recipe out of that 1888
Housekeeper’s Cyclopædia,
which she’d brought from Boxley to Madewell Mountain as part of her small dowry or trousseau or whatever. No, the secret of those biscuits was something she’d learned from her mother, a Villines, and which she passed on to her daughter-in-law Sarah, my mother, but which my mother could never make as nicely as Grandma Laura could.

In-habits
, who retain all their senses, including taste, but possess no need to eat nor any hunger, can only endow with rich memory such an experience as biting into Laura Madewell’s biscuits. Even if Robin discovered, as she was busily investigating recipes all on her own, a way to make perfect biscuits, and assuming her rather crude home-milled flour would permit her, her biscuits could never do for me what Grandma’s did, what Proust’s madeleines did for him.

But remembrance of biscuits past was distracting me from my main point, the tragedy of Laura’s loss of her children, which corresponded to Hreapha’s loss of hers. I would not go into the details of how each of them lost their lives, although the stories had been told me by Grandma herself: the important thing is not that one of your children dies in a waterfall and another one runs away from home but that some vicissitude robs you forever of the pleasure of their company. Farther along we’ll know all about it.

That little narrative and sermon were for the benefit of the whole company (including you), and were delivered in the elegiac accents of a twelve-year-old country boy who had been left behind by that actual part of himself who against his will had been removed from these beloved premises. I was only a simulacrum, no, an
eidolon
in the classical Greek sense, a
presence,
and my presence was needed more these days not by Robin but by Hreapha, and I spent countless hours (what is a mere hour to an
in-habit
?) in the latter’s company, not merely consoling her for her loss but honoring the promise that farther along we’ll know all about it.

I hate it here, Hreapha said to me one day when she was feeling despondent. I wish I were anywhere else.

Is that a fact, now?
I rejoined.
How can ye be certain that anywheres else would be any better?

I can’t, she said. But it just wouldn’t be
here.
Here is so dismal.

I reckon I may of felt that way sometimes. Or Adam did, I mean. Until it was time to leave. Until they was a-fixing to take him away. And then he got right mastered by the thought of leaving.

I told Hreapha the story of Adam’s last day on Madewell Mountain, of Gabe loading the wagon with just the bare essentials of their possessions, just what the wagon would hold in addition to the three of them—or the two of them, because at the moment of departure Adam kissed his mother and said, “You’uns have a good time in Californy. I aint a-going.” And ran away into the woods. No, not ran, because with that game leg of his he couldn’t even walk very fast, but it was fast enough to get away from his father, who had been busy loading the wagon, and by the time Sarah told Gabe that their son had gone off into the woods, he was too far behind to catch him. Still, Gabe plunged into the woods in pursuit, yelling over and over again, “AD! AD! AD!”

Adam knew he was being stupid. He didn’t manage to get so far off into the woods that he couldn’t hear in the distance that voice, “AD! ADAM MADEWELL, YOU BETTER JUST STOP AND GIVE A THOUGHT TO WHAT YOU’RE A-DOING!”

But Adam was so determined not to leave Madewell Mountain that he spent the whole night in the woods, cold and hungry. He discovered the unburied corpse of his dog, Hector, whom his father had shot days earlier. (This part of my story moved Hreapha out of her megrims.) Early in the morning he went back to the house to make certain that his parents had in fact departed. He searched the kitchen for something to eat, but his mother had left nothing behind. Days earlier, his father had taken the remaining livestock—the cow, the pigs, the goats, the chickens and geese—to his brother-in-law in Parthenon. Gabe Madewell had planned after reaching Harrison to sell the wagon and the mules for whatever he could get and pay a family in Harrison who were planning to drive a truck to California and would have room for the Madewells. Adam assumed they were already on their way to that Promised Land. Up until the day of the departure he had almost persuaded himself that the only good reason for going to California was that he might find Roseleen there; he had heard that the year before her parents had joined the endless migration of Arkansawyers (or “Arkies” as they were called) to California. But on the day of the departure he had had to choose between Madewell Mountain and California, and he knew that the latter, for all its fabled splendors, was simply no match for the former.

Now, even if he was only twelve (which, after all, Robin herself wouldn’t reach for another year), he planned to live here by himself, fend for himself, make do, subsist, exactly as Robin was doing so many years later. His father had taken the firearms, but Adam had a slingshot he’d left in the cooper’s shed, and he also had some fishing tackle and he could make a spear or two, and catch enough game to cook on the nice old kitchen stove that had been left behind. He didn’t even have the advantages that Robin had, not just of firearms but of a stock of edibles (albeit hers were practically gone now) salted away by Sog Alan, so Adam had to start from scratch in fending for himself. It was a daunting prospect.

But right away he killed a squirrel with his slingshot and fried it on the kitchen stove, having just a little difficulty with the recipe because all the previous times he had killed squirrels with his slingshot his mother had done the cooking. He overcooked the squirrel but it was still edible, and something for his stomach.

“Better piss on that fire, and put it out,” said Gabe Madewell, and Adam wheeled around to see his father standing there. His father was holding his rifle loosely in one hand. Adam was instantly scared, wondering, What’s the rifle for?

“I figured you’uns had done gone,” he said.

“You didn’t figure your maw would let me go off without ye, did ye? Why, I didn’t hardly make it to the foot of the mountain afore she commenced a-bawlin at the top of her lungs.”

“So you’ve made up your mind to stay?” Adam said hopefully.

“Naw, not a chance. The wagon’s still at the foot of the mountain, where we had to camp out last night. I’ve hoofed it back up here to get ye. Now unbutton yore britches and piss on that fire and let’s go.”

Adam would not piss on the fire. “I aint leavin, Paw,” he declared.

“Well, we aint goin nowheres without ye. Yore maw won’t allow it.”

“Then bring the wagon on back up here.”

“Boy, you aint yet learnt why we caint do that? When your grampaw died, this place died with him. This place aint fit for nothing. I caint run the cooperage without your grampaw, and you aint much help, and besides there just aint much of a market no more for homemade barrels, nor even stave bolts. I’ve told ye all that, time and time again.”

“Come and look, Paw,” Adam requested and led his father out to the cooper’s shed where, in one corner, Adam had hidden the cedar churn he’d recently made. “Look at that, Paw,” he said. “I can make anything, and if you’ll just give me time I can make a barrel ever bit as good as you can.”

Gabe Madewell laughed, but he fondled the churn and admired it and allowed as how it was pretty good made. “But nobody uses churns no more,” he observed. “You can buy your butter at the store real easy.” He tossed the churn aside, and Adam heard it crack as it fell. “It’ll be another two or three years afore you’re big enough to make a barrel, and no telling but what there won’t be no market at all for homemade barrels.” He took the boy’s upper arm in a tight grip, the muscular vise-like grip of a cooper, and led him out of the cooperage. “I never should’ve dragged your maw up here in the first place, but your grampaw needed me, and now he don’t because he’s dead. And now it’s time to make your maw happy and get the hell out of here.”

Adam broke free from his grip. “God damn it, Paw, I’m not leavin. You caint make me.”

His father just studied him for awhile. When he spoke again the coldness of his voice sent shivers through the boy. “Ad, you know I had to put ole Heck away because we couldn’t take him with us. Now I could just as easy put you away too, if we caint take you with us.” He raised the rifle and pointed it at his son.

Adam was shocked as well as scared but he managed to put a little courage into his words, “How you figure to explain that to Maw?”

“I’d just have to tell her I couldn’t find you nowheres. I’d just have to say we’d have to get on. Them folks in Harrison that’s a-taking us to Californy won’t wait for us. We’ve done already put ’em a day behind. Now take your pick, Ad: get yourself down the mountain with me, or there’ll be only your ghost to stay here.”

Adam turned and gazed at the homestead. Would his ghost really be able to stay here? He had spent a number of idle moments pondering the matter of death, especially when his grandfather had died, and he had considered whether or not it is possible to survive death in some way. Is there some part of yourself that can go on after you’re gone?

He knew it was possible that his father didn’t really mean it, that he had no intention of killing him but was just tricking him into leaving by that threat.

“Give me a minute, Paw,” he requested, and walked away from his father, back to the cooper’s shed. He reached down to the earthen floor of the shed and clawed up a handful of dirt and put it into his britches pocket, to take to California. From his other pocket he took his handkerchief and held it to his lips. “Adam Madewell,” he whispered, “be always here.
Be always here.
Never leave, Adam. Stay more forever.” He spread the handkerchief over the toppled cedar churn, and then he straightened up as his eyes began to fill with tears, and he limped out of the cooper’s shed and rejoined his father, and they walked together as fast as his limp would allow down the mountain to where his mother and the wagon were waiting.