The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  “I hope ye’ve been taking heed of where you’re at,” Grampaw said, when the trail finally emerged onto one of the Stay More roads, “because you’ll have to handle that trail all by yourself on the way home. Leastways you won’t be needing no lantern that time of day.” And then he delivered me to the schoolhouse, an awesome building because of its length and the windows of its one room and the belfry on the roof and most of all because it was painted white—I’d never seen a white building before. Grampaw said he hoped I’d have a good time and learn a few things, and then he left me.

  The truth was, I had been following in his footsteps most of the trail without paying much attention to any landmarks or turnings in the trail. And that first day of school was such an ordeal that it left me all shook up—Miss Jerram was easy enough and did her best to make the first day of the first grade tolerable, but being thrust into the company of so many other kids after an isolated early childhood took more social skill than I could muster, and I was left feeling like what some of the kids called me: a “furriner.” Because I wasn’t from Stay More or from the immediate environs, and nobody had ever seen me before or heard of me, I was a furriner. And thus an outcast from the beginning. I was determined never to go to that school again…if only I could find my way home.

  Trying to negotiate that treacherous trail without Grampaw was a fittingly sad conclusion for a sad day. I lost my way more than once. Climbing up steep places that had been relatively easy climbing down seemed to take forever. At one point, in the exertion to reach the top of a steep climb, my teeth lost their grip on the bail of the empty dinner pail, and it fell and clattered down to the rocks below, and I had to climb carefully down and retrieve it. In all modesty, what I was required to do at the age of six makes Robin’s ordeal at the age of seven pale by comparison. Hreapha, having made the trip herself (although she couldn’t have climbed in the places that required hand-holds), understood how precocious I was. She also understood why I was never able to allow my dog Hector to accompany me on that trail. And she understood why her own promise to Hrolf to take him to visit his father was so fraught with peril.

  It was past suppertime when I finally reached home. “Dear Lord in heaven, I’d done given ye up for gone!” my mother said, hugging me to her.

  “I was jist fixin to go out huntin fer ye,” Grampaw said.

  “How was school?” Paw asked. It was a rhetorical question, nearly mocking, but I didn’t know that. I told them I would just as soon stay home.

  “Didn’t ye learn nothing?” Grampaw asked.

  “I learnt that most folks live in houses that aint on mountaintops and where you can see other folks’ houses,” I said. And then I wanted to know, because I had never been told, “How come we live up here in a place like this, anyhow?”

  “What I’ve always wondered,” my mother remarked. “What I’d sure care to know.”

  “Hesh, woman,” my father said.

  “Boy,” Grampaw said to me, “this here’s the highest house in all the country. And it’s smack dab in the midst of all the fine white oak you’d ever need to make your barrels. And if you caint see no neighbors from here, so what? I never gave a hoot for no neighbors.”

  But he woke me again before dawn the following morning and handed me the dinner pail my mother had filled the night before, and then he remarked, “There’s a full moon still up. Just as well, cause you don’t need to carry a lantern with you.”

  I tried to protest, but he said, “Shhh! You’ll wake your folks.”

  So by moonlight I made my way back over that awful trail. At least this time I paid more attention to the turnings it took and the landmarks whose silhouettes loomed in the moonbeams, so that I could find my way home. And during morning recess, Miss Jerram took me aside and asked me where I lived and how I’d managed to get from there to the school, and she also complimented me on learning the ABCs quicker than the other first-graders.

  I told Grampaw he didn’t have to wake me to get me up for the journey to school. I could wake my own self. And when winter came, Miss Jerram gave me a pair of shoes that fit. “I just found ’em somewheres,” she said. They made a big difference when the trail was covered with snow. I knew how to read before springtime came. Paw was real glad when school let out for the summer, because he had plans for me to help him in the shop, sweeping up shavings, tending the forge, arranging the tools and, eventually, sharpening them on the treadle whetstone.

  I loved working in the cooperage with Paw and Grampaw (whose days, I didn’t yet realize, were numbered). They didn’t talk much, but I overheard enough to understand a few things: they were the only full coopers in all the country. The woods were filled with men who cut down white oak trees, sawed them up into stave bolts and hauled them down to the Parthenon Stave & Heading Company, where they were fashioned into staves, not for making into barrels there on the spot, but instead just being bundled and hauled out to the places in Harrison and Pettigrew where they were shipped by rail to big cooperages elsewhere. Paw and Grampaw had many disagreements and sometimes loud arguments, but one thing they were agreed on was their refusal to sell the stave bolts alone, even though, in the years after the war, they could have got as much as a dollar apiece for white oak stave bolts.

  “Start to finish,” was Grampaw’s motto, passed along to my father, and eventually to me. In fact, much of the white oak timber they were harvesting had been planted by Grampaw when he was a young man, so a finished white oak bourbon barrel, carefully charred on the inside, made well by Braxton Madewell & Son (& Grandson) was indeed a product created from start to finish. (But to be completely finished, I once observed to Grampaw, we ought to distill the bourbon meant to fill it. He was not amused by the remark.) Ironically, in the last year of his life, he could not work completely from start to finish; there was no market for his finished barrels, and his middleman had gone out of business, with the result that he could only try to sell the staves themselves, not the finished barrels. He was driving a wagonload of staves to Parthenon, too many of them for the wagon to bear, when the wagon slipped off the bluff near our house. He never recovered from his injuries.

  By the second grade, two important things had happened in my life. One was that my skill at lettering had reached the point where I made a bold suggestion that my father and grandfather debated for only a little while before accepting: using an iron rod heated to red hot in the forge, I could brand the barrels with the word MADEWELL. My father might have been illiterate but he could read his own name and he took pride in seeing each of the barrels branded on its head with those letters, a job that required little of my time, usually on weekends when I wasn’t in school. I loved the smell of the oak burning as the hot iron sank into it. My clothes were impregnated with it.

  Which is what led to the other important thing. My seatmate in school—as in all the country schools of that time the pupils sat two by two at desks made of wood and ornate cast iron with folding seats and lifting tops—was a shy little girl named Roseleen Coe. I wish I could say she was just as cute as Robin at that age (the age Robin was kidnapped) but in fact Roseleen was just moderately attractive: not homely by any means, but a long way from possessing Robin’s beauty. And she was terribly shy; Miss Jerram had to wring the least word out of her, and she never, ever spoke to me, her seatmate. I think Miss Jerram had assigned us to the same desk because we were not inclined to speaking, and we were both poor, both unkempt, both dressed shabbily, both shoeless (except in winter, and that second winter I gave Roseleen the shoes Miss Jerram had given me the previous winter, because I’d outgrown them and they would fit Roseleen, although I learned she had only a comparatively short way to walk in the snow to reach home).

  The first words Roseleen ever spoke to me were to ask, “Do you live in a smokehouse?”

  When I’d overcome my astonishment that she’d actually spoken to me, I said, “Why, no, matter of fact I don’t. How come ye to ask that?”

  “One time our house burnt down an
d we had to live in the smokehouse till we got another’n built,” she related. “And you smell like we did.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’ve been branding barrels and the oakwood smokes when it burns and the smoke gets all over me.”

  “Adam and Roseleen,” Miss Jerram said. “What are you two a-jawing about?”

  “Nothing,” I said, and we hushed up.

  But after school Roseleen caught up with me and said, “I’ll walk with ye a ways.” I didn’t mind. After being silent so long toward each other, we rushed to say everything in the short time we were together, until I reached the place where my rugged trail left the main road. Her main question was why I was branding barrels, and I had to explain the work that my paw and grampaw did and how I helped by burning our name into the barrelheads. How many brothers and sisters did I have? None. How many did she have? Scads. How far away was my house? Miles and miles. How far away was hers? Just down the road yonder. Was she any kin to Gerald Coe, the Stay More boy who’d died a hero at Iwo Jima? Yes, he was her own cousin. Where did I get my funny name? I said that I’d been told that in the olden days it was either Maidewell or Madwell, but somewhere along in there they didn’t know how to spell. Did I know I was the best speller in the second grade? Or the third too as far as that goes? That I could “spell down” practically anybody? Why, no, I never knew that. It’s true. You can. And I think you are just swell. I like you a whole lot too.

  “Come go home with me and eat supper and stay all night with me,” she said.

  Having never heard such an invitation before I did not realize that it was just polite and perfunctory, a commonplace way of saying goodbye that isn’t meant to be taken literally. I didn’t know how to reply. I didn’t know that I was expected to return the invitation at once by saying, “I don’t reckon I can tonight, but why don’t you come go home with me and eat supper and stay all night with me?” which would allow her to counter it by saying “Not this time, I reckon, but I’ll be looking for ye.”

  All I could think to say was, “Really?”

  That caught her by surprise. She had to think about it for a while before saying, “Well, yeah, if you really want to.”

  “I’d really like to,” I said. “But my folks are looking for me, I reckon.”

  “So I’ll see ye tomorrow at school,” she said. And she kissed me on the cheek, and walked away.

  In the third grade she kissed me on the mouth.

  The summer before the fourth grade I had a bad accident in the shop when I grabbed for a backing knife that fell off the bench, and I cut off my first finger and I gashed my leg something terrible. My mother wanted to see if they couldn’t get a doctor to come, or at least take me to see one, but my father said I could just take off from work for a while and see if it didn’t get better. I never could walk too well on my left leg after that.

  And I was out of luck the last time I tried to use that trail, which was the morning of the first day of the fourth grade. I had missed Roseleen all summer, and I had no idea if she even knew anything about my accident. Surely she must have wondered why I didn’t ever come into Stay More again to shop at Latha’s Store. Surely she was just as eager as I was to see how far we could go. Surely she had delightful memories of how far we’d already gone.

  My father and mother both didn’t want me to attempt to go back to the school with my very bad leg and the fact that Grampaw was practically bedridden with rheumatism and Paw needed my help more than ever in the shop.

  But I couldn’t put off seeing Roseleen any longer, and besides Miss Jerram had promised us that the fourth grade would be really special, when we’d really take up the study of geography (and it was going to be her last year, before a soldier she’d met during the war took her away from Stay More). So I begged my mother to fill my dinner pail for me, and I got up before dawn and dressed. I was no longer wearing overalls; but a shirt and trousers, and I felt grown up. But I had covered less than a mile of the trail, hobbling with my bad leg and practically having to drag it behind me as Sog Alan would be required to drag his leg so often toward the end, before I began to have serious doubts about my ability to complete the journey. Only my vision of Roseleen kept me going. And that vision was not enough to sustain me when, attempting the most hazardous and vertical drop of the trail, I lost my grip on the branch I was clinging to—or perhaps the branch broke under my weight (I was a real big boy now) and I plummeted to the rocks below. It was some kind of miracle I didn’t break every bone in my body. I broke only four of them, in my wrist, arm, ankle, and skull. The cracking of the skull gave me a concussion that left me unconscious for hours, and when I came to I could scarcely move. I drifted in and out of consciousness for the rest of the day, sometimes having dreams of Roseleen, even very sexual dreams of Roseleen, and managing only, at one point, to crawl far enough to reach my dinner pail and eat its contents. That was probably around suppertime. When I did not return home for supper, or at any time during the night, my folks figured that something must have happened to me, and the next day my father went out upon that trail himself, the first time he’d ever used the trail his father had blazed to allow a doctor to come for his birth, and he found me and carried me on his shoulder the rest of the way into Stay More, where Doc Swain set my broken bones.

  I was never able to go to school in Stay More again. I never saw Roseleen again…until…but that will have to wait.

  Chapter thirty-two

  It was the longest stretch she’d ever listened to the in-habit and it left her convinced he really was there, not just a voice in her own head. It was very timely too, because more and more lately she had been bothered by the inescapable idea that she was just inventing the whole world inside her mind, that nothing actually existed except her mind. Even before all of this began, when she still lived happily at home with her mother, she had noticed the strange developments that whenever she thought about something, or was hoping for something, that that something came to pass, it occurred, it appeared as if by magic, the magic that was in her head, as if she had just made it happen. This left her feeling powerful and it made her wonder if she had the ability to perceive things that other people could not. But it also, now, left her doubtful of the existence of other people, or even if other people had ever existed at all except in her creation, the way she created the paper inhabitants of Stay More. The last living human being she had seen, a year ago, was Sugrue, and she had done away with him. Although Adam was here, she could not see him nor touch him nor kiss him, and it was so easy to think that he was only the most remarkable product of her lively mind.

  One of her favorite lines in the Bible, in the very second chapter, was “And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”

  It was so easy, when she was feeling lonely, as God must have felt, to think that she might really be God herself, and that she had created Adam out of the dust and told him to name everything. Sometimes she tested the idea: “Adam, what’s the name of that little tree over there?”

  Why, that’s a sassafras, I reckon. It aint good for much. Slack cooperage, maybe, but we don’t make slack barrels, just tight ones. Course, you could make tea out of the small roots.

  “Adam, what name have you given to that big bird pecking on that tree trunk over there?”

  I call it a woodhen, but I’ve heared Grampaw call it Lord God Peckerwood on account of it’s so big. It’s actual named a pileated woodpecker, I don’t know why. Maybe because of that red crest.

  “Adam, what did you decide to name this big spotty spider?”

  That there is jist a orange garden spider, but don’t she make a perty nest? I had one I named Mirandy and she made a web that was ten foot acrost, and I’ve watched her catch grasshoppers in it. Look at them there cocoons, big as hickernuts! They won’t hatch till after Christmas but the babies will stay in t
he cocoon till May or June.

  And She saw everything that She had made, and, behold, it was very good.

  When she turned nine years old her new motto was, “Let’s be real.” Having for some time now decided that Adam simply could not be pure imagination, although her imagination never ceased to amaze her, she was not surprised that two important things happened because of him. The first was that he helped her make flour, something she couldn’t possibly have figured out how to do on her own. And something she desperately needed. She had run out of flour a long time back. It had been ages since she’d been able to make any bread or biscuits or cakes or pies. She could still make cornbread with the cornmeal (which was also about to run out), but that was it. She had broadcast the wheat seeds Sugrue had left, and harvested enough of the wheat, stacked into shocks as the Cyclopædia directed her, to result in almost two bushels of wheat, after she’d followed Adam’s instructions for making a primitive winnowing fork (out of sassafras) to throw the threshed grain into the air and separate the wheat from the chaff. (Here her other book, the Bible, was more helpful than the Cyclopædia.)

  Adam told her that down the trail toward Stay More, very near a large waterfall, in a glade or glen into which he had fallen during his last attempt to reach the Stay More school, were several caverns once inhabited by Bluff-dweller Indians. He had explored those caverns and had found an Indian mortar and pestle which he had brought home and shown to his folks, but his father had said “We aint got no use for such as that,” and Adam had put them away in the barn somewhere. Robin searched the barn and found them in one of the stalls.