How did I know these were her thoughts? Well, my goodness, certainly you’ve fathomed that I possessed the ability not only to inhabit the premises but also to inhabit the consciousness of each of its inhabitants. How else could I reveal their thoughts and feelings to the most important, albeit temporary, inhabitant of this place, namely, you, the reader? Is it too much of a stretch for you to believe that I am the real narrator of this book you are inhabiting? Do you need proof? Okay then, I’ll tell you what happened to Leo Spurlock, who you might have been expecting to show up at any moment, brandishing his revolver and ready to kill Sog Alan himself. Leo, you may or may not be happy to learn, got hopelessly lost on the north face of Madewell Mountain, spent a couple of frigid, scary nights in the woods, and like many lost people, moved unconsciously in a circle that brought him back eventually to his stranded vehicle, where a man driving an expensive type of SUV was trying to get around him. He chatted with the man and assured him there was no way he could get on up the mountain, and finally persuaded the man to turn around and head back down the mountain, and even to give Leo a ride. The man was going to Harrison anyhow, where Leo was able to hire a tow truck to rescue his pickup from its miring on the hopeless trail, but he did not attempt any further progress up that vanishing trail. He was still searching other roads and other trails with his topographic survey maps, and still having adventures, albeit none as exciting as his encounter with those hippies and his rescue of that abducted girl. There. Enough of Leo. How would I know all that unless I’m performing for you some of the same services that I was performing for Robin?
But I had not yet made myself known to her again. She was in great need of me, and, like Hreapha, had come to the conclusion that I only showed up—maybe turned up is the better term—when I was greatly needed. I recalled fondly how she’d been searching for me previously, even inviting me into the house to keep warm, bless her heart, not understanding that I didn’t need to keep warm, and not understanding either why I chose at that particular moment to remain withdrawn from her consciousness. I wasn’t happy that she’d considered me only a figment of her imagination. It is so easy to believe that there isn’t any such thing as us—call us in-habits as Hreapha does for want of a better term—or that we are only the products of a desperate imagination, an overheated need or yearning. We certainly don’t come when we are called, or respond to any attempt to locate us or communicate with us, because we are, after all, intensely idiolectal: nothing could be more private and personal than a part of oneself that one perforce must leave behind when one leaves a place. I was just the residue, as it were, of Adam Madewell, but I possessed something he no longer did: habitation at this homestead.
The simple fact was that I didn’t know what I could do for Robin, and I felt helpless. My joy at the removal of the bad guy was dampened by my awareness of her sorrow for having killed him. What could I say to her? Gal, you done the right thing? No, because for her to believe that, she’d have to accept it on her own, not because she heard it from a disembodied peer.
Several days after Sog’s mercy-killing, if it may be called that, when the buzzards (and crows too) were busy at their feast, and I had moved from the shed to the house, Robin abruptly stopped crying and began to sing. The rest of us—Hreapha, Robert, myself—were surprised. She had rarely sung when Sog was alive, perhaps out of self-consciousness about her voice, which was, in fact, a very sweet soprano. What she sang was not important, probably a contemporary popular song—it was something about Hi de ho, hi de hi, gonna get me a piece of the sky—what was important was the sense that the singing was allowing her to vent her emotions, and that the time had come for closure.
When she finished, I remarked, That’s right perty. I reckon we can start in now to saying our goodbyes to the departed.
Robin laughed and looked around as if she might be able to see me. “You’re back,” she said. “You only come when I need you real bad.”
I don’t reckon I come, one way or t’other. To come, you’ve got to’ve been able to’ve went, and I aint went. I’m just here. I just am.
“Well, I need you, that’s for sure,” she said.
You needed me real bad yesterday and the day before, I observed, but I didn’t have no notion what I could do for ye.
“What do you mean, say our goodbyes to the departed? Do you think we should go out there to the outhouse and talk to him?”
I laughed. Naw, I don’t reckon the buzzards and the crows would let us git close to ’im. But it’d make ye feel a heap better iffen ye could hold some kind of ceremony. Not no funeral, because you aint a-fixing to bury him, but jist speak and sing something solemn, ye know?
“Like read something from the Bible?” she said. “The trouble is, I don’t have a Bible.”
Let me see if I caint find ye one, I said. Or if you’ll jist listen careful, I’ll tell ye where one’s hid.
By voice alone, since I couldn’t point, I directed her to a little door in the ceiling of the kitchen and she was strong enough to raise the wooden ladder to the wall and with her flashlight climb up and push open the door. There was an attic space up there with mostly worthless dusty junk that Adam’s parents had cast off, but in one dark corner, wedged between two ceiling joists and covered with boards, was one of Adam’s mother’s old castoff dresses wrapped around two books, the only books on the premises, which Adam’s mother, blinded by trachoma and no longer able to read and not allowed to read in any case because Adam’s father, Gabe Madewell, prohibited the possession of books for reasons we will later discover, had directed Adam to hide there.
One of the two books was a not-very-large but complete Holy Bible. The other was titled Farmer’s and Housekeeper’s Cyclopædia, subtitled A Complete Ready Reference Library for Farmers, Gardeners, Fruit Growers, Stockmen and Housekeepers, Containing a Large Fund of Useful Information, Facts, Hints and Suggestions, in the various Departments of Agriculture, Horticulture, Live Stock Raising, Poultry Keeping, Bee Keeping, Dairy Farming, Fertilizers, Rural Architecture, Farm Implements, Household Management, Domestic Affairs, Cookery, Ladies’ Fancy Work, Floriculture, Medical Matters, Etc., Etc. with two hundred and forty-nine illustrations. It was published in 1888 and belonged originally to Adam’s grandmother, Laura Madewell.
“You really are Adam Madewell, aren’t you?” she said. “Or you wouldn’t have known where these books were hidden.”
Iffen it makes ye feel some better, I’m all that’s left hereabouts of Adam, but he aint really here, so I caint say as how I’m him.
Starved for anything to read (the only reading matter in the house was a stack of back issues of Police Gazette which Sog had read and re-read and which Robin had found boring), Robin sat herself down upon the davenport with these two books and proceeded to forget about me. I didn’t mind. I was happy to see that she had something to take her away from her miseries, and I enjoyed looking over her shoulder, as it were, as she skimmed through both books. The pictures in the latter book, mostly simple black and white wood engravings, were fascinating. And while Robin might never need to construct a spile or post driver or a hay elevating apparatus, she could certainly use such things as the instructions on grafting apple trees and making a simple smoke house out of a barrel, not to mention the many recipes.
While she pored over the two books, she wasn’t unmindful of her primary objective: to find something suitable to read at the services. The problem with the Bible was that in search of inspirational or devotional readings she kept getting sidetracked into the stories or narratives which arrested her curiosity—Elisha and the bears, Joseph and his brethren, Moses and the princess, the plagues and The Passover, Queen Athaliah, and so forth. She was going to have a lot of fun on cold winter days reading the stories in the Bible.
“Well, I guess I’m ready,” she finally announced, addressing Hreapha as much as she was me. But then she addressed me, “Adam, do you know any hymns we could sing?”
So I sang for her, in my own pleasant country
countertenor, “Farther Along.” I sang each of the verses, starting with this one:
Tempted and tried we’re oft made to wonder,
Why it should be thus all the day long;
While there are others living about us,
Never molested though in the wrong.
Followed by the chorus, with its promise that someday we might be able to make sense out of all this. Several of the six verses implied that we would have to meet Jesus first, when he came in glory and took us to meet our loved ones gone on before us, but the important thing was not so much inhabiting “that bright mansion” where we will meet Him but rather that we will learn answers to all our questions: why the wicked prosper, why the wrong are not molested, why we must leave home, why we must endure toils while others live in comfort, and so forth and so on. It is ultimately a hopeful and a reassuring hymn, and, as it turned out, Robin did learn the chorus if not all the verses, and thus was able to conduct a kind of memorial service for Sog, with three in her audience: Hreapha, Robert and myself.
She had, after all, come to think of Sog as her father, and she preached a little sermon to the three of us in which she declared that Sugrue Alan was not all bad, that he had some good qualities, like for instance he tried to teach her stuff, why just recently he’d taught her finally how to tie her shoes and cut her meat, and we ought to feel sorry for him because of how sick he’d been for several months now, and how feeble he had become, and she was sure that even if she could not forgive him for kidnapping her and taking her away from her home and her mother probably God would not hold it against him and he was probably going to heaven instead of hell. Amen.
“Okay, let’s sing,” she said to me. And I sang “Farther Along,” she joining in for the chorus, hampered not by keeping the key but by the variation of our pronunciation, hers the plain and simple accents of a Harrison schoolgirl, mine those of a backwoods country boy. Poor Robert was a bit spooked because he couldn’t tell where my voice was coming from.
When the hymn was over, she asked me, “Could you tell me a good part of the Bible to read out loud?”
Who, me? I said innocently. And then I added, I’m mighty sorry to have to tell ye, but I never got a chance to look at that book.
So she flipped aimlessly through the thick book, searching for something appropriate, but found nothing, just meaningless lists of names she couldn’t pronounce. Finally she decided that it might be just as well to read something from the other book, the 1888 Cyclopædia, so she let it fall open at random, and read aloud:
Bee stings.—Take a pinch in the fingers of common salt, put on the place stung and dissolve with water, rub with the finger. If not relieved in one minute wet the place with aqua ammonia. Care should be taken not to get the ammonia in the eye. I have used this remedy for several years and it has never failed with me.
“This just goes to show,” she declared, ceremoniously, “that he wasn’t always right but sometimes wrong, because his idea was to mix up the crushed leaves of any three plants and put them on the sting.”
Well heck, that’s what I’d do, myself, if I ever got stung, I declared. But the best thing is to try to keep from getting stung.
“Besides I don’t think we have any ammonia,” she said. Then she said, “I can’t think of anything else to say. So I guess this service is over.”
But one final gesture remained. When the buzzards and crows and rodents and maggots had left nothing but a skeleton sitting in the outhouse, a skeleton who would have looked scary except for the big grin on its face, Robin took a bottle of Sog’s favorite beverage, Jack Daniels Black Label, and, first tasting it herself but spitting it out, placed the bottle in the grip of one of the skeleton’s bony hands.
Chapter twenty-six
What she really wanted to ask the ghost of Adam Madewell was if he knew whether Sugrue had a ghost too, and if so, was the ghost going to be around like Adam? But she was afraid of the answer she might get. What if Adam said that Sugrue was already busy at work haunting the place? If that were true, Robin surely would have to leave, which scared her even more, although she had given it a lot of thought and had an emergency plan ready: she would wrap enough food for several days in a dishtowel, and take a flashlight with fresh batteries and the .293 rifle with several bullets, and getting Robert to ride on Hreapha’s back, she would just take off: heading south in the direction Hreapha had made her trip and hoping to come eventually to a path or trail or road of some sort. She’d have to wear her thickest coat, and maybe try to keep her hands in the pockets. There was already snow on the ground.
Why hadn’t Sugrue thought to buy her some mittens or gloves? He had filled that storeroom—Adam’s bedroom—with enough food and supplies and presents for her to last for a long, long time: he must have been planning to keep her for years. But he had neglected to get so many things that she would need, and hadn’t even thought of Kool-Aid and scissors and paper and books, and he hadn’t seemed to realize that she would outgrow all the clothes he’d bought for her.
Thinking of Christmas coming, she decided to go ahead and open everything he’d bought, searching for gloves or mittens, and while this would spoil the surprise of opening things he’d intended to give her for Christmas or Valentine’s or Easter or her next birthday or whenever, the whole idea of surprise and whatever fun is in the surprise means that there has to be another person involved, and there wasn’t any other person any more. Even with Hreapha and Robert in the bed with her each night, she had moments of panic at the thought that she was all alone now. Anyhow, being all alone allowed her to go ahead and open all the boxes and all the bags, and see all the stuff that Sugrue had intended to give her for presents eventually. “Thank you, thank you,” she kept saying to him again and again, as she opened the packages, which even included a box of ribbon candy intended for Christmas. Having learned to believe no longer in the Tooth Fairy, she was now prepared to accept this answer to her burning question, How could Santa Claus possibly find her this far off in the wilderness? She saw plenty of evidence that Sugrue had intended to be Santa, just as he had once been the Tooth Fairy. He had really got her some nice things, and she was sorry that he’d never be around to see her play with them or put them on…unless his ghost was here, and she surely had no awareness of his ghost being around, except for that ghastly skeleton in the outhouse.
Why didn’t she just get rid of the skeleton, which wasn’t too heavy for her to drag off its perch? It certainly wasn’t because she was afraid to touch it, because after all she’d made sure that those finger-bones had wrapped around the neck of that whiskey bottle. And the skeleton as such didn’t scare her. She remembered last Halloween when some of the kids dressed themselves in skeleton costumes, which she had thought were the least frightful of all possible costumes. What is scary about a collection of bones? No, maybe there were only two reasons she had decided to leave the skeleton there. One was that the outhouse had been Sugrue’s favorite place, where he had spent an awful lot of time. Dozens of times when she’d needed to go, she had opened the outhouse door to find him sitting there reading a Police Gazette and she could only say “Oops” and shut the door and wait for him to come out. But the other reason, the main reason, was that she liked the idea of leaving the skeleton there as a reminder that this man, Sugrue Alan, who had brought this world into existence, had kidnapped her away from her mother and friends and taken her to live in this place, was now no longer alive. She wanted to be able to glance in the direction of the outhouse at any time and see that reminder sitting there with that stupid grin and that stupid bottle of stupid whiskey in his hand.
Whenever Adam wasn’t around—that is, whenever she couldn’t detect that he was present, which quite often he was not—she just had to talk to Hreapha or Robert, or to herself. “I need to grow up fast,” she said one day, to any ears that cared to hear it. Her own ears did: she was painfully aware of how little and helpless and innocent she was, and she wanted to become an adult as soon as she could
. But the more she thought about it, and wondered how long it would take for her to become an adult, the more she understood that actually what she really, really wanted, more than anything else in the world, was just to stay the age she was right now forevermore. Just not ever change, just always be little and fragile and simple.
She knew she spent too much time thinking. And too much thinking wasn’t good for her. She tried to avoid it by spending as much time as she could with her two precious books, the old Cyclopædia filled with all kinds of handy hints on how to live and manage a homestead, and the Bible filled with all kinds of interesting stories.
Much of the Cyclopædia was either over her head (“Farm Fences,” “Making Our Own Fertilizers,” “Caponizing,”) or useless (“The Best Known Recipe for Corning Beef,” “To Banish Crows From a Field,” “How to Judge a Horse”) but there were pages and pages of things she ought to know (“How to Keep Sweet Potatoes,” “Winter Egg Production,” “To Stop Bleeding,” “Washing Made Easy,” “Burns and Scalds”), and there were hundreds of recipes to be tried out, and she proceeded each day to try a new one: hominy fritters and potato cakes for breakfast, chicken patties and potato salad for lunch. There was something called “Sauce Robert,” easy, with onions, which she couldn’t resist making and trying out on her kitty, who liked it if it was poured over protein like chicken or ham. There were desserts galore she tried. There were sixty different recipes for pudding, but she had the ingredients for less than half of them, which was more than she could eat. Her favorite was called “Kiss Pudding,” using mostly egg yolks (which was spelled “yelks” throughout the book). There was a simple recipe “To Cook a Rabbit,” so with Hreapha’s help she went out and shot a rabbit and cooked it according to the directions and it was delicious, although not that much different from chicken. One dish that was different somewhat from chicken was the pigeon pie. She used the .22 rifle to kill a few pigeons (remembering of course Sugrue’s “Pigeon eat”). The recipe called for lining the bottom of the dish with a veal cutlet or rump steak, which she did not have, so she substituted ham, and it was just fine. She always shared her dishes with Hreapha and Robert, who greatly appreciated them.
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