The raccoon was enough for now, and kept their bellies full for days. On their way home from the feast, Hrolf picked up another raccoon scent, or thought he did, and while none of them had any appetite remaining, out of curiosity he traced the scent to a hollow tree, explored it, and came running back to report, Ma, there’s some baby coons in that tree!
There were three of them. They were very young, their eyes not yet open, and Hreapha, understanding that their mother had just been killed and eaten by ravenous dogs, knew that the babes still had to be suckled for weeks before they could manage on their own. They were orphans. Their father was probably still in the vicinity, perhaps watching at this very moment, and while raccoon fathers help in the rearing of their young they would only eat any young who lost their mothers. Hreapha had not intended to give Robin three birthday presents, but she couldn’t very well choose which one to take and leave the other two. So she instructed Hroberta and Hruschka to gently lift two of them by the nape of the neck, and she took the third herself, and thus they carried the three baby raccoons quite a distance back to the homestead.
“Hreapha!” Hreapha said to Robin, that is, “Happy Birthday!” And each of the other dogs wished her a Happy birthday too. “Hrolf!” “Hroberta!” “Hrothgar!” “Hruschka!” “Yipyip!” It was quite a chorus.
“Good heavens, what are they?” Robin wanted to know, which reminded Hreapha of Robin’s first response to the sight of Robert. Baby raccoons appear more like the mature coon—just a smaller version—than baby pups resemble dogs. Their distinctive facial markings are already clearly in place. Hreapha realized that perhaps Robin had never seen a raccoon before and had no idea what they were. It didn’t matter. Creatures don’t have to have names to be appreciated.
Robin attempted to nurse the raccoon kits with the same doll baby bottle she’d used on baby Robert. “I’ve only got a couple of cans of Pet Milk left,” she said.
Adam’s voice became present: It aint a good idee to hold ’em like that, he told her. Upside down they might choke on the milk. Hold ’em right side up, on their bellies.
“What are they, Adam?” she asked him.
Baby coons, he said. I used to have one. Raised it till it was full growed, but it was so full of mischief my dad took it away off into the woods and let it go. Or maybe he kilt it.
Whether because the Pet Milk was used up, or because it wasn’t right for the kits in the first place (raccoons can’t drink cow’s milk, Adam told her), two of the kits perished before a week was out. Hreapha instructed her pups to bury them. The third one struggled on, opening its eyes and managing to crawl around and even to grasp one of Robin’s fingers. But it was sickly for a long time, until Robin could get it to take some mashed up apples (Robin had done a good job of getting the orchard to produce this year, with just a little help from her book and from Adam). Maybe the sugar in the apples was all the kit needed, and it began to perk up. Robin gradually added to its diet some Osage oranges, or “horse apples” as Adam called them: the huge fruit of the bois d’arc. And before long, it (or she, for it was clearly a female) was well, and eating anything they could find for it.
Robin named the baby raccoon Ralgrub, explaining to Hreapha (who in turn explained it to her brood) that it was “burglar” spelled backward. The facial markings, she said, resembled a mask worn by burglars, who are people that sneak into buildings to steal things. As she grew up, Ralgrub would often do that; sneak into the house and steal things.
Ma, when it’s my birthday will you give me a baby animal? Hrolf wanted to know. Something I can eat?
Don’t you ever think of anything except your stomach? she chided him, but instantly realized that wasn’t kind. Of all her young, Hrolf was the most interested in things beside his stomach. Tell you what, she added, if you’re a good boy and behave yourself, on your birthday I’ll take you to visit your father.
Really? he said. Really truly promise cross your heart?
She had let it slip out, and couldn’t take it back. The slipping out was probably an indication of how much she herself wanted to see Yowrfrowr again. She had hoped that he might want to see her—and his offspring—and might somehow be able to leave home long enough to search for her. Whatever markings she had left along the trail were long evaporated; she had told him the general location of the Madewell place, and if he wanted to, he could find it. But he was devoted to his mistress and wouldn’t leave her.
Hrolf, we’ll just have to see. Your father lives in a place called Stay More. It isn’t too awfully far from here, but it’s almost impossible to reach. You once said, If God had allowed dogs to climb trees, we would be the lords of the earth. No, we wouldn’t. God would have had to allow you to take wing and fly. The only real way you could get to Stay More easily would be to fly there. If we could fly, I’d take you there tomorrow. But we have to go on foot, and Mistress herself couldn’t possibly do it. Ask Adam to tell you about that trail. Or to tell you what it was like when he could use it to get to school. If he tried to use it today, he’d be out of luck.
Part Four
Within
Chapter thirty-one
I was out of luck the last time I tried to use that trail when I was a kid. I had used it so often through the third grade of school that I could have used it blindfolded, which is what my morning use of it had amounted to, anyhow, since I’d always had to set out from home well before sunup in order to make the journey before time o’books, which was eight o’clock. I made that journey so many times in the dark that I might as well have closed my eyes. I’ll never forget the very first time I made it, the only time I wasn’t alone. Grampaw took me. I was six years old, and it was August during the war years, and I had heard Grampaw and Paw arguing the day before over whether I was to be allowed to go or not. Paw had quit going to the school before he’d finished the third grade and had not been promoted to the fourth, not because he wasn’t smart and not because he was a troublemaker, but simply because he could not—or would not—learn how to read. He had no use for it, he always said. There was no earthly reason why a feller had to know how to look at a bunch of squiggly marks and tell what words they stood for. Words, if used at all, was meant to be spoken, not figured out of some squiggly marks. He was not going to let me start school either, despite my mother’s tears, she who’d never been known to shed any. But Grampaw, who lived in a shed (long gone now) behind his cooperage, and was still very much in charge of the homeplace he’d built as well as the cooperage, told my father, “For you to keep that boy out of school because you failed at it yourself would be like me keeping you away from coopering because I was fourteen before I could hammer and drive a barrel myself.”
And it was Grampaw who came into the house before the others were awake and shook me and told me to get dressed. He had a coal-oil lantern, and I followed single-file along after him, barefoot because I had no shoes, as he led me on the narrow trail which I hadn’t even known existed. He told me he’d blazed that trail himself when he’d anticipated going for the doctor to assist Grandma in her labor for the birth of my father. The job had taken him three weeks with axe and shovel and he was prouder of it than he had been years earlier making the road up the north side of his mountain that had allowed him to get his team and wagon in and out, up the steep winding road and back again. He’d had to practically carve the cliffside into a ledge wide enough for the wagon wheels (a ledge eventually fallen away and constricted into the narrow path that Sog Alan had been required to use). Every week he—and during my growing-up years, my father in his stead—drove a wagonload of finished barrels, lashed together to keep them from falling off the wagon, across that precarious ledge and down that crooked road and onward for many miles to Harrison, where he sold them, making just enough money to buy whatever was needed to live on until the next shipment of barrels could be made and loaded and hauled. He told me that making that original road—he’d called it the North Way—had been much easier than making the trail we were now using, the
South Way, which, although it was not wide enough for a wagon and team and scarcely even wide enough for a person as big as Grampaw, had taken not just an awful lot of physical effort but considerable trial-and-error surveying of the best possible—in some places the only possible—route. He told me he’d jokingly said to Grandma, “Laurie, I reckon it’ll be a real tribulation for you to birth that baby but most of the labor was mine.” There was one spot on the trail so steep that he related how he’d had to tie a rope around the doctor’s waist to haul him up—although now you could hold on to the branches of shrubs and trees on either side to raise and lower yourself. In such places, I had to keep my hands free by gripping in my teeth the bail of the dinner pail my mother had filled for me: hard-boiled eggs, a big tomato, a roasting ear, some cornbread and a bit of meat, probably possum.
“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 pos
sessing 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 and 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.
With Page 29